Chaparrita – Juanito's Travels

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Zen Cleaning Robot, fiestas, mas drama y thinking of moving to County Sligo 1995/2022 BlogPt11

2022

I haven’t focussed on why I started this blog for a while, that is planning for my 50th birthday world trip. It turns out planning a 50th trip is a lot more complicated than planning a 22 year-old trip. When I was 22, in 1995 – for most of the year at least, I turned 23 in December – I didn’t think about jobs, kids, any wives, retirement savings or anything like that. I was like a bird that could just fly off and sit in a tree for a while when the desire took me. A simple life. I could just pack my blue backpack with a few things and hit the road.

Now, I research guidebooks, try and find the best time to travel to fit in with plans to move back to my hometown of the Gold Coast in Queensland, while maintaining a job here in Canberra where I’ve worked for various departments of the Australian government for the last 15 1/2 years. Thinking, should I quit my job, get a payout, travel around the world and then return and try and find another job, or should I try and keep my Canberra job, use up all my Long Service Leave and Annual leave, travel the world, visiting my wife’s family in Mexico, and having a 50th birthday party, on the way, then return to the Gold Coast and find another job, hopefully with enough savings to live off until I do.

Life was much simpler in 1995 when I was 22 and 2022 was some freakishly high number I could hardly fathom, where the Zen Cleaning Robots had taken over all the mundane jobs of the world leaving us humans to just run around having fun in free houses, rather than post-pandemic fears, rising housing prices, and, just to keep it interesting, part II of the 1850s Crimean War where Russia fought the West (and Turkey) for control of Sevastopol and other such strategic places on the Black Sea, which has also managed to drive up the price of lettuces here in Australia to $10 a head.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, people need to learn history, how often seemingly forgotten events from hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago can affect us and influence the current era.

But back to 1995.

1995

I returned to Wexford one summer’s afternoon, after visiting Agatha, Ines and the girls in Dublin. I think for once I got the train back to Wexford, as I’d managed to save a small amount of money over the last months and I couldn’t be bothered trying to hitch. When I arrived back in Wexford I had to walk from Wexford town out to Inisglas, in The Deeps, around 14-15 kms.

About halfway back the blackest of black clouds covered the sky which, moments earlier, had been clear blue and sunny. It was a most ominous sight. It came out of nowhere. Maybe not nowhere, it seemed to be from the direction of the Irish Sea. The elements erupted. A gale started blowing. Rain started pouring from the sky. The world turned black. Black as the night’s sky. Then the lightning started. Lighting strikes came down every 3-4 steps. 1,2,3 then a thunderous thunder clap. 1,2,3 and the ground shook like an electric bomb, and then another, and then some more. So loud. Whipping down from the heavens with a crack so intense it made my spine shiver, my hands shake. So terrified. I didn’t dare look up to see where the lighting was landing. It was close. Metres away close. No gap between the light and sound. No time to count to 1. How close to death I was, any step now I thought. I walked closer to the trees hoping they might take the brunt of any lighting strike, pulling my chin to keep the rain from my chest. No escaping it though. I kept walking. 20 terrifying minutes or so later, looking at my feet, drenched with rain. It was gone. Quiet. Just for the sounds of the water dropping from the leaves of the trees.

I can’t remember many times I felt so close to death than those 20 minutes. Apart from the time the Thai Airways’s plane’s engines had failed – twice – after coming out of Bangkok a few months earlier. Or that time Luke had boiled up a whole bag of magic mushrooms that Matt had picked on his birthday and put in the freezer in the house we shared in Newcastle and given me a whole glass without alerting me to the phenomenal mind-fucking strength he’d made it. I mean most people just put in 3 or 4 mushrooms. That’s more than enough! What psycho puts a whole fucking kilo or something in? I ended up at a pizza shop that night asking a waiter to call an ambulance because I’d OD on mushies. But as I waited I saw a dog and started feeling better and decided to follow the dog to Sydney or somewhere.

