Ride Like A Gaucho

Sophia Ashe, hooked on ponies and horses since childhood, joined a team of gauchos at a ranch in Argentina and wrote a book about her experiences. 

Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy

Transcript

Peter Welcome to our travel podcast. We’re specialist travel writers, and we’ve spent half a lifetime exploring every corner of the world.

Felice We want to share with you some of our extraordinary experiences and the amazing people we’ve met along the way.

Peter This week we’re talking cowboys. Well, not the Wild West Yellowstone types, but the more authentic Argentinian gauchos who spend their days herding cattle from pasture to pasture on vast estancias, farms that can be as large as an English county. They’ve been doing this on horseback for a couple of centuries. Sophia Ashe, hooked on ponies and horses since childhood, ventured into this almost exclusively male and essentially macho environment, and wrote a book about her experiences. We caught up with her on foot, I hasten to add, and we started by asking her how all this came about.

Sophia So after uni…I studied agriculture at university, but I’m not from a farming background, so when I finished my degree, I really wanted to have some time out and go travelling and spend some time abroad. But I also wanted to try and gain a bit more experience in the farming world, while I was at it. So, I actually first started out in Australia for four and a half months. Working travelled there on a cattle station and an ostrich farm. But then, what I was most excited about was indeed spending time on a vast cattle ranch in Argentina.

Peter Well, that was a pretty daunting thing to do working with gauchos. Perhaps you could explain what a gaucho is, first of all.

Sophia So a gaucho is basically just the term for a South American cowboy. So they work out on the land, usually with stock. And yes, nine out of ten times they ride horses. So that was the absolute dream for me. I’ve always been a bit of a mad keen rider and really always wanted to go to the States and do the cowboy thing. But having Spanish roots, my mother was the one who drove me to choose Argentina instead. Yes, I’m very glad I listened to her.

Felice You spoke Spanish before you went?

Sophia Yes, I’m half Spanish and thankfully I’m completely bilingual. I realise now how important languages are – the owners of the ranch could speak pretty good English, because every season they would get hunters for the shooting season from America. But the Gauchos themselves, a lot of them from very humble backgrounds, they only spoke Spanish. Without being able to communicate, working on the ranch…I don’t think that would have gone down too well.

Peter You flew to Buenos Aires and then tell us what happened next. You went off to this big estancia?

Sophia I did, yes. Well, funnily, I didn’t actually know the owners of the ranch at all. They were a suggestion through a friend of my mother’s, who is Argentinian. When my mother asked him for contacts, he said, ‘Oh, these people are absolutely delightful and have many ranches across the country, so Sophia should speak to them.’

When I contacted them, they just said, ‘Yes, yes, arrive to Argentina whenever you like.’

‘I’m flying directly from Australia.’ They were laid back as anything and said, ‘Yes, you’ll come and stay in our flat in Buenos Aires for as long as you like, see the city and everything you want. Then, whenever you fancy, we will take you out to the ranch.’

So I only spent a couple of days in Buenos Aires, a very beautiful city. I absolutely loved it, but I was desperate to get out onto the ranch, so I was only there for three days, and then a member of the family drove me out to the ranch, which was in La Pampa Province. It was all in all about nine hours’ driving. And the ranch itself was an hour and a half from one of the big cities in La Pampa. So completely isolated, wild, rural, stunning, absolutely stunning.

Felice What skills did you need apart from Spanish and riding? Did you know anything about the sort of job you were going to be doing?

Sophia No, no, not really. And what I found funniest was that they, the gauchos, were also told pretty much nothing about me, so I think all they were told was, ‘There’s an English girl coming to gain some experience on the ranch with the horses and the cattle,’ and they were all very worried because all they heard from that was ‘English girl’ and they thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know how we’re going to communicate.’

When I arrived and started speaking to them in Spanish, they all looked absolutely gobsmacked and also very relieved. It was quite funny. They all turned around and said, ‘Oh, oh, you speak Spanish?’ I said yes. ‘Oh, we didn’t know that.’

So I thought, ‘Oh right. Ok’. And they hadn’t been told anything about my riding ability or that I worked on farms back at home, studied agriculture. Nothing. But none of that had actually been passed on. So they were very cautious about what to let me do to start off with, they looked after me so, so well. It was good fun to start off with, because I was very happy on the back of a horse and chasing the cattle and things. But yes, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had to ask, say, ‘How do we get these cattle in? What do you do?’ And bearing in mind the field sizes there – I call them a field, but they were anything between 500 and 1100 hectares in size.

Peter That’s what, around 1,100 to 2,700 acres?

