Starry, starry night

06-02-03

01 La Zunica

I met up with the Hernandez family again and we headed off camping in Lago Rivadavia. On the way we stopped off to see where Juan Simon worked. He was at the estancia "La Zunica" which was right out in the middle of nowhere. It was built in built in the early 1900's and has hardly changed since then. It was a regular little "House on the Prairie". You had to walk around with oil lamps once the sun went down.

Juan Simon had killed a sheep that morning in honour of the visitors and by the time Mariano and myself arrived the Bar-b-q was well underway. We arrived very late so it was pitch black, and with no electricity, being hidden behind trees, which were hidden behind hills, which were a mile away from the road to the middle of nowhere......I'm amazed we found it at all.

02 Little House on the Prairie

You couldn't really see anything except millions of stars. But the thing that struck you most was the noises. There was a thousand shep penned up that had just had their lambs taken away from them. The poor wee lambs were all huddled up in another pen, still within bleating distance of their mammies. As we sat drinking wine after the Barby all you could hear were hundreds of frightend little lambs bleating their poor wee hearts out under a blanket of stars. Still they were the lucky ones, they could hav been on the Bar-b-q. Maybe it was the whole setting but I'm convinced this was the best Patagonian lamb I've ever tasted. A sky bursting with stars, glowing embers, breeze rustling through the silver birch trees, and good amigos. What more could you ask for?

03 Morning After

Before we went to bed Juan Simon gave us a display of how he uses his Collie dogs. They pretty much ran the show, which was just as well as Juan Simon was a bit beyond tipsy. Through the darkenss you could just see the dark outline of the dogs darting round the flock and rounding up the stragglers. There wasn't a sound from the dog, all you could here was the soft stampede of the herd.

The next day that 1000 sheep were let back out to graze minus their lambs and 1000 new ones were herded up to have the 3 T's checked: teeth, tits and testicles. This herd was a mix of old ewes and gelded(?) lamb-rams. I'm not too good with the technical terms. The ewes were being checked to see if their teats were good enough for suckling another lamb and if their teeth were good enough to eat the grass required for motherhood. The lambs had had a wire tied round their jewels a few weeks previously and were getting checked to see if their nuts had dropped off yet. As friends of Juan Simons we were invited to help out and get the hands dirty. I gave it a miss. It's the sort of thing that would put you off lamb for months I thought, enough to make you vegetarian. Then again you wouldn't be in a rush to touch the Nut Roast either. Bad enough checking your own your own once a month.

04 Mariano doing Pee-Pee in Bag

Surprisingly, checking their teth was the most dangerous bit. They have quite a set of gnashers on them, and they don't like someone grabbing their mouths and forcing them to do a Mick Jagger impersonation. Checking the teats wasn't what I'm used to. I'd have no problem leaning against a bar counter with a pint in my hand, watching the sheep go by, and saying to Mariano "hey, check out the teats on her" - but it didn't work like that. They used the "taxi-home" approach. You had to wrestle the sheep upside down and grab a firm grip of whatever you could find.

05 Here comes the herd

06 Ride them up

07 Ride them in

08 Rawhide

09 Escape attempt

10 Breakaway

11 Nearly there

12 One thousand dusty sheep

13 Magnificent Five

14 A well deserved bone

15 A bit of R&R

16 Ungrazed land

17 The waiting room

18 The examination

19 The supply room

Juan Simon making the boys a coffee