WWOOF days at Estancia Huechahue
Note to fellow travelers- when you run out of money on the road, just head to a farm for some good old fashioned manual labor! After Bariloche, Karin and I checked off one of our longtime travel desires to WWOOF (World Wide Organization of Organic Farms) for five days in Argentina. The deal with WWOOFing is that you provide a farm with whatever skills you have ("Can you garden? Sure!") and in exchange you get a bed and meals por gratis, a pretty sweet deal when you're on a tight travel budget. The farm that welcomed us in was named Estancia Huechahue (weh-cha-weh), a horse ranch located on over 6,000 acres near the town of Junin de Los Andes.
Garden Girls
Every morning we would meet one of the Gauchos in the garden and work for 4-6 hours tying tomato twine in the green house, digging up weeds, shoveling maneur into planter boxes, meticulously planting rows of corn varieties or doing whatever else was needed. Apparently gloves aren't a thing in Argentina; by the end we had developed green thumbs, fingers, toes and minds.
Horse and Cattle Ranch
When our handy talents weren't needed in the garden, we were invited to join the resident staff for horse rides through the estancia. Neither Rin and I are expert riders by any means, but it didn't take us long to find the rhythm and proper technique on our horses, Argentina and Patagonia. We even got to join the Gauchos on an exhausting and dusty cattle herd up where everyone was on horses "yeehaw-ing" and shouting "vaca vaca vaca" at 200+ cows.
One of the best parts of staying at Huechahue was the home cooked food. Breads, honey, meat, salad mixings and milk were fresh off the farm and nightly meals were always something to look forward to. My favorite night of the trip was when the estancia hosted a proper Asado (barbeque) for its guests and we had the most delicious empanadas of the whole trip (tomato, cheese, basil filling fried in animal fat. Drool).
Around the farm
Our housing at the farm. If we ever wanted hot water for showers, we had to light a wood burning furnace and wait for an hour. Needless to say there were few showers taken here.
