Los Potreros

Our camp with cattle and horses

We arrived at the Estancia on Monday afternoon and set about having lunch, putting up the tents and generally getting settled in, before we were invited into the owners’ house for a wine tasting.  The estancia is owned by Kevin Begg, after being bought originally by his grandfather, and it is a working cattle ranch with about 500 Aberdeen Angus cows and a load of horses roaming around.

When he decided to start taking guests, he was aiming for the luxury end of the market, but he met one of the owners of Dragoman and so now plays host to the Drago tours too.  Kevin went to school in England, and worked in the City for some years, and his wife Lou is from England, so his English is excellent and he is happy to talk to his guests about all manner of subjects.  Having been partly drawn to Argentina by our most enjoyable experiences at Gaucho restaurants, I was pleased to hear that Kevin had been to one on his last trip to England and had also enjoyed it – it was nice to have the view of an argentine, especially one who is expert on the question of beef.

Wine tasting with Kevin

We tasted four wines, a Torrontes (white), a Malbec (red), a Cabernet Sauvignon and a dessert wine, and even as a non red wine drinker, I enjoyed them all.  Of course when I say we tasted, what I really mean is that we drank.  And drank and drank! Kevin is an old hand at this and so knew that after a certain point we needed to be kicked out of the house, to preserve both his glassware and his and Lou’s ability to get some sleep ready for their day’s work.  Sensibly, he gives us the use of a separate building that is nearby for us to crawl back to our tents, but sufficiently far from their home that they can’t hear us.  So we adjourned to that, taking the leftover wine with us as instructed.

 Dave and Ivan had been busy cooking us a meal while we were in the house, so we ate, drank yet more, played table football and darts, and chatted away into the early hours.

Over the next couple of days there was horse riding and walking to be done, and then we got a lesson from the gauchos in lassoing.  We started on a tree, and I did reasonably well at that, roping the tree with two of my three attempts.  However we then moved on to the calves that they had brought in for us, and I had no luck with the moving targets.  A couple of people did manage to though, and rather ironically it turned out that the most successful lassoer was the one person in our group that doesn’t eat beef!

I managed to rope the tree

The rounding up of the calves was not-so-ably assisted by the owners collie dog Delphi, who was enthusiastic but not entirely competent for the task.  The other two dogs, black Labradors Harvey and Boomer were happy just sitting alongside us on the wall and enjoying all of the extra attention they were getting.

For our second evening we had a local guitarist and singer come along to entertain us.  Jose was good fun and had us all clapping and singing along the odd line here and there.  Kevin had once again provided large amounts of wine for us, and after Jose left we attempted to have our own little sing along too, with varied success.  It didn’t sound as good as Jose but we enjoyed ourselves. Nic earned himself a temporary nickname of John (as in Travolta) for his lively rendition of the Grease song  Alone at a Drive-in Movie.

Asado

On the third night, the estancia put on a traditional asado for us, so we enjoyed some of Kevin’s home grown beef – except of course the champion lassoer who didn’t eat beef so instead had one of Kevin’s chickens - Dorothy apparently!  The food was excellent, and again accompanied by several large jugs of wine.

The evening’s entertainment this time ended in a game of ‘would you rather’, which prompted some lively discussions and interesting insights into the thoughts of our fellow travellers.  Our agreement that what happens in ‘would you rather’ stays in ‘would you rather’ prevents me from giving any details here, but suffice to say we now know a lot more about how everyone would choose to live, die and, inevitably by the end of the evening, which of our Dave and Ivan they would rather sleep with – including the guys!  Dave and Ivan weren’t there at the time of course.

The days at the estancia were hot and sunny, but the nights get cold.  The first night was cold, but I think we had probably consumed enough alcohol to keep us warm.  The second night, either we hadn’t had enough to drink, or it was much colder.  Over half of the group abandoned their tents and used the dorm rooms instead.  Nic and I stayed outside, with plenty of layers, but still woke up when the cock crowed at about 5:30am and had to put on some extra layers.  Everyone agreed that this was a bit too cold for comfort.  So when it came to the third night, almost everyone made their way inside, leaving just Nic and me and one other guy outside in the tents.  We prepared well this time, adding extra layers long before we went to bed so we could keep the warmth we had built up, and adding in all of our sleeping system layers.  When we go to bed we ended up having to take layers off as we were too warm and when we woke up at 4am, another layer came off too!  Otherwise we slept through warmly and comfortably until the alarm went at 5:10am to strike the tent, have breakfast and get underway on another early start for the long drive to Tafi del Valle.