Son Rullan

Back to farming, back to Spain.

An early morning flight out of London landed us on the island of Mallorca, Spain, out in the Balearics. We flew into Palma, killed a couple hours waiting for our bus, finally got it only to find the bus driver didn't know our stop... only to find that he really did and just overcharged us for fun or something (?), then arrived at the gates of Son Rullan where we were greeted by some of the most horrific and vicious dogs alive. They look like some sort of wild hyena thing that kills just to watch things die. But we braved the beasts and passed through the gates to find we still had about a 15 minute uphill walk to Son Rullan itself.

Son Rullan is a monastery dating back to somewhere between the 12th and 15th centuries, depending on who you ask. It's perched atop a hill on the lush north coast of Mallorca and is now broken up into a few separate properties all under the banner of "Son Rullan" (which, by the way, is pronounced "Ru-lan" and not "Ruyan" as it has a hyphen between those double Ls). The property to which we were a-trekking has now been converted into some sort of weird guesthouse/arts center/day care/farm that isn't supposed to make any money and is, in fact, just losing hundreds of thousands of euros a year for the owner... who doesn't even live on the island.

Now, this absent owner was actually more of a problem than one might imagine. This was the first farm that we've done where the owner hasn't lived (and worked) with us and, indeed, the manager, Henar, neither lived nor worked with us either. I'm sure in other places we wouldn't have noticed... but Henar pretty much single-handedly made this the first negative volunteer experience we've had. And as much as it pains me to give her so much attention on the blog, I think she deserves a quick couple paragraphs. Though no photos.

First off, she's a liar. We were told we would be doing different work every day: weeding, planting, fixing stone walls, cleaning, construction, clearing paths... In actuality, I did heavy lifting (construction, but not really even construction as I literally was just a packhorse) almost every single day. The days I wasn't moving stuff back and forth, I was... no, wait - I was still moving stuff back and forth, just different stuff. Like this mountain of sandbags which weighed 20 kilos each. The closest I came to working in the garden was the one day that I sprayed down the garden with a hose for 5 minutes. Kate, on the other hand, got to work in the garden a little bit... when she wasn't cleaning, that is. As the only female volunteer, Kate was somehow co-opted as the default maid. Which was funny as there was a paid maid and plenty of other helpers. But Henar would not be dissuaded by our pleas; we spoke to her a few times about varying the work and she always said something to the effect of, "Yes, yes, of course you can do that. But not today."

Secondly, she has serious power issues. We were told we'd have a private room with a double bed. In actuality, we had a room that was screened off from a very public hallway by a wall of barely-opaque sheets (that allowed the cat, Fisty, to jump up on the bed at any hour, waking us up and giving me allergies) in two single beds... despite the dual facts that a) we were the only couple there and yet all the single men had private rooms with queen beds, and b) there were two perfectly good rooms with actual walls available that were just left empty. We were eventually moved into one of them after one of the other volunteers interceded on our behalf, but once that happened, we discovered that Henar likes to go into everyone's rooms and snoop around. Not sure how much actual snooping she did in our room, but she came in pretty much every day while we were at work, moved things around, opened windows, etc...

Third and finally, she's a bitch. Sorry, but there's no other word for it. The day before we left she offered to give us a ride into town so we didn't have to walk the 40 minutes to the bus stop in the rain with our bags. It was especially convenient as the bus only comes once every few hours so we would have had to wait for a few hours at the airport or the next bus would be too late. So we get ready, go to confirm what time we're leaving with Henar, and find out that she's already left to town but is coming back soon. Everyone else thought it was weird that she just left but they all knew she was taking us too so they said not to worry about it. We even turned down a ride into town as we could go later with her. Then, around 10:40, she calls the house and asks for Jorge, one of the volunteers who had just offered us a ride into town but just left and I couldn't catch him. Then when I come back to tell Henar that he's gone, she says, "Oh, by the way, I probably should have told you guys this earlier but I'm not going to give you a ride today. I'm already in town so I'm just going to stay." Uh, what? Our bus was leaving in 20 minutes. We were all packed but still needed like 5 minutes to get ready and then we were going to have to run to the bus stop and hope the bus was late. Her excuse was that "she thought we saw her leave" and figured that meant we would assume that she could no longer take us and we'd figure out our own transportation. What? Well, now we've missed the only bus that can get us to the airport because you promised us a ride. Her suggestion was to take a bus to another town as she figured they'd have more buses to Palma from there, but she didn't know the timetables or how often they ran. Obviously, we're freaking out a bit by this point but we were lucky enough to get in touch with the Jorges and get a ride to the airport after all.

