High Jinx at the estancia
10 - 13 October, Ian
Since Sunday evening we've been staying at a
ranch - Estancia Los Potreros - at the top of the Sierras Chicas, the oldest
mountain range in South America, north of Cordoba and in the centre of
Argentina. The estancia couldn't be a greater contrast to our miserable spartan
base back in Santiago. The oldest parts date back over 300 years and while it's
simple it's also very comfortable, and everything that's been done here
(including the right amount of nothing) only enhances its gaucho chic. We're in
a little block called The Dolls House, which is less twee than it sounds. Each
of the bedrooms has a wood burner (chilly no longer!) and the few pieces of
furniture have character and utility. The ranch runs to 6,000 acres and has
over a hundred horses. Only one of these is a young stallion, which will either
get to be an old stallion or a gelding depending upon how well he performs as he
matures. There are cattle, predominantly Aberdeen Angus but also some
Herefords, if you care about such things. The estancia has specialised in
breeding a line of cattle capable of calving unattended - the heads of the young
are relatively small - so that they don't need to be brought inside and looked
after to have their young. There are also many colourful birds all around,
including monk parakeets squawking in the trees just outside. And, most
surprising of all, the owner, Robin, has recently got himself linked up to a
satellite that's in geo-synchronous orbit over Ecuador and now offers
wifi!
Robin's family has owned the estancia for a number of generations and although he's as English as warm beer Robin was brought up in Argentina. He worked as a broker in London for many years and moved back out here around 8 years ago, bringing his wife Teleri (it's a Welsh name, although our Teleri is much more Mary Poppins than Shirley Bassey) and three daughters; they now also have a young son. Four years ago they left Buenos Aires, where Robin had been engaged in City-style work, and set up Estancia Los Potreros as a riding centre as well as a farm. The night we arrived Zoe and Heidi enjoyed playing with the girls who are at interleaving ages but on Monday they decamped with Teleri to a village where they live in the week to attend school (actually they go to two schools - an English one in the morning and a Spanish one in the afternoons).
Even without the family's girls for company, there's plenty to entertain us here. The food is excellent and we're served with breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. The wine is good too - they have a red and a white privately bottled. The red is, unsurprisingly, a malbec, while the white is from a grape that I've not knowingly had before - a torrentes - you should try it if you see it. The same winery also makes a wine called Lagrimilla, which was the first wine ever exported from South America to Europe around 500 years ago. Like port, it was necessarily fortified to survive the sea crossing and it's sweet with a nose similar to muscat. It had an odd taste for a wine, and one that I could recognise but not place until Robin mentioned that it's used for communion wine.
There are plenty of staff hanging around the estancia and Robin and Teleri summon them with bells whenever they want something. I have the wrong upbringing for this kind of behaviour, but that's a socio-anthropological observation rather than a moral judgement: I'll merrily ask a PA to do plenty of tasks that others would feel uncomfortable not doing themselves because in that relationship I see a basic human parity with only a difference of role. I don't feel the same way about house staff but my instinctive recoil from the bell thing makes me question myself, not those who deploy it.
Apart from ourselves there are now four other people staying here. There is a sweet lady from Dorset who, to me, has the air of an Agatha Christie minor character about her. And there is a more modern lady, you might say, from Holland with whom we get on very well. And yesterday we had another English couple fly in to join us. All of them are tracing a triangle from Buenos Aires to here, then to the Iguazu Falls on the border with Brazil and then back to BA. It's an attractive itinerary but these routes that we see everyone beetling along (as at the Black Sheep Inn) reveal that "independent travel" is, by and large, a phenomenon that distils the planet into a relatively small number of choice meridians.
The riding here started off in a very gentle way and we were mainly walking our horses. The landscape is spectacular. The dominant terrain is grassland with straw-like grass that can be used for thatching sprouting up in clumps; as the wind passes across them it creates a lovely chaotic patterning. At this time of year, just before the rains, this is all parched and yellow-brown but the rivers still run and you can see that there is a lushness only just at bay. One of the first places we visited was a viewpoint known as "top of the world" and we had panoramic views that took in Robin's estancia and that of this brother (who is employed as a manager on the estate) as well as the large lake that serves as a reservoir for Cordoba. I rode a large black horse called Negro, the Spanish for black, although his name in my mind soon became iPlod. He walked as though in discomfort on the path, always seeking the softer ground, and he seemed nervous of the stoney descents and tired on the ascent. Being older than the other horses he would let them walk ahead and cut corners wherever possible to shorten his route. However, when the other horses, who were all livelier, trotted and cantered iPlod was able to join in and keep up.
