We have been looking for an opportunity to do a “Workaway” since the beginning of our trip, and we found a great one in Tinco, Peru. Workaways are places where you agree to do a certain amount of work for someone in exchange for accommodation and sometimes meals. The opportunities vary a lot but typically involve something like working on a farm, teaching English, helping around a house, working at a hostel, etc.
For our workaway in Tinco, we agreed to help out on a small farm and around the house for a family in exchange for free accommodations and all of our meals. It was a perfect way to get to live and interact with locals in a very non-touristy way, while also making our budget stretch much further!
We were planning to spend two weeks at the workaway but had to shorten to only one week because of my Covid quarantine timing. There were four other workawayers volunteering with us while we were there, and they all happened to be from the US! We all became friends and had a great time learning how to work on a farm together for the week.
The Family and House
Our workaway host was Dionny, a tiny, very energetic 70-year-old Peruvian woman. She speaks very fast Spanish and knew we could only understand about 10% of what she said but didn’t seem to mind and was constantly talking about anything and everything. She could run circles around us and more than once made jokes about how we tired out much quicker than her – she wasn’t wrong!
Two of her four children live at the house with her, Ursula and Alan. Ursula doesn’t have interest in the farm so works out of the house on other businesses, and Alan has a job in a town 8 hours away so is only in Tinco on the weekends. Because of this, Dionny really manages the farm by herself with the help of her Workaway volunteers.
The family has a tiny little white dog named Valentina and a cat named Astuto who are in a constant game of chase. There is also a neighborhood dog named Yogi that stops by without fail for food at meal times, but Dionny refuses to accept that he is essentially her dog.
Dionny grew up in Tinco but moved to Lima when she was older and lived there for 30 years. She moved back to Tinco about a year into Covid because she couldn’t handle being cooped up in her Lima apartment (not surprising, you can’t contain that energy!) and decided to start up her own farm.
The Location
Tinco is located about an hour north of Huaraz, which is a popular hiking and trekking destination in central Peru. It has a population of about 3,000 and seems to be a very tight-knit community. It only gets running water for certain times of the day, usually ~3 hours in the early morning and ~4 hours in the afternoon, but it didn’t seem to keep a set schedule. Because of this the family keeps big bins of water for use when the water is shut off and refill them anytime it comes on. Took a few days to get used to but they make it work pretty effortlessly!
They have three rooms set up for volunteers with two people in each, so John and I got our own room which was unexpected and nice! What was not nice, was that we learned our room was nicknamed the spider room. By day 2 we found out why. Every night we found HUGE, and I mean HUGE, spiders waiting for us on the walls and ceilings when we walked in. And for two people that freak out at small spiders, let’s just say there was a lot of noooo’s and whyyyyy’s and some choice expletives every night for about 30 minutes while we got up the courage to kill them. The volunteers in the next room could hear us and called it their pre-bed entertainment every night (and were grateful it wasn’t them). Because of this I can’t say we got the best sleep we’ve ever had there, but I guess you can’t be too picky when you’re staying for free!
The town is set below incredibly stunning mountains, we never got used to how amazing the views were as we walked around. And although the town itself is quite small, there are farm lands all around it and one of Dionny’s farms was about a 30 minute walk away from her house.
Unfortunately, the one negative about walking around this town is the dogs. Now if you’ve read any of our other posts from this trip, you know we love the dogs and pets in all of the cities we’ve visited. We can’t say the same for Tinco. Many of the dogs are incredibly aggressive and will run towards you ready to attack for no reason other than you came into their space. So much so that we had to carry rocks in our pockets to either pretend to throw or actually throw at dogs if they came toward us. Dionny was actually bitten by a dog last year, and is not shy about being on the offensive now. Everything was fine and we never had any actual close calls, but it was enough that we were always on the look out and walking around town was never exactly leisurely. I should say that Yogi (the family’s “stray” dog that they treat as their pet) would follow us on every walk and many times would try to act as peacekeeper between us and the dogs. We’re sure he may have provoked some of them too, but we always felt safer when he was with us and was a nice reminder that not all the street dogs there suck 🙂
The Work
We have to admit, we did not do a whole lot of work in the week we spent with Dionny. We helped her cook in the kitchen for most meals, which was very fun and she seemed to really enjoy showing us how to make typical Peruvian dishes. But beyond that we only worked on the farm two times.
On our first day, we walked to Dionny’s corn fields and she described how the irrigation worked and that we would be irrigating the field the next day. She said it should only take an hour or so, so the next day we woke up early to get the work done before breakfast. The corn is planted on a hill, and the water for irrigating the fields comes from a river that runs just above the fields. To start the water flowing, John lifted a metal gate that allowed water to flow into her fields. Then each of us volunteers had a position in the field and worked together to determine when a certain row had fully received water and start diverting the water into the next row until the entire field had been irrigated. Now as simple as this sounds, we all struggled to understand how to make it work the way she described and were absolutely not as efficient as we could have been. Once we got the hang of it, it was actually pretty fun and cool to see how it all worked. It ended up taking us 2 hours, which was clearly more than it should have, but Dionny said it takes her 3 when she does it by herself so still time savings for her!
