Farm fresh

This past weekend I had the chance to visit my host uncle's farm, Santa Luisa. "Farm," however, is a totally inappropriate word - something like "enormous and beautiful land holding," or the Spanish "hacienda" is much more accurate. Hernán (my uncle) owns 1,000 hectares of land (almost 2,500 acres) - that is enough to include an entire mountain, valley, lake, part of a river, and an area of rock that apparently holds some gold mine potential. It is HUGE, and it is gorgeous. Santa Luisa sits a two-and-a-half hour drive away from Cajabamba, although it's still in the same province. The dirt road that leads there takes you up over the tallest mountain in the area, called Pumacama (bed of the puma), then winds along the sides of stark peaks to drop down into a verdant green valley.

Our first stop was to visit the old Sitacocha hacienda house, which dates from the year 1600. Santa Luisa was once part of an even larger land holding, and this house would've been its central point of operations.

Then it was on to Santa Luisa. The farm produces pretty much everything from avocados to alfalfa, but the main economic engine are the bulls and cows raised there. Smaller livestock also abounded: cuys, ducks, chickens, turkeys, dogs, donkeys, horses, quails, etc. Jessica was particularly fond of capturing the chicks and ducklings, much to the annoyance of the yard's mother birds.

During the days, we occupied ourselves with hikes around different areas of the hacienda. For one excursion, we brought Javi's horse, Rosicler, and took turns riding around the open range - Jess was especially excited, since it was her first time on a horse. We got lucky with two days of no rain, making for beautiful views on all sides.

Aside from getting to enjoy and explore the farm's natural beauty, the other extremely cool part of the weekend was that literally every single thing we consumed, with the sole exception of the rice, was produced right on the farm - it is a completely self-sustaining enterprise. At breakfast we drank fresh cow's milk, ate bread made in the big clay oven from the farm's own wheat flour, and noshed on eggs courtesy of the chickens. One day's lunch/dinner was stewed venison - my host dad and uncle like to hunt the deer that roam the property. The other day's was delicious duck meat (I tried not to think about the ducklings during that meal) and fresh peas. And those peas were nothing short of incredible - I'm pretty sure this was the first time in my life I'd had shelled peas that were not previously frozen or canned, and let me tell you, the freshness factor has revolutionized my previous conception of peas - so good!

We also had the chance to watch Edwin at work, since he'd come out to help Hernán put name-tag earrings on each of the cows. For a big cattle ranch, having the cows clearly identified saves a lot of confusion about which is which, who's pregnant, which cow is related to which others, etc. So Jess and I got to be in charge of the recording notebook as Edwin yelled out cow types and ages, and we also got to pick some of the names :)