Life on a Horse Ranch

After a failed attempt at working on a farm in the amazon, Mary and I proceeded north into the desert to pursue an invitation to work on a horse ranch. Luckily for us, the invitation was legit and we were happily welcomed. The ranch is called Rancho Santana and is located in a small town called Pacora, 45 minutes away from the city of Chiclayo. Pacora is a sleepy town with a population of roughly 2,000. The town center is quite small, and often times was so quiet and void of people that it reminded me of movie scenes set in Mexican desert towns where it’s eerily quiet because people are too afraid to leave their homes. Though in reality, Pacora is a very safe town with a nice community where everyone greets one another as they pass on the street. Everyone seems to know everyone, and it is likely that the average Pacoran resident is somehow related to every 8^th person in town.

Rancho Santana is run by a married couple named Manuel and Andrea. Andrea is a Swiss woman who fell in love with Manuel, a Peruvian, while working on a horse breeding farm several years back. They married, had a daughter named Joceline (who is 8 years old), and created Rancho Santana. Their house is very modest, which is just one room for the three of them, with no plumbing. They have an outhouse for their toilet, and an outdoor cold shower. In a separate building is their kitchen, which had all the basic necessities: sink, oven/stove, refrigerator.  Since we knew ahead of time that Andrea was Swiss, we assumed that they probably lived with more affluence than the average Peruvian, but we came to find that this was not the case. They live in similar, if not worse, conditions than the average Peruvian. It was an interesting and sometimes challenging experience for us to experience their way of life for 3 and a half weeks.

Initially we lived in a bungalow for our first week there, which is the nicest building on the property. Normally it’s for tourists who stay overnight, but since we had no tourists during that time, we were allowed to stay there. Not only did it have electricity and internet connection, but it had a bathroom with hot water! We were living it up for a week until a tourist came and stayed for 2 and a half weeks, during which we stayed in a large tent next  to the bungalow. No longer did we have electricity to enjoy, and had to share the outhouse and cold shower that the family used. Honestly though, it wasn’t as bad as we anticipated it would  be.

 Rancho Santana has 11 horses, 4 cows, 1 goat, 6 dogs, approx. 30 chickens, 2 cats, and 2 ducks. Though despite having so many animals, very few of them serve any real purpose. They use about half of their horses for horse riding trips offered to tourists (the other half of the horses are in one way or another unfit for riding), and they occasionally eat a chicken (most recently, they had the loudest rooster slaughtered because it was too loud in the early mornings!). But they don’t eat the eggs of the chickens since there is no coop or safe place for the eggs to be (the dogs usually find and eat the eggs that are scattered about), and none of the cows or the goat produce milk, so most of the animals are just there. The animals do, however, create a real ranch environment, creating plenty of noise and often entertainment.

When we first arrived at the ranch, there was another married couple living and working there. They are from a very remote village in the mountains (so remote, in fact, that one must walk 3 hours to get there because there are no roads for cars/buses) and are part of a Peruvian culture that is probably the most traditional and technologically undeveloped (I would bet neither of them have ever used a computer or heard of The Beatles). Their house on the property is made of mud bricks with a dirt floor. There is no plumbing and little electricity. The wife would cook their food by building a small fire in front of the house. This was about as up-close and personal to poverty as I had been in my life.

There was also another volunteer named Marta working at the ranch when we arrived. She’s a Finnish girl in her early 20s who had been helping Manuel with the horses for the past few weeks. We shared the bungalow with her for the week that we had it, and then she left after that. She was very nice, helpful, and fun to be around, and taught us plenty about Finland.

Since Marta was helping Manuel with the horses, and Jorge (the man from the mountains) helped with all of the heavy lifting and day-to-day tasks, Andrea gave Mary and I two special projects for our first week there. First, we planted several grass beds around the ranch to make it less dusty. I really enjoyed this project because for some odd reason I enjoy the manual labor of digging, and digging was a huge part of planting the grass beds. The 2^nd project, on the other hand, was not so nice. We were told to cut down all of the bushes and shrubs  in a very large field. This may not seem so bad, but the catch was that they gave us shovels for cutting these plants. Shovels. Not machetes or large clippers (tools they did have on property), but shovels. After a couple days though we got the hang of it and became masters of shovel-cutting!