Sophia Each parcel could have between 4 and 1,200 cows in it. Yes, I had to be quick to learn. They’re quite bold to just set off.

Peter And gauchos traditionally are all male, aren’t they?

Sophia Yes, I was really the only woman on the ranch. There was a ranch cook, and all she did was indeed just that: cooked our meals. And because I stayed as a sort of guest, she did my cleaning and looked after me very well. And one of the gauchos who lived out in what they call a puesta. So the ranches, some of them are so big that they have little houses scattered out across the ranch and have a dedicated person or family living in a little house, and they are responsible for that area. Indeed, one of the gauchos lived in his puesta with his wife and daughter. But that was it. Yes, it was an all-male team. But to be honest, that’s not anything I’m not used to in this industry. I’ve always worked among men. And yes, it seemed perfectly normal to me, to be honest.

Peter I’m not thinking of you, I’m thinking of them! It must have been a strange experience to suddenly have this foreign woman, a foreign girl I should say, turn up. Must have been quite interesting.

Sophia Yes, that was very obvious at the start. Like I say, they looked after me very well, but they weren’t really sure what to say or how to say we’re going to go and do this, so we need you to do x. It was more like, ‘Oh well, we’re going to do this. You’re very welcome to come along if you like. And if you do want to help, then this is what you should do.’

To be honest, after a couple of weeks, they saw that I was, dare I say, probably a little bit mad and quite happy charging around on a horse. And they said, ‘Ok, well, we’ll just leave her to it and she can come along with us, whatever we do.’

Peter Well, presumably the first good thing for them was that not only did you speak Spanish, but you could ride well. And that obviously was crucial because it’s a hard life in a ranch like that, isn’t it?

Sophia Yes, yes. Although I’ve spent my whole life riding, there were a couple of months in the run-up to the trip that I hadn’t ridden, so spending my first nine-hour day in a saddle was a little painful.

Peter I can imagine. Of course, it’s not a saddle that you might be used to. Not an English saddle?

Sophia No. The first day I sat in one of their saddles, which they call a recado. They are incredibly comfortable, but they are so cushioned. It is basically just a layer of cushions, so comfortable but so wide. And I thought ‘Oh my goodness it’s going to break my hips. I’ve sat so far astride.’ I did a couple of days in a Chilean saddle, which is a bit like a western saddle, but it was very, very hard. I thought I would be more comfortable in it, but when they saw I was more serious about joining them with everything, they actually asked me whether, for the sake of the horse, I would ride in the recado, because that’s what the horses were used to and more comfortable for them. I said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ And as soon as I changed saddle, I was much happier being in a nice, soft saddle and soon became accustomed to it.

Felice What was your daily timetable at the ranch? What time did you get up and what time did you start work and stop work?

Sophia So when I arrived in February, it was still basically summer. The temperatures were around 32 degrees, 32 to 36 degrees during the peak of the day. So we would usually be on the horses by 7.00 in the morning. Some days…there were a couple of amazing days we had actually setting off in the dark under the morning stars and watching the sunrise, depending on where we had to be and at what time. But usually 7am and working through till maybe 11 or 12, and then either being picked up in the vehicle from wherever we were and being brought back to the homestead for lunch, or riding back if we weren’t too far away.

Then usually it would be something like 3 or 4 hours for lunch and siesta, of course, very important. So it wouldn’t really resume work again until 4pm, 4.30pm. But again, while it was light, we could be out until 9pm. until the dark set in. But then towards the end of my stay, because I left in mid-May, by then, suddenly the temperatures had changed. Very suddenly it became winter, and it was down to minus numbers in the morning, so we’d start a bit later and also finish a bit earlier. But there wasn’t that big gap for lunch, so the working hours were much the same.

Peter So which part of Argentina is this? Is it in the south? La Pampa, I don’t know it.

Sophia La Pampa is pretty much the next province down from Buenos Aires, heading southwest. La Pampa is what it means – basically the Native American word for the plains. And it does suddenly become very flat there. La Pampa is the northernmost point of Patagonia. It was absolutely incredible. The landscape could vary so much from being incredibly flat and covered in prickly acacia trees and carob trees, pretty much the only trees they had there. Or you could then get to other points where there were no trees at all, and it was just undulating sand dunes, and I mean massive dunes. Not just little bumps, but the whole place was just white sand, like a beach. It was absolutely incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. So how anything grew out there and the cattle were thriving. It was it was really incredible.

Felice Were you involved in feeding the cattle? What happened about that?