I had been warned that people involved in equestrian centres were simultaneously hyper-critical and super-sensitive and while I think I know why people say this in my limited experience it's not fair. When I turned up and admitted that I'm not a rider Robin did the right thing to give me the most steady horse. I got a good view from iPlod and didn't mind that the other horses were faster. In honesty, horses don't hold a great appeal for me. Nor do any domestic animals, and even people who share their characteristics rarely number amongst my closest friends. To me walking on a horse is about as enjoyable as walking not on a horse, trotting in a rising trot is merely painful and trotting in a sitting trot "western style" as they do here is a form of torture. Cantering is fun but not nearly as much fun as driving fast in a good car, and I can muster as much anthropomorphic sentiment for a Subaru, say, as for any horse. I've been told that they have a breed of horse here with a special gait that naturally progresses from a fast walk straight into a canter without trotting - a 2nd to 4th manoeuvre - and if I did ride this would be the sort of horse that I'd want.
I'm not lucky with horses. As I've written, when we went horse riding in Ecuador last month I was the one who drew the off-piste racer (not that I minded). And when Paula and I went riding in California one time my horse spontaneously decided to bolt away from the main group, although again without harm. The only reason I persist is that when I've ridden at the stables where Paula and the girls have spent most time riding I've been fine.
As well as the western style of riding the horses here have to be handled differently. Robin tells us that they have softer mouths than other horses and so can't be held on a short rein. Rather the reins are held loosely in the left hand and to steer the horse you bring the reins against its neck and avoid tugging into its mouth. Some of our experienced riders, including Paula, found it challenging to work this out in practice.
On Tuesday after our morning ride we had a picnic lunch, which was quite grand, and were promised polo in the afternoon. It was a baking hot day and we had to wait some while until we began. For polo, since there isn't a goalie position, iPlod was sidelined and I was given a polo horse. Whacking the ball with a mallet on horseback was fun but I couldn't get my horse to canter at it and even the experienced riders found it a struggle getting to grips with their Argentine left hand drive horses. In the end we didn't really play but rode home, having a good canter on the way.
Yesterday, when asked, I told Robin that I'd like a change from iPlod, not because I wanted to go faster but because I was feeling left out always being a couple of hundred metres or so behind everyone else. So he generously gave me a nag upgrade to another large animal that he warned me was "quite a horse". Immediately I could sense the difference. The new model twitched to be at the front and when we cantered she raced past those ahead of her. She seemed altogether smoother and more lively and this was the fastest I'd ever ridden. Sometime around the middle of the morning we made our way to the top of hill and again my new horse jostled on when it was time to take a break. Then all of a sudden she started cantering downhill, which I've been told enough times to remember is not a good plan. Yelling the Stop commands didn't work. Tugging back on the reins, English style, had no effect. Trying to turn her just seemed to piss her off. Within moments we were out of sight of the rest of the group and I thought we were going really fast. Then the ground levelled off and she rose to a whole new level of speed. As the horse galloped away and I realised that I was actually holding on it was, in a way that I would never choose, exhilarating but I had no idea how we would stop. Shortly we were going down hill again and she "slowed" to a canter, which still seemed fiercely quick and I saw a fence approaching across our path. At first I hoped that this might be her cue to slow down. Then, in my first moment of real fear as she continued at the same pace, I wondered whether she would either try to vault the fence or, equally badly, pull up right in front of it, catapulting me over. I tried again to turn her and she turned (I allege no causality).
As she did so I came off. I'm convinced that it was the laws of human thought and not of mechanics that removed me from the horse, and one piece of evidence is that as she turned left I came off on the left side, not on the right where momentum would have propelled me. At no point did I consciously decide that I would come off, but then I believe that "conscious decision" is an oxymoron: if we had the layer of brain that generates self conscious thought deactivated we might still be able to choose jam instead of marmalade for idle preference in the morning, or our warm black coat over our thin white one in bad weather. Animals make such decisions and we're animals. Even with speech, the distinctive gift of human cognition, before we "decide" what to say we draw the correct amount of breath with which to say it. So I believe that a pre-verbal part of me recognised that the horse wasn't running out of life and, if I was going to come off, then just after it had slowed to turn was the place to do it. My left foot caught in the stirrup for a few yards and banged my (good) shoulder against the ground a number of times before I twisted free. Once out I lay on the ground and formed a quick and probably correct evaluation of my condition: left leg bruised but not broken; left shoulder sore but not dislocated or broken; right thumb banged, not dislocated, cracked at worst. So okay. I lay back for a few minutes and saw vultures circling overhead, which, since I was not properly damaged, amused me.
