papas connection

After my last night in Balcarce, spent eating choripan at a small fiesta organised by a local school,
I left on my bike towards San Agustin, a small village where I could stop to camp along my way to Loberia.
It was very hot but I had plenty of food and drinks this time and the trip was a very short one.
I stopped in a small village called Los Pinos where a kid asked me if I was selling anything and when I replyed "why? do you want to buy my bike?" he wanted to know the price...."I can't sell it to you, this is my only mean of transport" I told him.
I arrived in the "camping" around lunchtime and realized it was more like a park, plenty of people parked their cars and sat around the bbq for a nice sunday afternoon and lots of kids were swimming in the small river.
I had a quick swim to refresh myself and ate a couple of sandwiches, a guy on a bicycle sat down next to me and offered me to share his beer and we started talking.
He was working in the potatoes fields near the village and was on his break, I asked him how it was to work in the fields and how much they paid him, he replied that he enjoyed it because it was quiet and easy and the pay was more than double what a waiter or a shop assistant would get in his town of Balcarce.
He told me he was saving money to buy a house in the countryside and said that with about ten years of work in the fields he would have had enough money, he was half the way through already....
I told him abot my trip and said that I was going to camp in the park for the night, he said that instead of being alone in there (there weren't any other tents around....) I could have joined him and his two workmates in the field for a drink, dinner and could have camped there.
I followed him on my bike as we passed many fields and finally arrived at their little shed where his friends were taking a break from changing the irrigation pipes and looked very surprised by seeing me arrive there.
We talked and drunk a beer and then they went back to work as I put up my tent next to their home, it was very hot and the sun was burning: I didn't envy them at all, but I had my bit of work to do too !!!!
We then went back to the park for a swim and talked to two girls who were sitting by the river drinking mate, they were interested and surprised to hear that an italian tourist on a bike was travelling through their country and even more amazed about the fact that I ended up in the very small village of San Agustin.
We went to a bar to have a snack and a beer, and I realized that almost everyone in there was working in the fields for the season, some guys even came from Santiago del Estero, more than 1,000 km far from there.
The living and working conditions weren't exactly the best, but the pay must have been very good if people came from so far away to work here, "potatoes fields owners must be very rich" I thought.
When we reached "home" later in the night they cooked beef steaks with onions and eggs and we talked about lots of things.
I had a great time with these guys and I will never forget riding my bike in the night through the fields with a sky filled with stars and seeing lots of fireflies "dancing" in the night !!!!