Sophia The ranch is about 85,000 acres, so it’s approximately twice the size of Birmingham, and had about 8,000 cows on it. So therefore there was quite a lot of room to rotate them around. But of course the grazing was quite sparse out there. What grew was very good, but it was thin. It’s not like a good crop of grass that we get here in England. So feeding…there wasn’t really any feeding. It would just be these big cattle moves, to move them from one plot to another, to give them fresh grazing. The only thing they really had planted on the ranch were big areas of alfalfa, which is something that the grandfather of the owner had pioneered in the, I believe, late 1940s to mid-1950s, putting alfalfa into these sand plains of La Pampa to, to fatten cattle. And that was about it. There were calves that would graze it, and the calves sometimes got some, like a mix of maize silage and some concentrate feed when they were in pens nearer the homestead. But that was it.

What they would do is in the winter, drive the cattle off these open, undulating plains on the ranch and move them to parts of the ranch which were thick with the acacia and carob trees, because the pods are very rich, but they’re basically giant beans. So that would be enough to keep the cattle fat over…well, the cows specifically, fat over the winter.

Peter But there’s obviously quite a lot of wildlife. You mentioned the farm acted as a dude ranch for American visitors in particular.

Sophia Yes. So it is also a game reserve. And they do some shooting and hunting, but it’s also anyone who wants to come and look at wildlife. Essentially, it’s a massive area in the middle of nowhere and completely taken by nature really. It’s absolutely stunning.

Felice What sort of wildlife did you see there?

Sophia There’s endless list of red deer. Wild boar, blackbuck, antelope, flamingos, armadillo… a lot of armadillos. Very odd is something called a plains viscacha, which is kind of like a Jack Russell-sized chinchilla rabbit. Very odd. I do recommend that you look it up and it has to be the plains viscacha because the males have a very characteristic thick, black, wiry moustache, which I find very odd, but very funny. And what else? Things like burrowing owls which lived in the burrows that the viscachas made, and the armadillos, snakes, a few snakes.

I don’t know what people make of snakes. I don’t mind them, but a few quite venomous pit viper type and coral snakes. Luckily, no issues with those. Unfortunately, things I didn’t see were pumas and the maned wolf, which actually is so elusive that it was considered extinct in La Pampa, but it has been sighted since. But I didn’t get to see a puma either. Annoyingly, whilst I was there, there had been sightings of them. But one very exciting thing was a crowned eagle, which is incredibly rare in South America. There are, I don’t know how many breeding pairs, but it’s not a lot. And I did manage to see one of those sat on one of the carob trees one day. So that was really very special.

Felice Were there any problems? What about safety? Did anything go wrong?

Sophia No. Thankfully not. Of course, you can expect people to fall off horses quite a lot. Although while I was there, only one gaucho had a fall, and it was something fairly minor because he was riding a young horse. One thing that did make me chuckle was on my very first night at the ranch, I was having dinner with the family and it was just in a lovely little hut, separate from where the rooms were, but honestly just a stone’s throw away.

When I was on my way to go to bed to my room, the owner of the ranch asked me, have you got a torch on you? I said, ‘Yes, well, I’ve got one on my phone.’ Of course I got a bit nervous thinking, ‘What do I need a torch for? Just to walk down one very short alley to get to my room.’ He says, ‘Oh, good. Yes. I suggest you use it because it’s not been unheard of for a buffalo to jump the cattle grids and wander around the homestead. And honestly, you do not want to come upon one of those because they are angry.’

I gave a sigh of relief and thought, ‘Goodness, that’s actually the complete opposite of what he said, but actually such a comforting feeling being surrounded by wildlife.’ Luckily I didn’t come face to face with any on the homestead. But out and about we did see quite a few, and there were a few bulls that would go for you on the horses and force you to kick on, so they were indeed very angry, angry beasts.

Peter You definitely need to be able to ride. Well, not a moment to suddenly fall off, is it?

Sophia No, you’ve got to hold on. And one thing that I was quite weary of was the armadillos making their holes everywhere. Obviously, you can’t see them all when you’re flat-out galloping. So a lot of the time, it’s just praying that your horse doesn’t put a foot wrong. These animals, they’re born on the ranch, die on the ranch when they’re old, and they have the most incredible reflexes. They are single-handedly the best horses I’ve ever ridden. Not spooky. Completely solid. Robust. Absolutely incredible.

Peter They’re not shod?

Sophia No, not shod. So yes, in that part of the country, because there’s not a single rock there, they didn’t shoo. But the gauchos just knew how to trim and file their own horse’s feet using, basically, a special knife. Quite a big one, sort of like a cleaver-ish knife and a block of wood to tap it. And just with that, they would perfectly trim their horse’s hooves into shape. Amazing.

Felice How does the ranch work with conservation?