After a few minutes passed I pulled myself up, took off my chaps and my right shoe (my left was already off), checked out my leg, put chaps and shoes back on and brushed myself down. Just then Jose, the gaucho who was riding with us and whom Robin had dispatched to check up on me, arrived and gave me a couple of cups of water. Robin had quite rightly held everyone else back to avoid any other horses getting spooked and chasing after me. Some while later still the others caught up. I switched back onto iPlod and we rode back to the estancia for lunch.
I sat out the afternoon ride and, being even more achy, didn't ride today either. Robin and I drove out to meet the others for lunch at another house owned by his family and this afternoon Robin kindly drove me out to photograph some burrowing owls that I'd seen on our first day's riding. En route we saw a number of large birds circling over a nearby area and guessed that there might be an animal down. We drove to high ground above the spot they were vectoring in on and then parked and proceeded on foot. Luckily, the wind was blowing at us and the sun was behind us. One species of bird that we saw was the caracara, which we've seen many times around here. If you saw one of them standing on the ground, as we did, it may well be the largest bird you had ever seen. We also saw a number of condors circling overhead, which look very large in the sky. But we walked carefully to a rocky outcrop overlooking where we thought the dead animal was and, sure enough, there were caracaras there and two condors, who at the instant we looked were both standing on the ground scavenging over the carcass of a calf. I cannot tell you how HUGE these birds are. Actually, I can: they have a height of 4 feet (about Heidi's height!!) and a wingspan of 10 feet, making them, according to Robin, the world's largest bird. Here you can see them (I wasn't quick enough to snap them on the ground) next to one of the caracaras, which in comparison look like pigeons:
This made my trip. We did also get to see the burrowing owls - I'll post some pictures, along with a few other birds, at the end of the month.
Paula's afternoon was less happy: she'd put in a request to round up the cattle with Monique but since Robin spent all afternoon with me no one was around to get the gauchos to get a horse ready for her so she missed out.
Within a day or two of arriving we liked the place so much that we extended our stay an extra night and only practical considerations stopped us staying longer still. I can do without any more horse riding and while it's special to ride in such a great landscape I know that Paula gets to do more high speed riding when she goes out on a hack at home. How could she not: she gets one-to-one attention from someone she knows and there aren't non-riding petrol heads like me there for the staff to worry about. But the location is tranquil and beautiful and the guys here really want you to enjoy yourself.
On the way here Zoe or Heidi, after our bad start in Chile and on our border crossing, asked if anyone was carrying anything unlucky - maybe we were jinxed! Despite my fall and a few frustrations I never feel this way and I don't now. This is the sort of week that makes the year what we want it to be.
(PS - the next morning, today, just as I post this, Paula and Monique did get out before breakfast for a session of fast riding and rounding up the cattle. They returned clearly thrilled by the experience and it was the highlight of Paula's week.)
Robin's family has owned the estancia for a number of generations and although he's as English as warm beer Robin was brought up in Argentina. He worked as a broker in London for many years and moved back out here around 8 years ago, bringing his wife Teleri (it's a Welsh name, although our Teleri is much more Mary Poppins than Shirley Bassey) and three daughters; they now also have a young son. Four years ago they left Buenos Aires, where Robin had been engaged in City-style work, and set up Estancia Los Potreros as a riding centre as well as a farm. The night we arrived Zoe and Heidi enjoyed playing with the girls who are at interleaving ages but on Monday they decamped with Teleri to a village where they live in the week to attend school (actually they go to two schools - an English one in the morning and a Spanish one in the afternoons).
Even without the family's girls for company, there's plenty to entertain us here. The food is excellent and we're served with breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. The wine is good too - they have a red and a white privately bottled. The red is, unsurprisingly, a malbec, while the white is from a grape that I've not knowingly had before - a torrentes - you should try it if you see it. The same winery also makes a wine called Lagrimilla, which was the first wine ever exported from South America to Europe around 500 years ago. Like port, it was necessarily fortified to survive the sea crossing and it's sweet with a nose similar to muscat. It had an odd taste for a wine, and one that I could recognise but not place until Robin mentioned that it's used for communion wine.
There are plenty of staff hanging around the estancia and Robin and Teleri summon them with bells whenever they want something. I have the wrong upbringing for this kind of behaviour, but that's a socio-anthropological observation rather than a moral judgement: I'll merrily ask a PA to do plenty of tasks that others would feel uncomfortable not doing themselves because in that relationship I see a basic human parity with only a difference of role. I don't feel the same way about house staff but my instinctive recoil from the bell thing makes me question myself, not those who deploy it.