The Jorges, now that I'm done ranting, were two middle-aged Argentineans also volunteering at Son Rullan, but for very long stays. Getting to know the Jorge's was easily one of the best parts of our month there. Jorge 1, as we called him, left Argentina 30 years ago and moved to France where he's been working as an artist ever since. He was actually the only paid "volunteer" who lived with us and was there to do some renovations/sculptures/redesigns of the place with his biggest project being to completely redo the tafona, or the old olive press room, making it into a big open space for parties, as a studio/workshop, or whatever. Jorge 2, also Argentinian, used to own a construction company so he oversaw our building projects. He'd been at Son Rullan for 2 years and had built himself a little (and I mean little) one room cottage on the property so that he didn't have to move in the summers when the place was rented out, though we were building a ridiculously overbuilt chicken coop complete with human bathroom and olive press room. Jorge also was an avowed carnivore in addition to being completely unintelligible.

In Spanish, of course, as that's all that was spoken on the farm. Henar spoke good English, but we tried not to talk to her unless it was absolutely necessary but the others there really didn't speak much English at all - and all spoke fluent Spanish. Those others, in alphabetical order, were: Anita (Ecuadorian, our cook and maid), Ariel (Argentinean, has dreadlocks, makes herbal draughts, and is trying to get Spanish citizenship), Carlos (Spanish, paid gardener, extremely...spanish), Everisto (Nigerian, jolly head handyman, had his first child while we were there, real name is Emeka but Spaniards call him Everest as he's a giant),Hugo (from near Madrid, loves the island of Formentera, vegetarian), Kati (Pep's wife, sometimes had to go into town to work after our own work, made some Mallorquin specialties), Manu (Italian, Henar's boyfriend who was actually decently cool though he had an annoying habit of taking the good jobs and disappearing when we had to do something difficult), Pep (from Mallorca, middle aged, getting his massage therapy certification), and Tony (British, only there for our last week, very experienced WWOOFer who also couldn't stand Henar and thought the place was run terribly, the only other one who didn't speak Spanish).

So yeah, we got a lot of Spanish practice which was pretty intense. It's just really tiring to only hear another language all day every day but I think we improved quite a bit, especially with construction vocabulary - though my lack of specialized vocab was probably part of why I was usually just told to move something rather than actually do anything interesting. Listening, however, was more difficult as there was such a mix of accents and when native speakers speak to each other, they use a lot more slang and speak a lot quicker than when they talk to us. Still, we could always follow the basic conversation and were able to participate quite a bit and Jorge1 went out of his way to speak clearly and explain things for us. But those talks were one of the best things about Son Rullan. Indeed, all the people we lived with were great and once Henar left for the day (after lunch) we had a great time.

What did we do in our down time? Well, we went on a few hikes, for starters. Son Rullan is situated in one of the most spectacular settings we've ever experienced and there are trails everywhere. One leads to the town of Deía on one side and Valdemosa on the other, but then there are literally thousands of proper trails/goat tracks that take you all over the place. And by place, I mean gorgeous island with craggy cliffs to one side and sparkling sea to the other. Plus there are all sorts of little surprises along the trails, like ancient cisterns for the animals, old Moorish stone walls, ruins of cottages, and wild goats.

