Still can’t walk straight.
It was good to go on a horse ride and see the desert from a different perspective, we’ve spent so many hours driving around the Atacama in tour buses, public buses or our hire car. And we haven’t really done any serious hiking, which is a shame and something I’d have to blame on… hmm… probably on rushing around too much trying to see everything. So anyway, four hours on horseback was a good alternative.
I like horse rides, and I’m really surprised this is the first one we’ve done on our year of travelling, as there’s certainly been other places we could have. I like the sense of being up high, on top of a real animal, and knowing that he can take you through almost any terrain. In the Pantanal of Brazil we were riding through water that would have been thigh deep on me, with big caiman crocodiles moving lazily out of our horses’ way.
But if I’m honest what I like most about riding is breaking into a trot or, even better, a canter and feeling the world fly by on either side. It’s more thrilling than driving a car at speed precisely because you’re a rider, not a driver; you are telling the horse what you want, but essentially it does the cantering and you’re along for the ride. The car by contrast is just an extension of you, via the steering wheel.
We did some cantering today. Maureen’s horse weaved all over the place and I almost fell off and I lost my lens cap. Still, cantering across the Atacama desert on horseback – cool.
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