Inisglas was also changing. The Buddha went on about change all the time. I would hear it everyday in my Vipassana mediation courses. Change, change. Everything’s always changing. If you get attached to things without recognising they will sooner or later change, you will be miserable.

I wasn’t feeling that miserable at the time, so perhaps I wasn’t that attached. But there were certainly changes afoot.

Nora and Stuart hooked up. Because Nora and Stuart hooked up, Frankie and I were now sharing the little space above or near the flour mill near Anthony and Eve’s house as Nora had moved to the main house. Frankie wasn’t too happy about the whole thing but he accepted it with sad dignity and continued to tend to the vegetable garden, even though most of the community, including myself, weren’t pulling their weight in that respect. Mind you I did continue to help Frankie out, picking veggies, mounding up potatoes, but it was more like a part time thing.

I also kept helping Stuart with the cow milking and yoghurt and quark making from time to time. Frankie helped me once when I drank a bunch of fresh unpasteurised milk straight from the milk bucket and ended up throwing up. He was a really nice guy. I think I’d discovered that day I might have also been intolerant to milk and asked Eve whether we could buy some soy milk during the weekly shopping run. Anthony, already upset that we had a freezer full of a dead cow that nobody was eating as we always made vegetarian meals, rolled his eyes in regards to the idea of milk intolerances. He also said Plato was dead set against people eating beans because it ruined their philosophical capacity or some crap like that. Sorry, but if the Buddha and Plato were in a fight the Buddha would shit on Plato and his beans any day, even when he was in his unhealthy self-deprivation period before he found the middle path.

Nora’s hooking up with Stuart meant Stuart’s son was getting more attention and being slightly less feral and pooing on the front lawn much less. But it meant Nora’s son getting a bit upset as he obviously as less attention was being given to him.

The kids in general were like community farm kids, roaming about like free range chickens most of the day and occasionally getting into trouble. One morning they all came in screaming and yelling and us adults all sprung into action wondering what the heck was going on. After more screaming it transpired that apparently they’d all been down to the beehives and decided to whack the sides of the beehives with sticks, which the bees objected to. They were covered in bee stings. I think the homoeopathic vet had some lotion to put on the hundreds of stings. They all survived.

The homoeopathic vet also gave a cow that had eaten too much clover, and was thus getting bloated, some plain old dishwashing detergent. She held her nostrils and poured it down her throat. You’d probably charge someone £50 for that.

Then there was Jay. Jay had bought himself a donkey, and a cart, and was making plans with Anushka, or whatever the quiet German girl’s name was, to travel around Ireland picking winkles and smoking grass, while kipping on the cart. He was going to leave in a few weeks. Just at the start of Autumn. Not that I had any idea at the time as I hadn’t read or seen Lord of the Rings, but it sounded a bit like something a hobbit would do.

Michael from Denmark was getting tired of Ireland. He was planning to go back to Denmark I think, or perhaps go work with the other Danish people at the disabled home, where, I think, his ex-girlfriend was still working, but where he’d also get a real wage, which was not forthcoming at Inisglas due to its philosophy of not really making money from the farm despite it’s great potential.

Tron was looking into some biodynamic program somewhere else in Ireland or Scotland or Norway or something, so was soon leaving the place.

Ross, being on the run from the UK police, was happy to keep low and remain in place with his chickens, baconers and porkers.

And I, well I had saved a little money, but I wanted to save more, so I started looking into WWOOFing opportunities elsewhere in Ireland where all my food and board was included, so I could save all my dole. I had found a place in my granny’s home County Sligo, in fact around the area of her home town Tubbercurry, also spelt Tobercurry on occasions. I was going there in a few weeks so I was getting ready for that.

But there would be one big event before that move happened.

Inisglas’ main manor house was in disrepair, and since the farm barely made any money, there was no way to fix it. So Stuart had the idea of organising a music festival where we could sell tickets and put the proceeds towards fixing the place.