The next day she said she didn’t need any work done so she took us on a 5 hour hike around the hills and other villages in the area – and yes, we were definitely holding her back speed-wise. The looks we got as we walked through the towns were pretty funny, they clearly do not get many tourists in the area and here were 6 very white Americans trailing this tiny Peruvian lady. More than once people pointed at us and laughed – not in a mean way at all just in a “wow I’ve never seen anything like this” way. We were quite the spectacle!
On our last day of work, Dionny took us to a different field that had not been planted yet and asked us to dig trenches for the next crop. Again, simple task yet we somehow managed to do a mediocre job. Her example trenches were perfectly even and straight, while by the end ours were squiggly and various sizes. She was of course very sweet about it and said it didn’t matter what they looked like.
We also occasionally grabbed stalks off her crops to feed to her Guinea pigs. She has about 40 Guinea pigs at her house that she farms and sells for meat, though she herself says she could never eat them and calls them her pets. A little bit of cognitive dissonance there, but we were just grateful we didn’t have to watch any butchering!
The only other “work” we did was teach an English lesson to a couple kids in the town. Every week a group of about 5 kids come to the house and whichever Workaway volunteers are there put on a very informal English class. The week we were there only two kids showed up, and they said they wanted to learn the English names of fruit. We had a great time creating games for them, and they were so cute and happy to learn. Though I think I personally learned more Spanish in that class than they learned English.
Our last day we all went to the farmers market in the closest large town, Carhuaz. I wouldn’t call this work by any means, but we all followed Dionny around the market and held the mountains of groceries she bought to feed us all. She does this every weekend with whatever group of volunteers she is hosting, and she told us that some of the vendors ask her “why don’t the gringos ever have money?” She thinks it’s funny and she’s definitely used to being a spectacle around the market by this point!
The Food
Living with Dionny was an absolute treat in terms of food. We were never hungry the entire week – which for John is saying something! We were cooking for 8 or 9 people for every meal, so we all pitched in with cutting vegetables, making rice, or whatever she asked us to do. Then Dionny would typically eat a healthier version of what we were having and sit with us and talk. A few highlights of what we ate:
Ceviche – we’ve had a lot of ceviche on this trip, but Dionny’s is one of the best. It was made of leche de tigre (a fish broth blended with herbs and spices), fish, and a LOT of lime.
Picarones – essentially Peruvian donuts. At one point Dionny had me peel some charred peppers, ginger, and cut some squash which all ended up in the blender. Then maybe 3 hours later the squash mixture had been cooked and appeared before me, and to my surprise it was for the picarones! Dionny had me use my hands to mix it while she poured in flour and told me to mix and beat it for another hour. I had to tap out about half way through and John took over. We then took turns forming the donuts and cooking them over the wood-fire stove. We had made so much dough it lasted us several nights and rounds of cooking!
One night as we were sitting around the table, Dionny asked us what we typically eat. Unsurprisingly, John mentioned tacos. Surprisingly, Dionny had never had a taco! We obviously felt the need to fix that, so one night she let us make tacos for dinner. The tortillas ended up pretty thick and the result was more like a gyro, but Dionny really enjoyed it and was excited to try something new. And we were of course excited to eat tacos.
Laguna 69
There are some very beautiful, popular hikes around the area that draw visitors from all over the world. The problem is almost all of them are at incredibly high elevations – something that John has been warned against already on this trip (our Cusco experience is etched in our brains). Unfortunately this meant he had to sit out on the hike to Laguna 69 that the rest of us volunteers did the weekend we were there.
It turns out Alan (Dionny’s son) is a tour guide for hikes on the weekends, so he offered to let us join his tour bus. It was about a 2 hour drive to the trailhead at an elevation of 13,000 feet. For those of you keeping track, that’s about 2,000 feet higher than Cusco where John had his altitude sickness! I could definitely feel the altitude even at the start, and we all started chewing coca leaves the moment we got there (a very common remedy for altitude sickness is Peru). The hike itself was incredibly beautiful the entire time, every single corner we turned lead to a new amazing view! If it had been at sea-level it would have been a pretty standard difficulty hike, but since it ended at over 15,000 feet we were all very very winded by the end. But we made it, and the views were absolutely worth it!!
By the time we got back to the bus one of the girls in our group was feeling the altitude pretty bad, and my face was feeling very tingly. We were happy to be headed back down to Tinco at the low low elevation of 8,500 feet (crazy how that seems low to us now).
Our week at Dionny’s workaway was definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. We can’t wait until our next workaway experience!
And now… off to Colombia!
Christine