Sophia So yes, one could argue that the hunting, in a way, is conservation. What they would hunt on the ranch would be the red deer, the black buck antelope, wild boar and the buffalo. Of course, these are they’re completely wild populations that just live on the ranch and they will go out of control. There are pumas, but there wouldn’t be enough to keep those numbers down. You do get the trophy hunters and things, so depending how you feel on that….but there is also the same sort of deer-culling program out there, like you would find in Scotland or here in England.

Of course, none of it went to waste, even during the hunting season, regardless of whether the hunter just wanted to shoot for a photo. Everything was eaten, all the hides were used. The antlers would be turned into any array of things by the gauchos on the ranch, and they would use all the hides to repair their riding equipment, make lassos. Absolutely everything.

Peter What did you wear on a daily basis? Did you become a gaucho in terms of clothing?

Sophia Slowly, yes I did. To begin with, I wore just a pair of jeans, sort of Chelsea boots, working boots and a T-shirt. I had a nice cowboy hat with a strap that I had from Australia that worked perfectly to keep the sun off. But then, bit by bit, I would find myself swapping the cowboy hat for the boina, which is the Basque hat, similar to a beret that just sits on the top of your head like a like a pancake. And there’s also something that they call faja, which is it’s like a belt, but it’s fabric and it’s a couple of meters long, and you wrap it around you rather than just using it like a belt. They have nice patterns on them. I was gifted one of those by one of the gauchos. So I would like to wear that. He was very proud when I wore it. The trousers I didn’t wear, because unfortunately the Covid lockdown happened while I was there, I didn’t mind a bit…I never left the ranch whilst I was there, but it also meant that I couldn’t go to the local village and see all the shops that had all these things, which was a bit of a shame. But yes, I would say I embraced the culture. I started drinking mate with them.

Peter Tell us what mate is?

Sophia It’s almost like a green tea, but in my opinion a lot nicer. It is drunk by filling up a little, little gourd, little pumpkins. Obviously those are desiccated and made pretty, one form or another. Anyway, you fill up this bombilla, as they call it. With the loose leaves, and you just fill it with boiling water and drink it from a straw. You don’t move the straw, they’re very strict with that. You pour them out around the straw and you don’t mix it. You don’t lift the straw. Nothing. The only thing you can do is pour a bit of sugar over the top, and then pour the water, just to give it a bit of sweetness. Because it is bitter, in a nice way.

Peter It is quite bitter, but it’s very addictive, isn’t it?

Sophia Yes, I did really like it. And it’s one of these very, very social drinks because you you take your sip and then you pour water in and you pass it to the next person. And then they pass it back and you pour the water over again. And of course, these bombillas are not very big and they’re full of leaves. So actually the quantity of water you put in them is very small each time. So every time you take a few sips, you top up the water. And that’s a good excuse to then pass it around to everybody else.

Peter So during the day there were a lot of tea breaks, mate breaks?

Sophia Well, you’d start the morning with mate and then you would have it when you arrived to the ranch for lunch, and then you’d have it after the siesta before setting off. And then when you got back in for dinner then as well. But actually, obviously while you’re out working, no.

There is quite a funny story when some of the old cows were being moved off the ranch. So they called in these big livestock trucker haulage companies, and one of the lorries got stuck in the sand, completely bottomed out, loaded full of cows. So it was it was significantly heavy. And so we were a fair bit away from the homestead. So we sat waiting around for the tractor driver to come with the tractor to pull this truck out. So we were with these truckers and thought, ‘Well, there’s not a lot we can do. And you just ask, have you got mate?’ And he goes, ‘Yes, of course I do.’ And he comes out with a little gas cooker and a little kettle, his thermos flask, bag of mate, the bombilla, everything. And he puts it out in on the ground and we’re all sat down in a circle drinking mate, while the truck is stuck up to its axles in sand, waiting for someone to come and rescue it.

Felice Do the other gauchos live on the ranch all the time. Or did they go home? Did they have another life outside their work?

Sophia A bit of both. There were a couple that lived on the ranch, never seemed to go home. And of course, it’s one of those things you don’t really ask much about in terms of family and where they lived. But generally, yes, there would be a sort of rota. And so there would always be people at the weekend, and usually the jobs were very light at the weekend. Not much going on, but you had maybe there’d maybe be five workers on the ranch over the weekend. Everybody else would go home on Friday evening, the night after work and then come in first thing on Monday morning. And they would be from one of two villages, to be honest. And not from much further away. Apart from the ones who were from very far away, who would have to essentially take holiday to be able to go back home, coming from other provinces far away.

Peter When did you come home?

