It's not that doing this stuff wasn't my cup of tea. It's just that sometimes, working in an organization dominated by women gets a bit overwhelming. They outnumber us 4 to 1 and I went down south with 7 of the girls to Bariloche where I had a brilliant time and heard more conversations about Will Smith's torso than I would ever like to again.
To combat the estrogen tide, Team Man was formed within VE. The concept is very simple and best explained by our mission statement "Fix Things. Drink Beer. Start Fires. Operate Power Tools. Go For Cafe Con Piernas. Play Football". Yes, it is a truly wonderful group where the only pre-requisite is to be in possession of meat and two veg. And when Suggett suggested a Team Man camping trip last weekend, I jumped at it.
And on a truly shambolic camping trip we went. Just south of Santiago is a small lake called Laguna de Aculeo. It's amazing that for a city so ugly, there are some incredible areas of natural beauty so close and Aculeo is no exception. Surrounded by the pre-cordillera, free of smog and fed by melt water from the Andes, the lake is not just an hour long bus ride away from the city, it's also a whole lifetime away. Matt, Jack, Clay and I rocked up at the campsite with what we considered the essentials. Between the four of us we had one two-man tent, 3 sleeping bags, one frying pan, one spork, 18 cans of Cristal lager, 12 eggs, 24 chorizos and a frisbee. Realising our predicament, Clay and Jack valiantly volunteered to go to the local shop whilst Matt and I put up the tent. In some quite wonderful preparation they brought back 4 meat empanadas, another 2 litres of beer, 4 litres of Gato (boxed red wine), a bottle of Pisco (vile, vile grape brandy) and a pack of cards without any 8's or 9's.
Pisco
And thus, we were set to begin, juggling a warm beer and a frisbee we played/polished
off the cans, siesta-ed and went for a swim. Jack was not only the first in the lake but also the first out as a swim into a dead fish cut short his aquatisism. Barclay and I did a little better, going for a 20 minute swim to a small island. We discovered that the island, was in fact and nature reserve and we weren't allowed to go on it. So we didn't. Instead we swam back and as I paused in mid swim I was astounded by the rolling, tree-covered hills, the dots of snow still clinging to the highest mountains and the fish head that floated past.We made it back and scavenged for firewood (or rather the others did, I "kept an eye on our stuff" by having another kip and drooling gently on Barclay's sleeping bag) and then took on some Chilean lads at football. Whenever this happens I tend to adopt some British colonial, xenophobic impression that we're going to teach Johnny Foreigner a jolly good footballing lesson, as clearly, no-one is better at footy than the people who invented it. This is always met with appropriate response of said foreigners giving us an absolute pasting. Lucky this was not the case here. Aided by earlier beer consumption and relying on Barclay and Matt to do all the running we managed to beat the greasy weones/really nice Las Condes boys before assuring our opposition we would meet up later to share a drink with them.
As the sun started to go down and the uber-rich Chilean jet-skiing families started to bugger off home, we continued to fulfill our team man obligations by starting a fire and drinking more beer. The cards came out, the choripan got finished off and the bottles got emptied. Matt introduced us to a drinking game called hockey and assured us there was a deep tactical edge behind the need to match two cards of the same value together then shout "Goal" in the most annoying fashion possible. Sadly, this strategic edge was more elusive than El Dorado and some of us finished the game thinking we were playing a totally different game.
And so it continued to go down hill. We gatecrashed our new Chilean friend's asado and were slightly horrified to discover they were all Jehovah's Witnesses. After an i¡uncomfortable period of silence we overcame this shock and our own prejudices by trying to teach them drinking games. And we failed. Not because of their religious affilitation but because of our total inability to speak Spanish / function as human beings. The last, great idea of the evening was Night Frisbee which mostly involved getting hit in the head by the frisbee and then failing to throw it to someone 2 metres away. It could well be the next big thing
God, this is really dragging on. So to sum up in as few words as possible. Passed out in tent. Others all slept outside. Woke up. Area around our tent was a bombsite. Couldn't find our eggs for breakfast. Searched for eggs for 20 minutes. Concluded some absolute knobhead had stolen our eggs. Cleaned up. Packed up. Went home. Passed out.
It was a tremendous weekend, we fulfilled many a team man criteria and all got horrendously sunburnt in the process. Really, does it get any better than that...?
(apologies to Jack for nicking some of his pictures, but I don't do photos)
