Last weekend we went to Lonquimay which is right next to the Argentinian border and 3 hours on the bus from here. The other english teacher (karina) comes from there. To get to Lonquimay we had to go through the longest tunnel in South America. It took about 5 minutes to get through and it was very tight, only room for one bus at a time! Lonquimay itself is quite small although it is alot bigger than CholChol. It is surrounded by mountains which in the winter are covered in snow although right now they have none. We spent Saturday with Karina´s godmother who is a mapuche woman. Karina mentioned how I like knitting and the woman went and got out all the things she had made. They were all amazing skirts, socks, jumpers. All had been made from scratch. she had spun the wool, then dyed it in natural dye. In her garden she had two bowls full of wool in natural dye. One with lemons and leaves, dying the wool a lime green and another with onion skins dying the wool a golden colour. I was fascinated. The next day we went horse riding in the countryside. The horses belonged to one of Karina´s friends who has a huge summer house in the countryside close to Loquimay. None of us knew how to ride a horse. I remember having two lessons at the sables and hoped it would come back to me. Although my horse just didn´t want to behave,maybe it was the fact i was speaking to it in english but it wouldn´t do a thing i wanted. I started to get visions of it jumping up and me falling off so i got a bit scared. I was very relieved when i managed to make it stop even if that was under a bee infested tree!After we ate goat which i´ve never had before. Everyone kept saying have much more healthy it is as it has less fat. Although i think they made up for it in the amount of salt that they put on it instead. But it was nice just needed less salt.
The other night Leona came through to tell me there was a spider in our bathroom and she was concerned it was a corner spider. Corner spider here are deadly you have about 2 hours after a bite to get to hospital. Silvia the woman who looks after the girls came through and confirmed that it was a corner spider! So that has freaked us a little!
R xxx