He turned out to be quite the organiser and got a few local bands to play at the event for free. He even managed to get his friends from a band called Elephant Walk, or some name like that, a folk/ world music outfit who’d played at Glastonbury. So we had a pretty good line up. To add to that, the guys at Inisglas decide to perform a few songs ourselves. We decided on Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, and two other songs I can’t remember. I was only singing choruses in those so I didn’t pay as much attention to them.

We decided for our performance we’d dress up like women. There was Frankie, Michael, Stuart and I, plus some googley-eyed German who’d recently arrived on the farm as a part of some farm stay thing he’d organised to learn biodynamic techniques. Tron was happy as he finally had someone on the biodynamic farm, besides Anthony and Eve who started the community, who was actually interested in biodynamics.

I liked Googly-eyed Person, but wasn’t there long enough to remember his name. He seemed like a good person.

We practised our songs for weeks and learnt all the words to Tears in Heaven which are still in my head somewhere today I’m sure. We did up posters, and put them up around town. Stuart got a spot on the local radio station to promote the event and after a few weeks, concert day was here.

It was a beautiful sunny day, though another summer storm threatened in the evening.

We decided that they Inisglas crew would start the event, so we donned our dresses like brides on a wedding day and made our way out for our big performance. Stuart had a nice slim dress which was in 1920s’ style. He even had a bit of lippy from Nora. Frankie, Michael and Googly-eyed German guy also had nice dresses. I was very happy with my dress, it was a lilac number, kind of thing you might see a Mexican woman wear on her sweet 15. I had really long hair, and the face of my great-grandmother from Sligo, so I think many in the crowd were thinking I might be the real deal, if it wasn’t for the obviously hairy legged men besides me. After Tears we had a more upbeat number and I went wild swinging my hair about. We had a ball.

The crowd was good and I think in the end we had a few hundred come along. We’d tried to get a liquor licence but were refused because we were holding the event on a Sunday, which was a harder day to get official permission to serve drinks given it was the Lord’s day. We got around the ‘law’ by having a game where you threw darts at a dart board, and if you hit a particular number we’d give you a free beer. It cost £3 to enter. After some confusion people realised the special number was any number, and even if you couldn’t hit the board we’d still give you a beer to console you. We kept making people throw the darts though as it was funny.

I’m sure if the liquor licensing people had come our whole scheme would have quickly fallen apart.

We also had sandwiches made with bread Michael and I had baked, some cheesy buns, also made at Inisglas, and home made cordial. Michael and I were the main bread makers at the time as Jay had moved more into beekeeping at that point and was prepping for his donkey-cart tour.

The rest of the real bands played throughout the evening and much craic was had by all. It did rain for a bit in the late afternoon and many of the families with young kids went off, leaving the harder core revellers. We ended up finishing up late into the evening smoking weed and drinking beers and wine by a big bonfire. It was like one of those wistful scenes at the end of some coming of age movie.

It was, really, the craic.

I decided to end on this high note, and in the days after, packed my bag and hitched up to Dublin to spend a few days with Agatha before heading to Sligo.

As it happened, Agatha had a friend who was coming to visit from Spain, so they’d organised a little trip through Northern Ireland and Donegal and were happy to drop me off at Tubbercurry, Sligo on the way back. So the universe was once again providing.

But just as change was happening at Inisglas, change was also happening at the Chaparrita in Dublin, and for me, most importantly, a change in my relationship with Agatha.

More of that in the next blog post though, I think finishing up Inisglas after a few months is also a nice spot to finish up this post.

P.s The Zen Cleaning Robot is a concept I came up with Rob Skelton at RMIT later in the nineties. I think it was for a school project on writing for the internet that started with a drunken night of wine and indoor soccer where I ended up sleeping at a house in Saint Kilda with the friend of a classmate who was growing a super awesome little weed plant grown from a seed form Holland.

