After reluctantly tearing ourselves away from the Torrent Duck family, we jumped in the van and headed back down our now familiar rutted gravel road toward Punta Arenas. Time-wise, we were pretty much hopelessly behind because we had spent so much time being thrilled and delighted by the Torrent Ducks.
By now it was about 10:00AM and we just drove, talking about the Torrent Ducks and reminiscing about the wonderful experiences we had had over the past four days. Around 1:00PM, when our tummies were beginning to growl, we stopped at Estancia Cerro Negro near Puerto Natales. An estancia is an extremely large property, usually in the thousands and even tens of thousands of acres, most often used for raising cattle or sheep. Back in the 1950's, the Chilean government wanted people to come to Chile to work on these ranches and many from eastern Europe answered that call. We were to have lunch at the Estancia Cerro Negro (means 'Black Hill Ranch'), a lunch prepared by the wife of the man who operates the ranch. The couple live on the property, but not in the historic house where we had lunch. This house has been lovingly preserved and functions as a testament to the hard work involved in maintaining such a large property, as well as to the wonderful family whose origins were very far away. After lunch, Gerardo demonstrated shearing a sheep, a task they will be doing with many helpers in a few weeks. The ram he sheared looked huge to me, but, in all honesty, I haven't seen very many sheep up close and personal! When he was done, he estimated that the weight of the wool now off the animal was about 4 kilos! Here are some photos from this interesting scene:
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| These are the rather lethal-looking shears used in the de-wooling of the sheep. |
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| And so the shearing begins. |
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| About half finished . . . |
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| Done! The sheep looks significantly smaller - and more comfy! |
This entire process of shearing one sheep took three minutes! I'd probably still be chasing a half-shorn sheep around the barn trying to finish the job! The animal really did seem used to this process and, literally, relaxed and let Gerardo do the shearing. Gerardo assured us that the sheep felt much better without all that wool - and weight.
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