Travel

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…

It’s often occurred to me that an interesting premise for a travel article would be to visit a place and explore it without the help of a Lonely Planet Guide or a Fordors. Don’t get me wrong; these are fabulously useful tools and I have a shelf full of them at home, but they have…

We’ve been out on the trail for over two weeks and we are finally very near, if not exactly in, Cholila. As we expected, we’ve developed a rhythm. We ride for two or three days. They are usually long and dusty, and amazingly hard work. People say that riding a horse is harder than you…

After the big crash (See January 31 post.), we miraculously rode on, apparently no worse for the wear. But we decided to take the shorter, though hotter and less picturesque, route into Norquinco. Basically, we rode alongside a wide and dusty road. (What did I say about most of my travelling involving copious amounts of…