Apart from ourselves there are now four other people staying here. There is a sweet lady from Dorset who, to me, has the air of an Agatha Christie minor character about her. And there is a more modern lady, you might say, from Holland with whom we get on very well. And yesterday we had another English couple fly in to join us. All of them are tracing a triangle from Buenos Aires to here, then to the Iguazu Falls on the border with Brazil and then back to BA. It's an attractive itinerary but these routes that we see everyone beetling along (as at the Black Sheep Inn) reveal that "independent travel" is, by and large, a phenomenon that distils the planet into a relatively small number of choice meridians.
The riding here started off in a very gentle way and we were mainly walking our horses. The landscape is spectacular. The dominant terrain is grassland with straw-like grass that can be used for thatching sprouting up in clumps; as the wind passes across them it creates a lovely chaotic patterning. At this time of year, just before the rains, this is all parched and yellow-brown but the rivers still run and you can see that there is a lushness only just at bay. One of the first places we visited was a viewpoint known as "top of the world" and we had panoramic views that took in Robin's estancia and that of this brother (who is employed as a manager on the estate) as well as the large lake that serves as a reservoir for Cordoba. I rode a large black horse called Negro, the Spanish for black, although his name in my mind soon became iPlod. He walked as though in discomfort on the path, always seeking the softer ground, and he seemed nervous of the stoney descents and tired on the ascent. Being older than the other horses he would let them walk ahead and cut corners wherever possible to shorten his route. However, when the other horses, who were all livelier, trotted and cantered iPlod was able to join in and keep up.
I had been warned that people involved in equestrian centres were simultaneously hyper-critical and super-sensitive and while I think I know why people say this in my limited experience it's not fair. When I turned up and admitted that I'm not a rider Robin did the right thing to give me the most steady horse. I got a good view from iPlod and didn't mind that the other horses were faster. In honesty, horses don't hold a great appeal for me. Nor do any domestic animals, and even people who share their characteristics rarely number amongst my closest friends. To me walking on a horse is about as enjoyable as walking not on a horse, trotting in a rising trot is merely painful and trotting in a sitting trot "western style" as they do here is a form of torture. Cantering is fun but not nearly as much fun as driving fast in a good car, and I can muster as much anthropomorphic sentiment for a Subaru, say, as for any horse. I've been told that they have a breed of horse here with a special gait that naturally progresses from a fast walk straight into a canter without trotting - a 2nd to 4th manoeuvre - and if I did ride this would be the sort of horse that I'd want.
I'm not lucky with horses. As I've written, when we went horse riding in Ecuador last month I was the one who drew the off-piste racer (not that I minded). And when Paula and I went riding in California one time my horse spontaneously decided to bolt away from the main group, although again without harm. The only reason I persist is that when I've ridden at the stables where Paula and the girls have spent most time riding I've been fine.
As well as the western style of riding the horses here have to be handled differently. Robin tells us that they have softer mouths than other horses and so can't be held on a short rein. Rather the reins are held loosely in the left hand and to steer the horse you bring the reins against its neck and avoid tugging into its mouth. Some of our experienced riders, including Paula, found it challenging to work this out in practice.
On Tuesday after our morning ride we had a picnic lunch, which was quite grand, and were promised polo in the afternoon. It was a baking hot day and we had to wait some while until we began. For polo, since there isn't a goalie position, iPlod was sidelined and I was given a polo horse. Whacking the ball with a mallet on horseback was fun but I couldn't get my horse to canter at it and even the experienced riders found it a struggle getting to grips with their Argentine left hand drive horses. In the end we didn't really play but rode home, having a good canter on the way.
Yesterday, when asked, I told Robin that I'd like a change from iPlod, not because I wanted to go faster but because I was feeling left out always being a couple of hundred metres or so behind everyone else. So he generously gave me a nag upgrade to another large animal that he warned me was "quite a horse". Immediately I could sense the difference. The new model twitched to be at the front and when we cantered she raced past those ahead of her. She seemed altogether smoother and more lively and this was the fastest I'd ever ridden. Sometime around the middle of the morning we made our way to the top of hill and again my new horse jostled on when it was time to take a break. Then all of a sudden she started cantering downhill, which I've been told enough times to remember is not a good plan. Yelling the Stop commands didn't work. Tugging back on the reins, English style, had no effect. Trying to turn her just seemed to piss her off. Within moments we were out of sight of the rest of the group and I thought we were going really fast. Then the ground levelled off and she rose to a whole new level of speed. As the horse galloped away and I realised that I was actually holding on it was, in a way that I would never choose, exhilarating but I had no idea how we would stop. Shortly we were going down hill again and she "slowed" to a canter, which still seemed fiercely quick and I saw a fence approaching across our path. At first I hoped that this might be her cue to slow down. Then, in my first moment of real fear as she continued at the same pace, I wondered whether she would either try to vault the fence or, equally badly, pull up right in front of it, catapulting me over. I tried again to turn her and she turned (I allege no causality).
