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Published: August 15th 2010
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I go to bed a little apprehensive about a full day of horse riding. After all, I haven’t ridden a horse in....well ever, and with my co-ordination who knows what could happen. We get picked up at 8:30am and it is just us and a French dude, Stefan on the tour. Stefan lives in Washington DC so speaks English well and can also speak good Spanish and French. Smartarse. We ask him how his riding experience is and he tells us he hasn’t ridden since he was nine when he fell off and broke his arm. Good, I thought, someone on the same level as me. After a short drive out of town on the main road to the glacier, we came across a farm house with four horses tied up out front. The horses were white and grey and looked reasonably old and slow to my relief. There were also about a dozen dogs there to meet us when we pulled up.
We met Martin, the farm owner and our guide who welcomes us into his house, basically to sign some long forms in Spanish. When we ask him for an English version, he laughs and says, ‘it just
says if you fall off the horse and break your neck, you don’t know me and it’s not my fault’. We signed and Sarah asks about safety, only to be told she could probably wear a helmet, but it would not help as generally people don’t land on their head when they fall off horses. I am wearing flat runners which concerns me a little as I will no doubt slip through the stirrups but Martin just laughs and says everything will be fine when he gets me on the horse. His instructions are simple, pull the reins to stop, pull left or right to turn and kick the horse to make him go. No further instructions required.
We take off on a small dirt trail to the side of the main road in single file. The horses follow each other and don’t need much direction. The order is Martin, Sarah, me then Stefan. Our horses clearly like being in that order and seem to know the track like they do it every day, which makes life interesting when Stefan starts booting his horse to bring it past mine and when it does get past we start a mini
gallop to get the position back and I have absolutely no control of the horse. Half an hour of gentle walking and we then turned off the main road to walk through the very barren paddocks leading to the massive Lago Argentino - as we get closer, I realise there were some pretty steep sand dunes to negotiate but we all did it with ease although the ride was a little bumpy. After close to 2 hours riding, we have ridden around a fair bit of the lake and stopped in a grassy spot for the horses to eat and for us to set up a picnic. Of course the dozen dogs had joined us along the way and loved running and shitting alongside the horses. We were basically in the middle of nowhere and didn’t see a single person or anything on the way to the lake or at the lake. Martin set up a superb picnic lunch of rolls with ham, salami, cheese, tomato and then he brought out the red wine, which Stefan loved the idea of but I wasn’t so sure given I was already un-coordinated enough and slipping in the saddle as it was, but
I had a glass as did Sarah. Martin polishes off the bottle and then produces another. He and Stefan drank that one themselves and Martin becomes increasingly loud and funny as he was drinking, noting how he gets his horses by roaming around Patagonia looking for stray horses. He also loves talking about how fat his wife is and explains that you need a fat wife in Patagonia to keep you warm because in winter it is unbearably cold and in summer they can shade you. He finishes off the second bottle of wine and then he just vanishes. The 3 of us go to the edge of the lake and look around but as an hour passes by we wonder where the hell Martin has gone. Obviously not too far as his horse is still tied up. Then, he reappears and explains that he needed a nap, so he was sleeping under a tree for an hour. He quickly unties the horses and then it occurs to me, it took 2 hours to get here, but we only have1 hour to get back before our bus picks us up!
My fears were soon realised when a giggling Martin kicks his horse into action and took off on the flat hard sand at the edge of the lake. Before I had a chance to settle, all our horses were off chasing - it had turned into a race around the lake. I slipped out of the stirrups and was just hanging onto the reins for dear life, my arse bouncing up and down on this crazy horse as it tried to chase down Martin. Just as I was getting so sore I thought about jumping off, Martin stopped his horse to walking pace and laughed at us grimacing in pain. My horse had sweated up and was blowing hard and now he was only interested in finding food, so we took a couple of minor detours on the way up the sand dunes. We occasionally get into gallops on the way back and some of the s-shaped bends are scary when you just miss overhanging trees at full pace but the horses are amazing the way that they power up the sand dunes. By the time we return to the farm house, my arse is on fire and I couldn’t feel if I still had any testicles, but boy was it a fun ride. The scenery was amazing when you got to look at it and I was in awe of these horses negotiating the terrain as they did.
We then went back inside Martin’s farmhouse to wait a few minutes for our bus ride back to town. Stefan, Martin and I share some good strong mate tea while playing a game with a hook and a string attached to the roof which I of course struggle with given my lack of co-ordination. We make it back to town exhausted and went back to our milenesa pollo a la nepolitana place before completely flaking out for the night. I could hardly walk and knew the next day would not be fun, having to fly to Buenos Aires while walking like I had won the lucky door prize at the Blue Oyster bar.
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