We celebrated Julio’s 65th birthday with his family and friends. Julio is taking the picture. Believe it or not, but this shot is taken inside his stable. In Hindsight and on to the Future The horses are on the range for winter; our saddles have been stored, and I managed to wash the dust…
Behind Every Good Story in Cholila is a Gun “The going price to hire a killer in Cholila,” our dinner companion tells us, “is 5000 Pesos (about $750).” We are learning that despite starting to feel comfortably at home in Cholila, there are some major cultural differences between what we know in Canada and…
There’s No Place Like Home — Almost Yesterday, I rode Judy down to Cholila from the lakeside farm of Ivan Hueche, the young guide we hired to take us (successfully this year) up to the Tigre Glacier. It was a destination that locked gates and, as we learned last week, a circuitous and challenging route…
You can make out the round corral and paddocks in the grassy area where we campedamong the mice and a raging bull near the Rio Argentino. Rolling With the Punches (Part 11) If you read my last (and first) post of this trip, you’ll know that Canela sustained a nasty wound, caused, for all we…
Don Fuentes allowed the five of us plus our six horses to camp in his back field. Rolling With the Punches “Canela has been badly bitten,” Beto tells me. I’m sitting enjoying my first maté on the first day of our second year on the horses. We are back in Argentina, back in the same…
You can see a long way in the desert. My last post painted a picture that was more bitter than sweet – more agri than dulce. While I found the wind a challenge for the six days it took us to get from Esquel to Beto’s home, and it made me sad that we were…
It seemed impossible when we set out on January 23, that we would make it no further south than Esquel, a town only 163 kilometers away if you travelled by Ruta 40. But with the days becoming shorter as Patagonia slipped into autumn, we decided to turn north and finish our adventure at Beto’s home,…
That’s me on Judy doing my Butch Cassidy impression. Sharing lamb (capon) with a campesino en route to Esquel. He has spent four months on his own in that cabin for the last 32 summers looking after his sheep, cows, horses and dogs. Not uncommon in Argentina, I think this type of life…
Before I started this excursion, I wasn’t exactly sure how we were going to make this trip work. How, I wondered, do you ride into a place where you have never been before with four or five horses and manage to find a place for them and us to stay? Well, let me explain. We…
I once cycled in Tuscany, Italy. Days in advance of our arrival in the fortified city of Volterra, people on the roadside and in the towns along the way would ask us, “Are you climbing the Volterra hill?” By the time we reached the Volterra hill (It was a good climb.), we were pretty freaked…
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