We met with Samantha's dad in the morning who introduced us to Chisco. Chisco agreed to come to Santa Rita to have a look at Assuan and tell us what he though of him and also show us various other foals that were available. He would have to make some arrangements and it was decided that we should meet him at 3pm at the Vimpy in Ferreries.
At 3pm he met us again, jumped into our hire car and headed off to Santa Rita. He and Tolo had a chat (not sure what they were saying) but I think that maybe Tolo was worried that he would show us some better foals to buy, I could be wrong. They both went in a looked at Assuan, then we went back to the car to go to the next place. His comments about Assuan were 'he's nice, he has good feet' not quite sure what he meant by that myself.
The first place we arrived at was not too far down the road, no hang on, the entrance wasn't too far down the road, the farm was a 15 minutes drive down a dusty rocky road, massive stones kicking up under the car. The thought 'Maybe I should have paid the 25 Euro at the car hire company to protect the underneath of the car' oh dear!
We arrived at the self-contained little farm, it was beautiful. Fully self-contained, wind and solar generators for electricity, I don't think they had mains electric or waste, possibly had mains water being a farm. They had some cats and dogs and the sweetest little puppy, at one point it jumped one of the cats backs and was play fighting with it, the car was clearly used to it and ignored it. The owner lead us around the back of his farm to the paddock where the foals were roaming, we walked past a cow laying on the floor with four little hooves sticking out the back, clearly in labour.
His foals were lovely, older than Assuan and coming from some winning blood lines, but it has to be said, they just weren't Assuan and were clearly not as handled. Suddenly everyone burst into action, the owner run to a shed and pulled out a big metal t-bar, went across to the cow that was in labour who had now moved off of the floor. He put the t-bar onto it's behind, had a rope around the calves hooves which attached to the device and he started to winch the calf out of the mum. I've seen it on television before, but being just 3 metres away is quite and experience; Chloe was bemused. Chisco mucked in and helped grab the calf as it was born and lowered it to the floor, he was covered in blood; the farms wife gave him some fresh clothes to wear and took his off to be washed.
After this we headed off to some other farms to see some more foals. All very nice, but not handled and you can hardly get near them. We thanked Chisco for his time, asked how much we owed him for his time and he refused to take anything, his answer was 'I'm just helping out some of my friends'.
It has to be said, the sense of community in Menorca is amazing.
We went back to tell Tolo that we wanted to buy Assuan, but he was out on a ride, so we decided to go back to the apartment, get changed to go out for dinner and then go back to see him later. When we returned later in the evening, we sat down and had a long chat with him about everything. There was a distinct proud look on his face when we told him that after seeing all these foals, Assuan was the best. We made various arrangements and said that we would fine tune the details over email. Tolo said that he would like some pictures of him when he grows up, we said we be sending him pictures all the time. This also gave us a lot of confidence in Tolo; we were originally a bit nervous of purchasing a foal from someone that we couldn't communicate with 100% in case something got lost in translation.
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