After a week, Marta left, and an Austrian woman named Karen came for a two and a half week stay of daily horse riding. This meant that Mary and I had to leave the precious bungalow and move into the tent. At the same time, Jorge and his wife left the ranch, unannounced, and made things a heck of a lot more complicated and difficult for the rest of us. Since Marta had left, Mary and I had hoped to take over some of the horse-related duties. I mean, we did come to a horse ranch hoping and expecting to work with the horses. But since Jorge was gone, Mary and I had to assume his duties because they needed to get done. So we spent almost no time with the horses during our 3 and a half weeks there, aside from feeding them and a two-hour trail ride we each got to take.

So our usual daily routine was wake up around 7:30am, eat breakfast, make breakfast for Karen, clean up after everyone, shovel the horse pooh scattered about, carry very large and heavy bundles of long grass on our backs to a grass grinder machine where Manuel would feed all of the grass through and shoot out small pieces of grass, then we would scoop up the grass and feed it to the horses and cows, then we would have a couple hours when some days there was some sort of work for us to do, other days not so much. Then at 1pm, we would walk into town, pick up Joceline from school, pick up food for lunch and dinner that was prepared daily by a cook in town,  eat lunch, clean up after everyone, and then the afternoons were usually relaxed. Often Mary would help Joceline with homework, or we would play with Joceline, or sometimes take a nap. Then at 4pm, we would bring in more heavy, long grass and feed it to the horses and cows. Afterwards, we would feed the dogs and cats (a delicious meal of rice, chicken heads and other organs, and whatever leftover food from the day before), which could be a very frustrating task since the dogs had to be fed one-by-one in the kitchen. The dogs, however, had almost no discipline, and when they were hungry, they would claw at the kitchen door and try to run in every time we’d open the door. So when we would try to let one dog in to eat, we would also be having to fight off the other dogs who are also trying to get in to eat. We eventually learned that splashing cups of water in their face when we’d open the door would often keep them away. Later in the evening, we would eat dinner (always leftovers from lunch), then Mary and I would clean up after everyone, and retire to our tent to watch a movie or episode of some TV show on her laptop. We were usually asleep by 9:30pm.

For the first half of the time there, we were happy to be doing the work and enjoyed the vibe of the ranch and the small, sleepy town. But our morale dropped as the work became very routine and mundane, we were constantly filthy, we were getting tiny cuts all over our arms and legs from carrying the long grass (even while wearing long sleeves and pants) and the ranch became infested with mosquitoes. I had never in my life had such a problem with mosquito bites until working on this ranch. To try to count the bites on our bodies would have been as futile as to try to count the stars in a clear night sky. So after a while, the last thing we wanted to do was carry very heavy loads of grass that are full of mosquitoes. And at the end of every exhausting, sweaty, dirty day, we were rewarded with cold showers to try to get mostly clean.

Despite having very little interaction with the horses, and despite the awful work, we did still have some enjoyable times on the ranch and in Pacora. We had some fun times playing with Joceline, and even though she only spoke Spanish to us, she was very good at speaking slowly and clearly enough for us to understand, something most Peruvians don’t do for us. She warmed to us immediately and was not shy at all about being silly with us, even in public while walking her home from school.

We enjoyed the company of the various tourists who came through the ranch. Karen, our Austrian tourist for the last 2 and a half weeks, was full of wonderful travel and life stories and kind of seemed like a cool aunt by the end. A German couple, who were on a year-long journey through the Americas, stayed for a few days and became instant buddies of ours. On a Saturday night, they invited us out for some nightlife, to which we replied, “Nightlife? In Pacora?” No matter though, we ended up having a riveting evening in their hotel room playing the German version of the boardgame “Sorry” and eating chocolates. Another young German couple came through for a night in a large truck that they have been driving and sleeping in for the last year and will continue to do for another year. They began their journey in Halifax, Nova Scotia, drove across Canada, up to the northernmost town in Canada, then down the Pacific Coast, through Mexico, Central America, and all the way down to Peru. They will spend the next year exploring the rest of South America.