In fact, we caught a wild goat. It was scared by Rita, Henar's dog, and then trapped by Ariel and Everisto. Everisto wanted to eat it, but the goat was too small (only a baby) and it was terrified so after a day or two, Ariel let it go again. And that wasn't why he earned the nickname of Houdini - no, that was because in the 4 months that Jorge 1 had been there, he claimed he'd never seen Ariel cook or clean in the house and that he always disappeared at the right times. That mostly held true, but he did make some delicious pizza and several loaves of scrumptious homemade bread while we were there, though we ourselves did not do much cooking. That was because breakfast was just a buffet, lunch was cooked by Anita, and dinner was usually whipped up by Jorge who loved to cook (meat). We did make a couple things, however, and our recipe for carrot cake was a particular favorite that we probably made about 6 times as it usually didn't last for more than an hour or two.

Pep and Kati did a bit of cooking during their week at Son Rullan and, through them, we got a taste of real Mallorquin cuisine. I can't say that we're huge fans, however. The Arroz Brut (or "Dirty Rice") was tasty (though an experience to eat as you had to gnaw on rabbit bones and periodically pause to work a snail out of it's shell) but the Frito Mallorquin... I feel bad saying this, but it was a struggle. I feel especially bad as they were so excited about it and everyone was talking about it for days, both before and after. But we Americans just don't have stomachs accustomed to eating that kind of thing. That kind of thing is, by the way, a hearty stir fry of peas, potatoes, artichoke hearts, red peppers... all good so far... plus lamb lungs, heart, liver, and coagulated blood. Lots of very spongy sweetmeats, especially the lung. And the blood was just disgusting. Kati brought it out while cooking - it looks like a weirdly textured meat loaf - then sliced and diced it into cubes for the frito. We weren't thrilled but assumed it would cook down into part of the sauce... but no, it just warms up but stays in little springy chunks, kind of like tofu. Only made of blood.

But we did choke it down and put on a fairly convincing show of liking it, especially as Jorge 1 filmed an impromptu short film titled "Frito Mallorquin," turning the whole kitchen into a soundstage in the process. And let me assure you that this kitchen deserved to be on film. As I said, the house dates back to the... well, several hundred years and, as such, it includes one feature of old Mallorcan homes that's gone out of fashion but sorely needs to be reintroduced: giant fireplaces. The one in the kitchen was enormous - the size of a bedroom. It could seat about 10 people inside it's walls and turned that part of the kitchen into an eternal campfire.

Which was necessary as the house, being old and drafty and made out of stone, was really cold, especially at night. And that's despite the fact that we had mostly good weather. The days that it wasn't so great were spent inside writing and napping while the good days were spent out walking and in nearby towns, including a day trip to the port town of Soller, though we actually ended up missing the port as we took too long to start heading that direction. But we did see the rest of the town, including a little exhibition on former resident Joan Miro. We also got some tasty tapas and saw one of the more interesting churches we've seen in a while.

Another day trip was in to Palma itself. We got a lift from Pep and Kati as they had business in town and were dropping off Hugo anyway. So Hugo gave us a mini tour then we wandered around for a few hours, checking out the port, the huge castle/cathedral on the hill, and the winding streets of the old town. We unfortunately arrived at a rather awkward time so most everything was closed but we got a good basic overview of the city's touristic center. For the non-touristy tour, we went with the Jorges to run a few errands on the way to the airport. They took us to the industrial part of the city, stopping in a hardware store, a pipes store, a thrift store, a massive used wooden beams shop, and an antiques store as they shopped for new things for the to-be-built bathrooms as well as the tafona project.

In the end, we were very conflicted about leaving. On the one hand, we'd met some really great people and worked a lot on our Spanish.. but on the other hand, the work was really hard on our bodies (I'm pretty sure I broke the tip of my finger in addition to straining some muscles and burning myself pretty badly twice while burning dead olive branches), fairly thankless, and we had to put up with Henar. Still, we made it through a month and looking back, I'm definitely glad we did.