We stayed at Canon de Blanco for one month (minimum stay).
The ranch is in a wonderful setting, next to the river, at the bottom of Sierra Nevada volcano, with mountains all around. It has hot water pools and the river to swim in.
The deal was 5h a day for 6 days a week.
The work was mostly painting fences, picking up rocks and building/clearing up a bike trail.
Often we had to be driven up the valley in the morning for some jobs, and when that happened they were always late to pick us up, so the shifts actually lasted 6 or even 7 hours. Up the valley there was no signal, we didn't have a radio so we couldn't communicate with anyone, so we just had to wait on the side of the road not knowing when we would get picked up.
There are many horses and we were very happy to work with them, we felt we were experiencing real chilean countryside life.
We had one meal shared with the rest of the workers there, that was very nice, and two meals that we would cook for ourselves.
The housing was sometimes shared with some of the clients; it didn't have hot water, but there were hot showers a few minutes walk away, across the field.
In the whole valley there is no signal, but there is wifi at the restaurant/reception area close to the hot pools.
We chose this workaway because we were very interested in the horses and in the farm life; one of us had a lot of horse experience and the other one was still learning.
We couldn't ride the horses on our own (as it was cited in one of the other reviews), we would saddle up the horses, prepare them for the rides and guide rides with the clients (together with the third volunteer that was there) because it was the only way to ride them, but that wasn't considered working time.
The shifts started at 8am; you wouldn't know what your job would have until the same morning, this lack of communication and planning was a bit tiring after a while.
Cristian was nice and it was possible to talk and express concerns with him, he was always up to tell a nice anecdotes about the valley, show us the local fauna, and tell us about the hiking trails nearby, but he's also very busy managing the whole ranch, so he isn't always around.
We had some tension with the rest of the employers: they all repeated a series of rules with us that became stricter and stricter the longer we stayed. We were staying in the rustic lodge that sometimes also had clients staying, with a shared kitchen. After the first week, we got told that we couldn't use the kitchen of the lodge anymore, but a smaller one in a shed in front of it, that consisted of a sink and 2 camping stoves (way too small for 3 people to cook, barely 2 of us could stand in it). We had to insist to still use one of the shared bathrooms in the lodge, instead of the bathroom of the shed, because it was too dirty. It didn't seem that any of the clients were bothered with our presence (and very rarely they would use the common kitchen), and the insistence of the workers for us to not use it, and their continuous asking us if we left it clean and tidy (when we always did), was insistent and sounded quite patronizig.
In terms of food, the lunch was prepared for us and shared together with all the people working there, that was nice. For breakfast and dinners we would get some basic food bought for us to cook with. Throughout our stay we had some problems in getting enough supplies; Cristian was the only one doing the groceries, and later on we discovered he wanted us to send a list at the start of the week, so that we would get the food at the end of the same week, or at the start of the next. This though wasn't clearly communicated to us, and we ended up having to ration a lot of our food to make it last because we didn't know when the next grocery would arrive. Anyway bring your own snacks and condiments, the food is pretty basic. We also got told by Cristian that for some things we could ask in the restaurant (eggs, bread, tomatoes) but most of the time when we asked, they told us they only had enough for the clients and they couldn't give it to us, or they would give us a very small amount. If we told Cristian that we still needed the things, he'd ask why we didn't get it from the restaurant... there wasn't much communication between the parts.
Around the second week we discovered there was an infestation of fleas: the two dogs and the cat were covered in them and we found ourselves covered in dozens of bites, caught them in our clothes, in our sheets, and in the couches in the living room. We told everyone right away but we soon discovered that nobody really cared, and we wondered if they even believed us. We were given a bottle of insecticide and we had to insist to get more of that when that finished. We had to change and wash our sheets multiple times, do regular checks of our clothes and beds, and take great attention to stay away from the pets, which were very cuddly. We kept being covered in itchy bites for the rest of our stay.
Cristian told us he'd put some spray on the animals a few days after that, but we kept seeing fleas on them. Evidently the locals didn't get bitten as much as us, so nobody was bothered about it.
A week and a half later we received a message on the groupchat telling us to "always keep the door closed because the cat had entered the lodge, and some clients had complained about fleas"... they didn't believe us until a client complained, and then tried to accuse us of letting the cat inside.
We also perceived often that we would receive a different treatment because we were two women, while the third volunteer, that was a guy, was much more taken into consideration.
Another one of the workers showed explicitly sexist behaviour towards us, when we worked at the bike trail up in the valley he would try to force us to work separately "because we were talking too much", he kept asking the third volunteer "if we were really working", he told one of us that the rakes we were using "were too heavy for us to lift", and told us to shut up while we were in his car. In the last days his behaviour was openly adverse against us and that was very upsetting.
We told Cristian about those behaviours, he said he would talk to him, and when Cristian was present the worker would behave normally, but that wasn't always the case.
Three days before we left we got told we had to move out of our room, because they booked it for clients, and we got moved to the room in the shed, where usually one of the workers lived, that was full of his clothes and personal belongings. We received the message at midday of our day off, when we wouldn't be back until late in the evening. The rooms was dirty, the mattresses in bad conditions and didn't have sheets (and of course, had fleas), so we had to prepare them late at night, after returning from a long hike.
The way they just moved us around with very little advance and communication really upset us, and left a bitter taste in the memory of our stay.
Overall we enjoyed our stay, the place was wonderful, we really experienced the gaucho life, we did a lot of work with the horses and explored the many hikes around the area. There were also many apple trees in the garden of the lodge, we often collected them to make jam and baking. We know that a workaway is also about adapting to the culture and the ways of living that you encounter, certainly it's hard to manage every detail on such a big property, and we didn't expected to be pleased and revered on everything; but the treatment from the people working there was quite upsetting after a while, and we were ready to leave at the end of our stay. We wrote this long review not to accuse anyone, but just to be honest and specific of the things that happened.
Thanks Cristian for our stay!