I would have hoped Zen Cleaning Robots would be being manufactured by now.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Inisglas Biodynamic Community 1995 BlogPt9

The day after arriving Ian drove the community van into Wexford to deliver some veggies and yoghurt to the health food shop. I went into the social services office and started the paperwork to get some unemployment benefits.

They gave me a number and issued me a plastic social services card which I still have today. I’m not sure if I actually got it on the day or whether they sent it to me later. Luckily I had enough documentation even without my Irish passport to prove I was Irish. They explained the unemployment system, similar to Australia in that you had to apply for a certain amount of jobs, but different in that they’d send a cheque to the address, which I could cash at the post office, rather than having money deposited in my bank account which they did in Australia. When I said I was staying at Inisglas they immediately recognised the place as it turned out just about everyone there was on the dole. Wexford wasn’t a huge place so people generally had a notion there was a bunch of hippy going-ons at the place, but that they were mostly harmless.

There were a few at Inisglas who weren’t on the dole. Anthony and Eve, and Ross – who probably didn’t want any official record of himself due to being a British fugitive – and the homoeopathic vet who brought in a basic income with the homoeopathic treatment of cows and the like. I think Wobbie also got most of his income from selling trees from the nursery. The others weren’t on the Irish dole, their respective countries had some sort of arrangement with Ireland so they could collect unemployment benefits from Denmark and the other places they were from. I think they got a bit more than us Irish.

I wasn’t that keen to be collecting the dole, but I really didn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to stay in Ireland more than 2 weeks. I soon also found there weren’t many jobs going in the local area so working on a biodynamic farm on the dole was going to be it while I was in Wexford.

I put my qualms about social welfare aside and quickly settled into a routine in the Inisglas community.

My granny from County Sligo had to move to Australia when she was 10, after her mother died. She worked on a farm in central Queensland close to Mt Morgan, near Rockhampton. I was sort of doing the same in reverse, but I think much more comfortable than my poor granny probably had to endure.

Before heading back to Inisglas I stopped off at one of the pubs in town with Jay and Frankie. Jay had a pint, I think I just had an orange juice again. Stuart popped in a bit later for a quick drink.

The day at Inisglas always started with a light breakfast, or at least a cup of tea and a snack, at the wooden table in the kitchen. There was a wood fired AGA oven in there that was always on low. There was always a kettle there and a pot of tea on the go.

Ross was obsessed with having the kettle going 24/7 and used to get pissed when anyone left it empty, or drank the last of the tea without making a fresh batch. As he often had that look in his eye like, ‘I’ll stab the next person who leaves the teapot empty’, it seemed wise to make sure the brew never ran dry. I was suitably scared of Ross, but I was also friendly so I tried chatting to him. He’d often just grunt, but he would also sit occasionally and drink tea at the table with me and smoke rolly cigarettes at the kitchen table. If there were too many people about he’d usually just grab his tea and run off to another part of the manor house.

You could tell this used to be a stately home because the kitchen had places for a bunch of bells which were attached to various rooms to alert the kitchen staff to the desires of the stately home owners. It was a big place with maybe 10 bedrooms, a sizeable living area and space for a fancy table. The fancy table was long gone and we always ate around the solid wooden kitchen table that easily fitted 15-20.

Breakfast would normally be a bit of soda bread baked in the AGA, which Jay or Anthony would make during the week. The community also had a sizeable bakery with professional bread ovens subsidised by the European community. But we only used that when we were doing the baking for the Dublin markets on the weekends as the ovens were only worth firing up if you were making dozens and dozens or loaves. I’d have the bread with jam for breakfast most days. Occasionally I’d go for a porridge or just fry a few eggs, depending on my mood. We have eggs and fruit in regular supply in the pantry as well as some dried and fresh fruit, and as much milk, freshly squeezed from the farm’s cows that you could ever possibly want to drink.