As she did so I came off. I'm convinced that it was the laws of human thought and not of mechanics that removed me from the horse, and one piece of evidence is that as she turned left I came off on the left side, not on the right where momentum would have propelled me. At no point did I consciously decide that I would come off, but then I believe that "conscious decision" is an oxymoron: if we had the layer of brain that generates self conscious thought deactivated we might still be able to choose jam instead of marmalade for idle preference in the morning, or our warm black coat over our thin white one in bad weather. Animals make such decisions and we're animals. Even with speech, the distinctive gift of human cognition, before we "decide" what to say we draw the correct amount of breath with which to say it. So I believe that a pre-verbal part of me recognised that the horse wasn't running out of life and, if I was going to come off, then just after it had slowed to turn was the place to do it. My left foot caught in the stirrup for a few yards and banged my (good) shoulder against the ground a number of times before I twisted free. Once out I lay on the ground and formed a quick and probably correct evaluation of my condition: left leg bruised but not broken; left shoulder sore but not dislocated or broken; right thumb banged, not dislocated, cracked at worst. So okay. I lay back for a few minutes and saw vultures circling overhead, which, since I was not properly damaged, amused me.
After a few minutes passed I pulled myself up, took off my chaps and my right shoe (my left was already off), checked out my leg, put chaps and shoes back on and brushed myself down. Just then Jose, the gaucho who was riding with us and whom Robin had dispatched to check up on me, arrived and gave me a couple of cups of water. Robin had quite rightly held everyone else back to avoid any other horses getting spooked and chasing after me. Some while later still the others caught up. I switched back onto iPlod and we rode back to the estancia for lunch.
I sat out the afternoon ride and, being even more achy, didn't ride today either. Robin and I drove out to meet the others for lunch at another house owned by his family and this afternoon Robin kindly drove me out to photograph some burrowing owls that I'd seen on our first day's riding. En route we saw a number of large birds circling over a nearby area and guessed that there might be an animal down. We drove to high ground above the spot they were vectoring in on and then parked and proceeded on foot. Luckily, the wind was blowing at us and the sun was behind us. One species of bird that we saw was the caracara, which we've seen many times around here. If you saw one of them standing on the ground, as we did, it may well be the largest bird you had ever seen. We also saw a number of condors circling overhead, which look very large in the sky. But we walked carefully to a rocky outcrop overlooking where we thought the dead animal was and, sure enough, there were caracaras there and two condors, who at the instant we looked were both standing on the ground scavenging over the carcass of a calf. I cannot tell you how HUGE these birds are. Actually, I can: they have a height of 4 feet (about Heidi's height!!) and a wingspan of 10 feet, making them, according to Robin, the world's largest bird. Here you can see them (I wasn't quick enough to snap them on the ground) next to one of the caracaras, which in comparison look like pigeons:
This made my trip. We did also get to see the burrowing owls - I'll post some pictures, along with a few other birds, at the end of the month.
Paula's afternoon was less happy: she'd put in a request to round up the cattle with Monique but since Robin spent all afternoon with me no one was around to get the gauchos to get a horse ready for her so she missed out.
Within a day or two of arriving we liked the place so much that we extended our stay an extra night and only practical considerations stopped us staying longer still. I can do without any more horse riding and while it's special to ride in such a great landscape I know that Paula gets to do more high speed riding when she goes out on a hack at home. How could she not: she gets one-to-one attention from someone she knows and there aren't non-riding petrol heads like me there for the staff to worry about. But the location is tranquil and beautiful and the guys here really want you to enjoy yourself.
On the way here Zoe or Heidi, after our bad start in Chile and on our border crossing, asked if anyone was carrying anything unlucky - maybe we were jinxed! Despite my fall and a few frustrations I never feel this way and I don't now. This is the sort of week that makes the year what we want it to be.
(PS - the next morning, today, just as I post this, Paula and Monique did get out before breakfast for a session of fast riding and rounding up the cattle. They returned clearly thrilled by the experience and it was the highlight of Paula's week.)
Posted: Thu - October 13, 2005 at 08:47 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM