We danced a lot. To my chagrin I did not get to dance with any of the men outfitted in traditional gaucho wear, pleated pants tucked into boots, a white collared shirt with a wide embroidered sash and felt beret. My partners, not including Mike, were more along the lines of drunken chuckleheads but it was still a great time. The music was guitar and accordion, there were a number of cowboy hats. There did not appear to be any traditional women's wear.
We left the party around two with a guy named Alvaro who never took off his aviator shades and walked to his campground where we stumbled on a lone guy at a campfire boiling water for maté. He seemed really happy to have comrades in maté and set to work brewing a gourdful. For maté the drinking gourd or maté is filled with maté leaves and possibly sugar (my preference, it's quite bitter otherwise) and then filled with boiling water. A metal straw or bombilla with a perforated bulb at the end is used to suck up the infusion. The maté gourd and bombilla are passed around from person to person and water added as needed. It's a warming hospitable tradition and you don't say gracias to your maté host until you are done and don't want anymore. Maté is drunk in Chile and Argentina and is ubiquitous in Uruguay though we never tried it there.
The next day we walked back out the dusty track we had walked in on the day before, to the riverside corral where the rodeo was held. We were moving fairly slowly after our late night and missed the sheep shearing, though we passed a pickup crammed with wild-eyed naked sheep on our way in. When we arrived the cow roping was in progress with 4 or 5 gauchos swinging immense lassoes over their heads as a harrassed cow ran in a circuit around the ring. A dog kept the cow moving in generally the right direction and as it passed each man would try to lasso its front legs.
The roping went on for a long time with groups of lassoers succeeding each other and we wandered around people watching. There was a great bar built out of logs and leaves where a number of participants, both man and beast, gathered. And we ran into our friends Diego and Ilana from the Cerro Castillo trail.
At this point the principal attraction, besides the gauchos playing a sort of horseshoe like game with a cow´s hoof, was the asado being prepared nearby. The meat corral contained 4 or 5 log fires around which were planted 5 foot iron stakes skewering entire lamb carcasses or sides of beef, at least 20 large pieces of meat in the first round. The meat was cooked over about 5 hours by the heat and smoke of the fires and when it was done everyone crowded around the split-rail fence to grab a piece.
When a slab of meat was done the iron stake holding it was pulled up and hefted onto a long wood table where people cut it apart and tossed the pieces in a huge roasting pan. Two men carried the pan around the ring and placed pieces of meat on receptacles held out by the hungry hordes pressed to the fence. A woman followed them with a pot filled with sopaipillas or fried dough.
People in the know and picnickers had plates and plastic dishes. Others had paper towels, pieces of cardboard, their bare hands. Mike scrounged us a couple of plastic bags and we set to on sopaipillas and pieces of tough but deliciously flavored beef. Unfortunately even after going back for seconds we didn't manage to grab a piece of lamb. We dubbed the undertaking Meatstock after Mike noted that it was like Woodstock with meat.
After our feast we joined many others relaxing on the slope behind a riding ring. A band started playing and suddenly and seemingly from nowhere a mounted gaucho galloped into the ring at the head of a group of 20 or so unsaddled horses. The wild horse riding event involved a presumably difficult horse who would be saddled and mounted by the participant. The other riders surrounding them would disperse and the horse would start running and bucking, encouraged by barking dogs and thumps from a crop held by the rider. It was hard to tell if the horse was going to buck anyway or was doing it out of irritation. Regardless most of the riders were bucked off which was satisfying.
This event also went on and on and we started home before it ended. Along the road back to town we ran into first Christopher from Lago O'Higgins and then Steven who we had met briefly on the trail in Cerro Castillo. It has been a lot of fun running into "old" friends from a few days or weeks back on our travels.
The next morning Javier's minibus picked us up at seven for the 3 hour drive to Coyhaique, the capital of the region. This was our first step in the multibus, multiday odyssey to get to Bariloche, Argentina to meet Mike Grafton who would be visiting from San Francisco.
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