Garden Girls' Divine Secrets of the Llay Llay Sisterhood

At 8:30 a.m., Kate and I awoke to Belltower and an actual bell to find that as promised, the Hari Krishna farm was freezing bitter ice bone numbing cold. Even under four wool blankets, I could feel every hair on my body stand up, unhappy to know that I’d soon be pulling them from my bed. We each put on two pairs of pants and three layers of shirts to get to breakfast.

Sweet potato soup, homemade bread, toasted oats and almonds, and avocado were among the breakfast of champions offered to us by our priestly Hari Krishna friends on this fine frigid morning. It’s a little weird to have soup in the morning, but warm is warm, so I choked half of it down like a Hari Krishna farmer would. At breakfast, we met some more farm folk, including the crew of ‘Mothers’ – women of Hari Krishna faith. All of the practicing folks had been anointed with some sort of chalky yellow-y paste on their foreheads. The Mothers sat on one side, the devotees (men) on the other. The four women chatted merrily while mixing various Ayurvedic powders into their food and rubbing some potions onto their skin. Normal morning rituals: freeze, brush teeth, drink soup, thumbprint paste on forehead, dust your tea with magic powder…

We got assigned to the garden. Too bad no textbook chapter ever prepared us for words like hoe, spade, and watering can. With charades and descriptive-word guesswork, we got tools into our hands and headed for the fields with a guy whose name we can’t remember. He spent the day calling Kate Stefanie and me… nothing because he couldn’t remember Kate’s name – for this blog, I will call him NHK – Non-Hari Krishna. Twenty-four, Argentine, vegetarian and not intending to become a devotee, he’d been living there for a month already and had his eyes set on Peru and Bolivia before starting university, where he planned to study music. In four hours in a garden, you can learn a lot about a person. I started watering and Kate started weeding. The eight-bed huerta grew lettuce, cabbage, squash, herbs, tomatoes, and who knows what else. Watering was the most relaxing thing ever. I just had to hold a hose while walking slowly up and down the beds, staring off into the looming mountains.

Over the course of the morning, NHK brought us orange slices, water, and fresh apple juice (there were bits of peel in the cup. Kate didn’t like it.). When we finished our watering and weeding, we planted baby lettuce sprouts. With a halfhour to kill before the work hours were over, NHK led us to meet the farm’s vaquita, which translates to “little cow.” This is a misnomer – this was the hugest bull I have ever seen. Laying down, it’s butt was the width of my height. I was fairly terrified of this creature, who the HK crew would consider ‘friend-not-food’ and I would just call ‘massive scary bull’ – not ‘vaquita.’ After killing more time taking pictures in our awesome farm hats – mine, straw, Kate’s, bucket, it was finally time for lunch. After visiting an angry horse and trying to take pictures of peacocks on the run, we went to eat outside.

This meal could be eaten in mixed company, and we were glad to sit with our 7-foot Netherlands multilingual friend David. We chowed down hard on some lentil-sweet potato stew with brown rice, basil tomatoes, green salad with lemon juice served with fresh mint tea. I asked David about the food serving system because there was something weird about who served who what when. Turns out, food cooking and serving can’t be conflated with eating because the mouth transmits karma and you have to rinse yours out if you cook or serve; and, before you eat, you have to offer the food to the God Krishna, but sometimes David sees people taste it while they’re cooking, and sometimes he sees priestly leaders serve themselves, which makes the tiny Peruvian lady angry.

In the afternoon, we chose to wander the farm property and head toward an oft-mentioned stream. On the way, we stopped in the Silent Shrine of Shiva and ran into our NHK friend and another man, known as the Hombre Bomba. The Hombre Bomba was very excited to be in the company of such lovely gringas. Kate’s blue eyes offered him particular fascination. He plucked blackberries off of a bush, and gave us a mango that had been offered to Shiva, and chatted loudly in the silent shrine, which felt irreverent. We continued on through the stream, ambled across the river, and walked down a road to a local farm. On the way, we took pictures with them and promised to send them on Facebook. That will be difficult since we don’t know their names. They got mad we didn’t share the mango, but it was so sweet, so delicious, like the plums in the William Carlos Williams poem.  On the dirt road, we stopped for some queso fresco – so fresco, like the rounded wheel had just come from a cow. We sat on log and ate our cheese bare-handed, and the Hombre Bomba asked us questions about our government and racism and sexual education in schools. Then, this radical vegetarianist, anti-mining, ecoprotesting, democracy-hailing liberal told us he was anti-gay marriage because he doesn’t think kids should grow up confused about having two moms. I amiably countered his argument by saying, isn’t it just as confusing to grow up without a dad? Our world’s full of single mom families, some successful, many not. But, I wasn’t really interested in trying to logically evolve this whole argument in Spanish with a crazy man in a jumpsuit who had just fed me good fruit and cheese. 

Soon after, we bid adieu to all of our buddies on the farm, all who had been really kind and interesting. We walked down the dirt path and saw a bus in the distance. Kate and I then discussed how willing we would be to hitchhike, in that moment, and in general, and decided we wouldn’t because our parents would be so so mad. In that very moment, the bus pulled up and stopped next to us, and the driver offered us a ride to the distant corner. Since it was a school bus full of children, and it was just too coincidental to say no, we decided that this was a great idea. 

Once back in Catemu’s downtown strip, we realized we had just 780 pesos left to buy bus snacks – less than $2. In the supermarket, we came out with two juice boxes, and from around the corner, two Premium alfajores (caramel, graham cracker chocolate-covered yummies). After 24 hours of eco-farming vegetarianism, the rush of sugar gave me an instant headache. Kate convinced me to go use the public elliptical, and we were ridiculed by a group of men across the street. Those crazy gringas at it again. We had to work off the sugar and kill 20 minutes somehow.  

When the bus finally arrived, we hopped on and conked out after passing through Llay Llay (where we watched the sun sink over the Andes, in awe, leading to the second half of this blog title). We woke up back in Santiago four hours later.

While I got incredibly sick that evening, in ways that I will refrain from describing, I would definitely recommend anyone spend 24 hours with Hari Krishna. I don’t know that it will change your life (we had hamburgers when we got home), but it’ll definitely make a memorable story.