Cherry Tomato Harvest

To be assigned the job of harvesting cherry tomatoes is to be given a charitable gift.  Especially if you are hungry, and here's why.  Ripe cherry tomatoes are small, delicate, succulent little guys.  They can't withstand the usual levels of abuse that the larger fruits of the farm can, like being dropped into a bucket, dumped into a crate, poured together on a scale, etc.  As such, they are useless in a purely economical sense.  They are like ice cream in the sun: meant to be eaten immediately.

The solution then, is for the farmer to select near-ripe fruit for the store.  The yellow-orange ones are firm enough to hold their own, and by the time they reach a shelf will be red and sweet and perfect in a salad.

Picking half-ripe tomatoes is easy.  A little monotonous, but then most jobs are on even the smallest farms.  You get the benefit of working in a nice warm greenhouse too, but that's not the reason why this job is so choice.  There are many near ripe, and far from ripe tomatoes to be sorted through on the vines, but there are also bright red balls of flavor that need to be dealt with too.  They can't just be abandoned alone out there to grow old and sag into little sacks of liquified pulp.  Can't be forgotten and left to rot.  You can see where this is going.   They must be consumed!

After working on the cherries for the last hour before lunch yesterday, I was a little worried I'd overdone it.  After Andrea told me `yes of course´ I could have a few while I worked, `eat as many as you can!´ I put away many many tomatoes.  I was almost not hungry for lunch (but not quite).  But here I am today, eating more.

Only One Month Left

Here's a very direct and factual update. Not my favorite way to do things, I wish I had a good story to write in place of this, but it's now two months since I wrote down what is happening here, and for my own good I need to get it down before it's all forgotten.

A total of two months was spent WWOOFing with the family in El Bolson, Argentina. The first month went much as the last post described, with the length of the working day slowly but steadily lessening in length as we convinced our hosts that we weren't a couple of lazy freeloaders. More and longer siestas were taken. More breaks for toast and Maté.
Then Abuela Blanca Rosa split town. The household lost it's head, who claimed she needed a respite off in Chile's Viña del Mar for a couple of weeks. But before she left, she asked Caitlin and I if we'd like to extend our stay, continuing to help out her daughter and grandchildren as they continued to maintain the farm in her absence. We'd evidently shown ourselves to be at least trustworthy, maybe even competent, and so were given the option to stay on until late March. This was great news, as we hadn't done anything to land another WWOOFing spot, and the town of El Bolson and it's surrounding beauty still had new and fun things in store for us. We accepted.
When you see me next, and I relate to you the free-spiritedness of Vida Luna (Blanca's daughter and new Jefe de la Huerta), you'll understand how the house could sorta fall a notch toward chaos when Blanca handed over the keys. Basically, the hour when we started working shifted from 9 to 10, lunch fell back too, and after a leisurely siesta, maybe an hour of seed sorting went down before we all called it a day. The workday shortened from 8ish hours, to 5ish. The evenings lengthened proportionately, and beer and wine took up a more prominent role. All in all, more fun, more hectic, less learning, less stress.

After that, Caitlin and I set out north for Bariloche, where we stayed at a ridiculously inexpensive hostel bordering on hotel and enjoyed some city life. From there, we went west into Chile. Sadly, we had to forfeit many dollars worth of dried fruit and raw nuts at the border, but we did our best to wolf down dried pears and chocolate covered coffee beans. We even offered out handfuls to the other passengers on our bus, but in the end way to much went to the basura bin.

Just a few miles later, we disembarked and headed out into the volcano-y terrain seen here. With many days worth of provisions (minus tastiest-trail-mix-ever) we slogged up what should have been a medium-easy first day's trail to a beautiful campsite amidst hills of tough grass at the base of Volcán Puyehue (Poo-yay-way, sorta). The setting sun cast a gorgeous red light on the snow-covered Puyehue just before setting and leaving behind one of the coldest nights I've ever spent in nothing but a tent and goose feathers (Joey, Ben will remember the night in NZ when I woke up with a layer of frost on my sleeping bag--this was colder).
Next morning, we arose late in our typical backpacking fashion, and made for the Volcán. We ditched our backpacks just before things got steep steep, and clambered up over rock and snow, step by step, through biting wind, past friendly Aussies and Israelis, along a snowy ridge, to the tip-top of Puyehue. At the peak, the wind died and we were warmed by the sun and dark rocks that peaked out through the snow. A lunch of hardboiled eggs, homemade bread and cookies (oh yeah! Side story time: our last night in Bariloche I stayed up until the wee hours of the night baking bread and cookies for our trek. The bread was simple whole wheat that was crumbly and stale on day 1, but the cookies were ANZACs and held up like champs for the whole week we trekked.), and vitamin D filled us up and rejuvenated us after the tough summit.
Eventually, we went back down. This was one of the best parts of the hike because after a little trial and error, we were able to glissade down the icy/snowy/melty slopes of Puyehue, losing about 600 meters in twenty minutes. By the end, things were less steep and more melty, and Caitlin and I were only able to continue sliding (glissading is like sledding without a sled) by combining our weights, and 'rowing' with our bamboo walking sticks. Naturally, when we got back to our packs our stomaches were sore from laughter, our backsides were wet with snowmelt, and Caitlin's pants were beyond patching.
The rest of the trip is best told with photos, so I refer you again here, but basically we worked our way around to the opposite side of the mountain, out across rolling hills of pumice (liking hiking on sponges, good for the knees!), and down to a section of a clear blue river heated by thermal activity to toast hot-tub temperature. Amidst rain and shine, we passed three days in this spot without seeing another human or animal besides some Caracara (Chloe, you heard of these birds?). The water was fine, and our food dwindled to a reasonable weight. We read aloud David Sedaris, played Henry-loses-a-bunch-at-cribbage, and defeated the wind and rain in my endlessly impressive REI tent. Finally, it came time to retrace our steps out of the park, and on to the populated portion of Chile.

Since then, we've spent time in Osorno (D-), Valdivia (B), Santiago (A), Valparaiso (A), and now Viña del Mar (still grading). The best of these have featured excellent walking streets, cozy cafés, and cute shops with handmade artsy clothing and shoes. Soon we will decide what we think of Viña's beaches, and then meet up with our new WWOOF host just north of here. We will stay two weeks on this farm, and then make for the salt flats of Bolivia, and after that my time in South America is over. I'm already missing this place, and reading about all the things I want to do and see that I just won't have time to do and see this time around. It feels silly to leave this hemisphere with so much unfinished business, but of course one could spend a lifetime here and never be satisfied. And perhaps it's a good thing to leave a place with reasons to come back.