GypsySpirit A most unusual week that felt so familiar.
Tristan surprised me with a Soulful Sunday at his friends’ off-the-grid farm in Utuado. It was his gift he said to give me a day off mothering. Jovan and Yairi would stay with him.
I was touched.
He was trying to give me a break since I’d already been traveling with Jovan and Isis for a whole month in Dominican Republic (DR). Plus, you know the last 26 years of mothering.
Last minute, it turned out that the host’s grandmother was ill and they needed to fly to California. They had to cancel Soulful Sunday and they asked Tristan if he would care for the farm and bring all of us with him.
I was super happy. I’d get to stay with all of them and we’d be in this farm with lots more space, I’d be around nature (yes!) and we’d be more comfortable than in Tristan’s casita. The stay was supposed to be only a couple of days. It turned into a week.
When I tell you off the grid and self-sustainable, I mean REALLY off the grid and as self-sustainable as it gets. They don’t have a regular house on the farm. They have a hurricane-proof, earthquake-proof adobe, which is what Tristan helped finish building when he first came to the farm.
In fact, this project is what made it possible for Tristan to come to the island and check it out. He used WorkAway.com– a website listing people and places needing help with their farms or their children, in exchange for lodging and food and the opportunity to travel.
They are AirBnB hosts of a bedroom deck in the farm. It’s a wooden deck with everything a regular bedroom would have on top of it. No walls. Only a mosquito net keeping the thousands of bugs away.
That’s where I would sleep. Isis and Jovan would share a large tent several steps from me. The tent was a pretty good walk across the river stream from the main deck and the adobe that is at the beginning of the farm once you enter.
The bedroom deck I was to sleep in was even more steps away from the tent. I had my own toilet and shower behind the deck. Outside. No walls. Your walls are the trees and plants and bugs (lol) all around you.
It was such a good change of pace. I mean we slowed way down in DR at the beach and in the ecolodge in the mountains but this was slowing down even more.
I loved it.
We could cook in and hang out at the main deck which is where all guests do but since the hosts were gone we had access to their kitchen as well.
There were chores to do of course to take care of the farm and the animals. The chickens had to be fed, the dogs had to be fed, the cats has to be fed. The chickens were to be kept away from the vegetable and herb garden. We could collect eggs to eat breakfast. (I stopped eating eggs long ago so I didn’t care for those. No matter how organic they were).
The dead leaves had to be picked off the garden plants. Compost had to be fed to chickens every two days.
Other than that we could just relax.
You could go to one of the two outside toilets to do your business but again, we also had access to the compost toilet in the adobe. You could only do #2 in the compost toilet. They have a system to extract the gas from the compost toilet and reuse in a special one-range stove to cook your food. It’s not as gross as it sounds. By the time the gas makes it to the stove it does not smell or anything.
When using the outside toilets you had to throw a cup or two of sawdust into the hole once you were done. There was toilet paper, yes, kept in a container at each toilet. The used toilet paper was thrown in the hole right before you sprinkled sawdust. The waste is later collected and used to fertilize the garden.
The water? From the river. The owner ran pipes everywhere to create a plumbing system. They had super duper water filters that run about $300 each for drinking water according to Tristan.
See? As self-sustainable as it gets. The coolest thing? We got to eat from the garden. There were cocoa beans, cauliflowers, tomatoes, pumpkins, eggplant, like 3 different types of kale, collard greens, bananas, plantains, malanga root, aloe vera and countless herbs.
It was so comforting to have the four dogs and two cats there because we all miss our two dogs Nala and Midnight. As all you animal lovers know, once you have pet love it’s so hard to live without it.
We went to the river while there. Isis and I read our books. I read one cover to cover in 4 days which is one of my favorite things to do. One of the days Tristan and I went into town and had some food and beer at one of the restaurant/bars there.
It was so peaceful and soothing and healing except for two nights when I couldn’t sleep because of two banana spiders staring at us. One in the bedroom deck I slept in the first two nights. There was a mosquito net but I didn’t trust that it would keep it away. It was on the ceiling right above the bed. I said “hell no!” and moved to Yairi and Jovan’s tent. All was fine the first night but the second night another banana spider appeared.
The one in the tent was on the outside of the built-in net but still. Who can sleep when you have these scary-looking and not-so-small spiders staring at you while you sleep?!
Aaahh! That was the only part I didn’t like.
Oh, and there was a very large pig terrorizing the farm and the dogs would go crazy every time it showed up. Tristan told me it wanted the chicken feed. Poor thing must have been hungry. Some farmer had like 40 to 50 of them and decided to just leave one day and let them all lose throughout the area to the annoyance of all the neighbors.
It was about 3 days before we saw the pig so we were haunted by the thought of running into him while walking around the farm LOL. When we finally saw it it was just as scared as we were. Except the second time I did while Tristan was away the three days he had to work and I stayed in charge of the farm. The dogs went crazy and he walked away but at one point he turned around like he wasn’t scared of the dogs anymore and started at me. I yelled at it as I was told and I called the dogs towards me because it could have hurt them and after staring at me for a few seconds, thankfully it turned around and walked away. I felt really sad because honestly I could sense it was just hungry.
So that was our week in the farm in Utuado, PR. Definitely an experience to remember and cherish especially for us that didn’t grow up in a farm. Although the whole thing felt so familiar to me. After all, I was born here and spent the first 12 years of my life in this island. Even though I didn’t grow up on this side of the island in a farm there were a lot of things about it that reminded me of my childhood. It was a nice time despite the spiders and other bugs :/
In case you’re interested in visiting: Healing Mountain Retreat @ Finca Remedio Eco Farm