After breaky I’d head out with Frankie for a couple of hours to tend to the vegetables. It wasn’t overly strenuous. Sometimes we’d tend to the huge compost heaps which we’d use to feed the veggies. Sometimes we’d slash nettles and comfort and soak them in water to make fertiliser teas for the plants. Sometimes we’d plant out seedlings of kale – before kale was even popular – or spinach. It was still early in the season when I arrived and there wasn’t a huge variety to harvest, but we dug up a few Jerusalem artichokes which grew in abundance. Jerusalem artichokes are gassy, not super delicious, but highly nutritious and easy to grow root vegetables. Most evening meals made in my first weeks there at Inisglas included at least a few artichokes in them, while we waited for the nicer Mediterranean vegetables – although most of them originated in central America – like the tomatoes, zucchinis, eggplants. The other things ready to harvest in those first weeks of me being on the farm were carrots, some peas and a few beets and brassicas – kale and the like. I think we were getting the odd leek as well, so enough variety. Being Ireland we had a lot of potatoes growing, but in spring we could only forage a few little spuds, still plenty to add to meals though.

After a few hours in the garden we’d go back and have some more tea, some home made cordial and some bread and cheese, perhaps with some gherkins from bottles. After lunch we’d go do a bit more gardening, perhaps going to 5 PM, depending on the weather, or whenever it started getting dark, before stopping and heading in for dinner. I was amazed we never had to water much, just the stuff in the poly-tunnels and seedlings in the first few weeks after planting until their roots got down into the wet sublayer. We did regularly add the nettle and comfrey fertiliser teas though which gave the plants a bit of a drink I’m sure. Otherwise the rain was sufficient to keep them all going.

We took turns making dinner using some sort of roster. As mentioned, Tron was the worst cook. The rest of us usually did up a vegetable stew or curry with some sort of pulse like chickpeas, kidney beans, white beans or dried peas in it, as well as a few spuds, carrots, peas, parsnips and whatever veggies we were picking at the time, including the dreaded Jerusalem artichokes. Tron’s focussed on cooking nettles until Nora banned the use of nettles. I was thinking of writing: to be fair on Tron, nettles are nutritious, but I don’t think we should be fair on Tron and he should be rightly condemned for his cooking abominations, especially given the other delicious things we had at hand.

Often we’d add a few tins of tomatoes and tomato paste as well as herbs and spices to add flavour, and serve with rice, or pasta, or some carbs. There was always some bread to go with it if you wanted.

As there were around 20 people all up including kids you had to do up a big pot. As the veggies were fresh and full of biodynamic flavour the meals were pretty good, nothing super fancy but hearty and filling and never too boring apart from Tron’s nettles.

I’m not sure exactly what time of year it was when I started out at Inisglas, but one night soon after arriving I saw Eurovision was on the tele, which is usually in May. According to the Internet, the final was 13 May in 1995 to be precise, and Ireland hosted it that year after winning in 1994. I didn’t have the internet back then so I’ll stick with sometime in May just to be retro.

After initially focussing on helping out Frankie with the vegetables, I branched out a bit and started tagging along with Stuart, who milked the cows in the morning and afternoon. I got to be a regular cow milker and Stuart showed me how to make his Irish championship yoghurt. I had beginner’s luck and my first batch was as good as any Stuart had made. He also showed me how to make quark, a type of soft cheese, which, at least in Stuart’s version, involved putting yoghurt in cheesecloth and hanging it under the big rhododendron tree. It was another good thing to have for lunch with the bread from the AGA oven. I think we also made a type of cheddar cheese, or at least a cottage cheese, as well, which meant separating the milk curds from the whey, just as they did in nursery rhymes. Whey, for those who don’t know, is a watery yellowy buttery milky type of stuff, pretty clear and not white like milk. I’d take most of the whey to Ross who gave it to his pigs to fatten them up to make bacon out of them. Ross explained there were basically 2 types of pigs, porkers, which you used to make pork out of, and bacon’s, which you used for bacon. And thus endeth the pig lesson from Ross.