Sophia I was there from mid-February to mid-May. Actually, my stay was made longer by Covid. Funnily, I don’t know why I ever thought I would have wanted to spend less time than I did. I was stuck, essentially, in Argentina when all the flights were grounded. There was no sign of me returning home. I was quite happy on the ranch and of course, being completely isolated, it was as if nothing had happened to us any way. You had to give all your details to the British Embassy, and they managed to plan two repatriation flights and I was put on one of them. So I came back on, I think it was V-E day in May.

Peter So it must have been quite a wrench to leave, having lived so closely with them. A wrench for them, for you to leave.

Sophia It was. I think that was one of the worst goodbyes I’ve ever done in my entire life. Because, like I say, I never left the ranch in three and a half months. And you live very closely with all these people who took absolute great care of me, and every single one of them became a good friend. So saying goodbye to them under those circumstances, I was obliged to say yes to my seat on the plane, of course, and then saying, ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back, who knows when the world will be back to normal.’ I had desperately hoped that I could come back over the summer and make up a bit of money doing a harvest or something, and then go back out at the end of the year. But unfortunately, that never happened.

I still have not been back out there. I do still talk to them. I try to keep in touch with as many of them as possible, and I do have it ingrained to go back out there someday. But of course it’s so far away. And it’s not only travelling to Argentina, it’s that extra travel from Buenos Aires to the middle of nowhere that just adds an extra half day to a journey. But I am definitely committed to go back out there and see them and relive it all once again, albeit even if it’s just a short holiday.

Felice I know you’ve written a book about your experiences there. Did you start it when you got home?

Sophia I started it when I got home. I spent two weeks isolating, of course, after the flight and I was feeling very down, very lonely, having spent three months surrounded by people, living a dream and then coming back to being shut in a room and all I could do was…well, it was just self-pity, really. I sat in a room. I talked to them every time they’d come in for lunch or dinner or whatever, breakfast, because they were 3 or 4 hours behind. So that would always work out. I would just sit there between their calls, looking at photos, videos, and I just started tapping away some memories because there was nobody really I could tell it to. And they were such incredible memories that I didn’t want to be having all these calls over Zoom and the phone telling people about them. I wanted to sit in front of them and say, ‘Look at these photos. This is what I was doing,’ but I couldn’t.

So just for myself, really, I wrote some bits down, tapping away at the computer, and then I just guess one day I thought about it and thought actually it was so perfect. It was like a film or a dream. So many things that happened, you can’t imagine they would have been real. And I thought, actually, you know what? I will not stop writing until this is a book on a shelf somewhere. And that’s just what I did. So it did actually take me two years to write. I was doing it on days off, weekends. I was very committed and I thoroughly enjoyed writing it because it just allowed me to relive it all once again.

Peter Well, it’s a fascinating read. And the question we haven’t asked, which we of course have to ask, was there any hint of romance anywhere down the line? I got the impression from reading the book that one of the vets might have taken a shine to you.

Sophia Oh no, no no, it was all just friendships. But no romances. No, not on my side anyway. Perhaps one or two of them might have done. Although I’ve often thought if it became a film adaptation, I’m sure there would be a way that the director would wangle in some sort of love story.

Felice Tell us the name of your book and where people can buy it?

Sophia So it’s called Ride Like a Gaucho, and it’s available on all platforms, so you can get it as an e-book on Kindle, Apple, any e-book platform all through Amazon. You can also get a paperback copy and I do actually supply my local bookshop. I live in a little Cotswold town, so the Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, you can also order copies through them. You can order on Amazon. The Instagram account for the book is @ridelikeagaucho exactly like the book title.

Peter Sophia, thank you very much for talking to us. It’s a fascinating story and I hope that you go back and see them all again.

Sophia I do hope so. As a nature lover, it was just such a relief to see places of the world so unspoilt and so beautiful, so pure and natural and with equally pure people in it as well. So an absolutely brilliant experience, and all I can ever say to young people is: if you get the opportunity to travel before or after uni, do it. You spend a lot of your life working. You can wait a year to start the job, but go out and see something because it just changes your thoughts on everything so much.

Felice That’s all for now. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please share this episode with at least one other person! Do also subscribe on Spotify, i-Tunes or any of the many podcast providers – where you can give us a rating. You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any of the many podcast platforms. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We’d love you to sign up for our regular emails to peter@actionpackedtravel.com. By the way, we’re no 7 in the Top 20 Midlife Travel Podcasts.

Also read about and listen to A Modern Day Horse Nomad, Inside the World of Horse Racing, On Safari With Alice in Africa, Age is No Barrier to Adventure