arrival

I’m in. As I write this, I’ve been four days with my first host and it is something else. A little different than most WWOOF assignments, this is a business that has paying clients visiting most of the time. At the moment we only have one, but I think we’re expecting more soon. The slow season is arriving and we’ll be having fewer guests than usual (apparently 25 was the largest number at a time in the past month). The Hacienda is a horse ranch that offers riding lessons and riding holidays to people from all over the world. It seems that mostly Germans come, but when I arrived there was also a couple from New Hampshire (they looked like total Berkshirites, by the way; the man’s son even attends Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, near my old Farm). The clientele this place attracts is indicative of my hosts’ nationalities: many are from Germany, with others from all over Europe. Only two Spanish women work here and they both live in the nearby town. Everybody else lives in the Hacienda (kinda like the Farm, once again…). So far I’ve met people from Belgium, France, Switzerland, Finland, Slovakia, Egypt, and New Zealand. The people who have been here longest speak German and Spanish most often, but because of the multiple origins of everybody else, English tends to be spoken the most in everyday conversation.

The set-up is grand. I have my own room with a private bathroom, three fabulous meals a day, and the freedom to wander the whole place, as I like. My primary work is in the olive grove, preparing the trees for the olive harvest; the work is hard, but not difficult. Although the whole countryside is covered in olive trees, because of the labor involved and small return, we only harvest from a small paddock of trees, with the oil and fruit produced used in-house. This is how it goes: Imagine a dwarf-sized fruit tree with hundreds of suckers creating a hedge around the bottoms of the two or three widely spread trunks. Now, my task is to cut away the suckers using a suleta (think one-headed pickaxe) and hand axe. Sounds easy enough, right? Ok, now imagine that the wood of this fruit tree is so hard the blade can’t actually sink in, yet the suckers and branches (several of which are an inch or more thick, and taller than I am) are so flexible they give and bounce when struck. The trick seems to be whacking the things hard enough at just the right point where the sucker meets the trunk to just knock it off, rather than actually cutting through. If you then factor in a temperature of 75°(24°C) and a high sun, you basically have my six-hour workday. But it’s not so bad. We begin work at 8 am, with breakfast from 9:30 to 10, then more work until lunch at 2. Breakfast breaks up the day nicely, with the work ending at the high heat of the day, leaving the rest of the afternoon (until dinner at 9) free. And I’m really enjoying beating the hell out of olive trees!

The trip here was an adventure all by itself. I was traveling for a very long time. After my arrival in Madrid, I had to immediately hop the Metro (subway system) to get to the center of the town where I immediately caught a train to Jeréz de la Frontera. Jeréz is a town in the Southern province of Cádiz. From there, I meant to take a bus to Villamartín where the Hacienda is. I made it to Jeréz just in time to miss the bus. And then my credit card wouldn’t work in any of the cash machines. It was the perfect nightmare scenario I was hoping to avoid. I’m in Spain, I have no cash, it’s 10 at night, and nobody speaks English. There I was, wandering the dark, semi-deserted streets of an unfamiliar town with all my luggage, looking for a cheap hotel. And nobody had heard of the hostel in my guidebook. Thankfully I finally found a decent hotel (read: cheap!), and the first English-speaking Spaniard who could help me. I rented a room for the night, tried to resolve my credit card problem, and slept a fitful sleep. The next day, I hit the streets again, in search of a bank that could give me a cash advance, or a kind stranger that could give me bus fare. I managed to find the latter and made it without further incident to my new home.

So now here I am, supplied with a roof, food, and labor for my hands, companions-at-arms, and an international phone card. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, ok, maybe some cold hard cash wouldn’t be bad.