We would often save some cream from the milk, after we pasteurised it. You could have that on some of the cakes that people like Yvonne and Nora occasionally made. We’d also sometimes use a bit of the whey that Ross’ pigs didn’t eat to add to the vegetable stews. It gave a nice bite to the broth.

One thing we didn’t make was butter. Back then Ireland and Europe had a butter mountain and when you got your dole check they’d also send a voucher to get a pound of butter each fortnight which Eve would collect together so the community always had good Irish butter in abundance. I hope in some way I contributed to dealing with the butter mountain while I was there.

On Fridays I started helping Jay out in the bakery. After breakfast and tea we started making bread the whole day. We’d work up a sough dough or stoned ground biodynamic yeast bread batch, put it in the tins to rise, work on the next batch, and then chuck batches in the oven every hour or thereabouts. In between bakings, while the dough was rising and the risen ones were cooking in the oven, we’d sit and chat and have tea and cigarettes (me less than Jay who was a self confessed chain smoker), as well as freshly baked bread with some jam, cheese, and quark. We’d usually go from 10 am to 6 pm, then load the van around 7-8 PM ready to take the markets in Dublin the next day. We mostly had sourdoughs and yeast wholemeal breads just with some sesame seeds on top, but we also made a few fancy loaves. We made packets of flat pita style breads, some ones with olives and tomatoes, a sunflower seed loaf and a batch of raisin and nut loaf.

On Saturday mornings I’d hitch a lift up to the Dublin markets and help sell the bread, yoghurt, cheeses, bags of flour and whatever veggies we’d brought up with us. We’d usually sell out of everything by around 11 or 12, except maybe an olive loaf or raisin and nut bread. We alway kept a few loaves back at Inisglas for the community.

The drive to Dublin was nice. It only took an hour and a half to 2 hours. I was still getting used to these little countries after the expanse of Australia. We passed through County Wicklow, and got a nice view of the Wicklow Mountains. I remember a stand of Australian gum trees somewhere on the way and a few picturesque forest edged roads on the way.

Initially I didn’t stay much in Dublin, I just hung out at the markets for a few hours and maybe walked around whatever area that was in. I also took the chance to go check out the Dublin GPO to see if me Irish passport had arrived, which it never did. Later on though I’d come up fairly often to Dublin and stay with friends.

The friends from Dublin were ones I first met at Inisglas. One of the guys who seemed to regularly show up at Inisglas invited a few girls from Dublin to Inisglas one weekend. They were Spanish, well Ines was Spanish, Agatha, she was Catalan, as she would often point out. Stuart encouraged me to hang out with them and they invited me back to Dublin where they shared a house with an Irish guy, a Basque Spanish woman and a German woman, all in their twenties. After a weekend of fun on the farm and showing Ines and Agatha around I was keen to see more of them, so next time I took the bread up to the markets instead of going back to Inisglas, I took a loaf of bread, some cheese and yoghurt and headed off to their house. I started doing that every couple of weeks.

The first time I went to the girls’ house was a few weeks after arriving at Inisglas. By that stage my dole cheques were coming through. After contributing my £40 (yes it was still before Euros) I’d have £20 leftover. I used about £4 buying some duty free tobacco from Nora, who got it duty free on the ferry when she went over to London to study her Steiner education and brought enough back for all the smokers, which was pretty much everyone, except Stuart, who pretended not to smoke, but who ended up having a regular smoke. He was diabetic so he did need to try and at least to pretend to avoid it.

So I had about £16 pounds leftover each week which was enough to hang out in Dublin with. Especially if I could bring some bread, cheese and some veggies with me to cook at the girls house.

This allowed me to explore Dublin a bit over summer and party with the girls who had dubbed their house the Chaparrita. The girls were very short and this does seem to mean ‘shorty’, though sometimes I think it may have had a double meeting by the way they spoke and giggled about it.

More on Dublin next time though, I think it deserves some focus. Especially my relationship with Agatha Julia and Ines.