We enjoyed observing behaviors of farm animals that one only really notices when you spend a lot of time with them, like the way chickens run like people with no arms, or how when cows “moo”, they often sound like a child screaming for attention, starting soft and building with volume and intensity. (One cow’s moo reminded me of that scene in the movie “Seven” when Kevin Spacey comes into the police station covered in blood and is trying to get the attention of Brad Pitt. He is calling for him, but Brad Pitt doesn’t hear him at first, so finally Kevin Spacey yells, “Detectiiiiiiive!” Every time I’d hear that cow, I would just hear, “Detectiiiiive!”) We saw owls in the daytime and witnessed them turn their heads a full 180 degrees. We also saw bats at night, and felt the breeze of their wings as they flew within inches of our faces. And of course, we witnessed almost all of the animal species mating (or at least trying to mate). Horses mating is an intense action to see! I think Mary and I would agree that the best part of living around so many animals was the constant symphony of animal sounds, even in the middle of the night. Cow’s mooing, horses naying, roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing, dogs barking, owls hooing, bats screeching, ducks quacking, you get the point.

We also had the exhilarating experience of catching a rooster. One evening, while we were feeding the dogs in the kitchen, Joceline opens the door with a message from her mother: “Catch a cock…?” We were at first taken off guard by the choice of vocabulary, but soon realized that Manuel was trying to catch one of the roosters to be slaughtered and needed our help. You might not think grabbing a rooster is very tough, but let me tell you, it’s tricky!! Roosters are fast, and when they are running at you with a sharp beak and long claws, you think twice about reaching your hands out to grab that thing. We ended up running all around the ranch chasing this animal, trying to corner it, only to have it fly over our heads. Luckily Manuel is a pro and caught it soon enough, and that rooster became lunch the next day. I also had to help wrangle a horse that was loose running around the ranch. Catching a rooster is one thing, but when a horse is running at you at full speed, you’d be nuts to try to stop it! Again, Manuel was the pro who saved the day.

While in Lima before heading to the ranch, I purchased a Peruvian instrument called a charango, which is like a 10-string ukulele. Mary also has been traveling with her ukulele. Andrea knew we played these instruments, so when she met a local Pacora man who is a professional charango player, she told him we also played and invited him to jam at the ranch. It turns out that Pacora doesn’t have any other folk musicians, so this man was thrilled to jam. His name is Willie, and he came to the ranch several times during our time there and taught us a handful of Peruvian songs. At first we were also thrilled to be playing with him, learning local music, singing songs in Spanish, and make a connection with a local resident. He’s full of life, is always happy, and says he is married to music. He started coming to the ranch every four days or so, but after a while began coming every day and during times when we were trying to finish up work for the day. It became so stressful trying to finish work while also entertaining him, and we grew very, very tired of playing the same songs with him, especially on days when we were exhausted and just wanted some quiet time. But a person like Willie does not understand why we would not be interested in playing music at any given moment of the day. We were so happy to have made that relationship with him, but in the end it became a bit much.

In the end, we were glad to have had this experience; to live among so many animals, to live in a much poorer environment, to have a much better taste of Peruvian life than most tourists get, and to also lose weight and get buff! But in the end we were also very ready to be done. The mosquitoes, the cold showers, the sometimes grueling work, living out of a tent, and always feeling dirty just wore us out, lowered our morale, and eventually made the experience unenjoyable. Andrea said she was very sad to see us go and told us we were some of the best volunteers they’d had. We were happy to hear this, since we put in so much hard work on their ranch. We were sad to say goodbye to the family, but it was time.

We were also ready to leave Peru. Although we had been to some beautiful parts of Peru and had some great adventures and experiences, our overall impression of Peru was that it’s just OK. We had heard that Ecuador was amazing, so we headed straight there from the ranch where we have been spending the last week. So far, we can confirm that Ecuador is loads better than Peru in so many ways, especially in its beauty. It is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve seen and has not stopped impressing me with it’s landscapes and architecture. My next blog will be about Ecuador.

Digging out grass beds

Willy, our charango player

Manuel riding away

Joceline eating lunch

Andrea, our Swiss hostess

An example of the grass we carried every day.

Pacora