Adventuring with Herbert Putkey

While in Argentina, Chris and I went to this “puesto” called Kine. A puesto is like a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. It’s got some trees around it to say “hey! we’re here!” in the otherwise barren, treeless landscape. The family we stayed with didn’t speak English and offered food, lodging, and activities at their puesto. We stayed there for three nights.

To get there, we took a “cuatro por cuatro” (a 4×4) in the morning. There had been a huge thunderstorm the night before and the road was washed out. A Toyota 4×4 had gotten stuck in the mud and we waited for 1.5 hours for the tracker to pull the Toyota out and compact the mud so we could drive through.

We arrived at Kine and it was somewhat awkward. The family didn’t introduce themselves but they did offer us coffee and bread with jam. That was at 3:30. Dinner wasn’t until 9pm, so we were left to entertain ourselves. Luckily, the daughter, a 16 year old, entertained us and we played cards with her. She didn’t speak english so we practiced our spanish. She didn’t want to practice her english with us.

The next day, we went on a horseback ride through the ranch. We saw a lot of wild guanacos as well as “el bano” of the guanaco. There were also cows, horses, chinchillas (wild). We rode for about 2.5 hours to the asado pit where Aldo, the dad, was cooking a freshly killed baby sheep. It was 3kg of meet on a cast iron stick, cooking over hot coals. It took about 20 minutes to cook the sheep and then I ate about 1kg of the meat. This was, quite possibly, the BEST meat I’ve EVER eaten. There was no additives - just all baby lamb - and it was salty and juicy and unbelievable. I decided then that North Americans do not know how to cook lamb. Why taint it with sauces when it already tastes like heaven? In the best spanish I could, I told Aldo that this was simply the best meat I’ve ever eaten.
During lunch, a storm was moving in, as usually happens in the afternoons in Payunia. It wasn’t raining over our lunch area, but maybe 2 km to the west we saw clouds moving in. At one point we saw a funnel cloud. It was the first time the daughter, Roxana, had seen a funnel cloud in that area! We finished with lunch and packed up everything, got back on the horses and started riding back. It started raining on us, so Roxana led us back to the truck. Then it started hailing harder and harder. We jumped into the truck and the hail came down like I’ve never seen! It hailed for about 10 minutes, the horses standing in the field getting struck. There was thunder and lightening and at one point there was a lightening strike in front of the truck, so close, maybe 250 meters, and there was NO gap between seeing the lightening and hearing the thunder. That was pretty scary!

After 20 minutes, the thunder, lightening and hail passed, leaving just rain. We got back on the horses and made our way back to the puesto. Chris and I are not great horse riders but the two horses we rode only wanted to be next to each other. They would always walk together no matter what we told them to do. At one point, Chris’ horse decided it didn’t want Chris up there anymore and it laid down on the field, sending Chris over to the side with his foot stuck. The horse felt the foot and quickly stood up. I was worried for Chris after this, but it was a good laugh.

We returned at about 5pm, read our books, took a shower, and had dinner at 9pm. The mother made flan, the best flan I’ve ever tasted in my life. Man, that was good day of food, possibly the best ever.

The Kine website: http://www.kinie.com.ar/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Argentina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.