What is the farthest I have ever been from home?

Lesson 4 & 5

Me and my family love to travel all over the place and we have been to many places.  We have been to Cancun, Mexico twice. I love Mexico so much; they have beautiful gardens, coconuts and excellent tennis courts. We have been to Florida, which has sunny beaches and all the things than Cancun has. We’ve also been to Key West, which has museums and other fun activates like snorkelling, nice boardwalks, and a mesmerizing little town.  But, the place with the most memories, activities, scenery, and variety is South America.

What is the farthest I have ever been from home?  Now that question is easy.  When I was five years old my family and I decided to go to South America for one year. We traveled all over the place – we started in Uruguay and lived at a Work-Away farm where we would do physical work for the owner, who in return let us stay in his guesthouse.  He wasn’t the nicest guy in the world, and he was only nice and gave us the day off when his girlfriend was over (which wasn’t that often), but it was still fun. There were Espino trees with thorns as long as your pinky-finger.  Those thorns were a pain to step on (literally), and parrots would take those thorns to make nests in tall sycamore trees.  The birds were very colourful and very loud, and every morning we would wake up to their noises.  It was hard enough sleeping in that hot guest-house and the birds didn’t make it any easer.  There were bats that would poop everywhere, and to top it all off, bat poop can be toxic.

After that we went to many other places, but one of the places I remember most was a Uruguayan Estancia, or tourism ranch. It was so beautiful there. There were barns, stables, and pens with all sorts of animals including ostriches that laid eggs the size of a small football and were very hard.  One of the coolest people I met there was the gaucho “Mario” (a gaucho is a South American cowboy).  He worked for the owners, took care of the livestock, milked the cows, herded the cattle on the huge acreage, and that sort of work.  The main things I remember about him were the big knife that he had on his belt, and when he killed one of the animals for a meal.  If we were having ostrich he would get a stick the size of a baseball bat, walk into the pen where they were kept and chase it around the pen until he was able to club it on the head.  If mutton was on the menu he would kill a lamb, skin it, cut it open, gut it and cut up all of the meat before you could say “You know, Mario, maybe mutton wasn’t such a good idea” (but in spanish).  Then the meat would go straight to the parrilla (or south american BBQ).  Here is a video of the whole process. (If you don’t like seeing a sheep being butchered, don’t watch!)

Here are some more interesting places we went to: Montevideo, where we met a very nice hotel agent who spoke English, always gave us the best room, and who we still know to this day, and who we invited to spend Christmas with us a few years ago.  Punta del Diablo was my favourite place out of the whole trip. The things I remember most about that place was a hammock, riding horses, and a small guest house with bunkbeds that smelled like cedar.  We also went to Buenos Aires, all over Chile, and a bit of Peru.  There was an awesome train museum in Peru where the people were so nice.  A favourite thing from Chile was the parks and playgrounds – they were better there then anywhere I have been.  They had rope parks – huge structures made of rope that you could climb, and some made of logs.  It was amazing.  We lived for quite a while in Santiago, but also took trips over the Andes mountains into Argentina, where we went to many wineries and breweries.  We also went to this awesome spa/water-park that was heated from hot-spring.  And in a city that I can’t remember the name of, there were so many stray dogs, and we did our best to name them all.  There was Blueberry (we named her that because she was blind in one eye and it was very blue), and Blackberry (he was black), and there were many more.  And one of the most amazing parts of the trip was a bus ride from the the capital – Santiago – through the north of Chile on the way to Peru. It was across the driest place on earth – The Atacama Desert – but it wasn’t that dry on the bus.

In South America there are crazy festivals and parks all over the place, and we even climbed an incredible mountain with a statue of The Virgin Mary on top.  We saw a volcano and a beautiful waterfall; we went to markets that always had so much food including my favourite “blood sausage”.  There are beaches that have very cool shells and big rocks that seem like they are made out of a lot of little rocks and are very hard to climb on because, if you fall on them they skin your knees and hands.

We stayed in hotels, apartments, work-aways, and all sorts of different places, and I would recommend going to South America to anyone who likes travelling.  Even though we only stayed for nine months there is still so much more I could tell you about my adventures in that beautiful place.  Like, about subways and the optical illusions on the walls, or about Capybaras – the national animal of Uruguay, and so many other enchanting stories.

I hope you enjoyed reading and learning about South America, which is the farthest I have ever been away from home.

If you want to read more about me I have a couple other posts I hope you enjoy.