A Love Affair with Horses-2: Finding the Valley of Longevity

My experience on the farm in Slovenia was relegated to the back of my mind just a few short months after. The thing with traveling is that so many peak experiences keep coming your way that it’s very easy to forget something good that happened, to be replaced with some other experience. In time I was traveling through Peru. After having traveled through it’s southern half, which is the standard traveler route, Jodee (who had joined me towards the end of Brazil) and I decided to bus it to Colombia from Lima where we were. We planned a couple weeks to get into Colombia. Our first stop was Trujillo and then Chiclayo. I went online to see what those places had to offer as attractions, things to see and do. The first activity that came up in Chiclayo was horse riding! Suddenly memories of the farm in Slovenia came back, and I couldn’t wait to get on a horse again! I contacted the lady that ran the place to settle on details. As emails were exchanged and dates and prices thrown around, my anticipation started to build. It was soon cut short however, for in one of her later emails, the blow came.
The farm used Peruvian Paso horses. They are famous for their slightly different gait which is a lot smoother than that of Arabian horses. In fact in Trujillo they do these horse riding shows where the rider trots around the perimeter holding a glass of champagne, showing not a drop spilling while the horse does it’s thing.

Unfortunately, this breed of horses also tend to be to the smaller side. And that reduced the amount of load they could carry. The lady said that the rider needed to weigh less than 85 Kilos. That put me out of their range. I would need to wait till later. Crestfallen I wrote her one last email asking her if she knew of places which had bigger horses. Thankfully she replied with a list of places, most of which were further down south or inland, which we wouldn’t go to as we were making our way up north. But one place stood out as being farther up north: Vilcabamba in the country of Ecuador.

One thing I realized in my travels was the value of moving slow. After spending the first 6 months in a frenzied blur, I had then slowed down, vowing to devote at least a month to a country. In doing so, I had needed to pare down the list of countries I was going to visit. Ecuador had not made the cut. I was planning on just traveling through. But now we had a reason. I set about figuring out how to get there from Chiclayo. After a few hours of searching through the nethers of the net, we had our answer. It was an interesting route. Bus 1 from Chiclayo to Jaen. Bus 2 from Jaen to San Ignacio. Taxi 3 from San Ignacio to the Peru-Ecuador Border at La Balsa. Bus 4 from the border to Zumba, and bus 5 from Zumba to Vilcabamba. It had all the makings of a good adventure. Jodee was worried about the safety aspect of doing something like this which wasn’t your standard traveler route, and I spent sometime getting her on board using dubious logic (‘They’re not going to rob you when you’re with a big bald brown guy!’). Her adventurous spirit taking pity on my desperate persuasion skills, soon we were on our way to the bus station to purchase tickets.

The first 2 bus rides were without incident. The taxi ride though was a different story.

A few among you might know that during my stint in the US I had a hobby of tracking cars. I’ve got a fair amount racetrack time in different cars under my belt. That required going to racing schools and endless hours in cars with instructors, both being instructed and sitting in a car with an instructor while he tested the laws of Newtonian physics (and on occasion quantum tunneling). Suffice it to say I’ve seen my fair share of crazy driving. Screeching rubber usually doesn’t faze me by now. Or so I thought.

Our bus had reached San Ignacio at 4PM. The La Balsa border closed at 5. It was about 15 km away. One of the locals told us there was only one way to get to the border in time. Take a taxi. I was expecting a toothless old man in a rickety rust bucket grinning as he chatted all the way down to the border. Well, at least I got the rickety rust bucket part right.

The Ecuadorean border of La Balsa follows a river which snakes through the valley at the base of the hills where the town of San Ignacio resides. The roads that take you down to the border snake through the hills. Turn after treacherous turn force you to take it slow and enjoy the scenery. Or at least it would for most people. The taxi drivers of San Ignacio didn’t get that memo.

These scrappy young boys grew up in antiquated machines that they knew as carros, where rubber and brakes were very much expendable items. Every taxi ride is an opportunity for them to play GT Racing in real life. Except there are no respawns here. As we careened around the corners the tires weren’t the only things screaming for mercy. Those screams fell on deaf ears as the driver basically had the throttle all the way to the floor for the entire ride down – or so it seemed. It wasn’t the speed in itself which had me finding all sorts of religions on the way down. It was the fact that it was a race track, and an obstacle course, all the same time! Every turn brought us to a new level in this video game. Sometimes there’d be rocks strewn across the road. Other times a donkey casually sauntering across. Yet other times there’d be a stream that had decided to take a short cut across this Peruvian Grand Prix. While I’d be thinking that I wasn’t yet ready for the afterlife, our cheerful driver would casually yank the wheel, the tires would start a new cacophony, and the car would miraculously avoid whatever new hazard had popped up before making its merry way down. Halfway through I started to smell the stench of burning brakes. I tried bringing that to the driver’s attention. He just laughed it off (‘Brakes?What brakes?!’). After about a half hour of probably the highest my pulse has ever raced, we, by the grace of god, allah, vishnu, jesus, yahweh, adonai, insert-your-favorite-universal-overlord-here, and our taxi driver’s skills, miraculously, and I mean miraculously(!), reached the LaBalsa border with 20 minutes to spare.

Twenty minutes, a deserted border crossing, and friendly border patrol. That should have been enough to get a quick stamp on the passport. We walked in to the office got our first set of documents read through, ran across the bridge to the other side to get some more paperwork done, and then finally back for the stamp of approval. Things went smooth up until the last very minute, when, hello bureaucracy my old friend, they needed a photocopy of some document that I had. Originals don’t cut it, and they didn’t have a photocopy machine. Still smiling, still friendly, he told me I needed to get it elsewhere. The nearest photocopy machine however, was in the neighboring town, about 10 minutes away by – you guessed it – the pod racers they call taxis! Would the kindly patrol officer wait till I got back before closing the border? Sure.

Luckily our racing driver was happily chatting with the waitresses in the one restaurant next to the border. With equal mix of relief and trepidation, I engaged his services again to take us to get photocopies and come back. More crazy driving, copy 2 documents, my heart’s pumping overtime. Back at the border, as I’m running to the office, I suddenly notice, my Green Card is missing!

For those of you who emigrated to the US, you probably realize the importance of a green card. If you’r from Asia it takes about 5 years to acquire. It’s your only way of getting back into the states, and if you lose it I wouldn’t know where to go about getting another one other than flying back to India. Now my heart just sank. I decided to retrace my steps. The last place I had seen it was in the border patrol office on the Peruvian side. I went there asked the officers. No one had seen it. Then I started walking exactly in the steps I had taken before. While crossing the bridge, a glint of silver and green! My Green Card had fallen out of my passport while I was running across the bridge to the Ecuadorean Border Patrol office! And thankfully no one had crossed the bridge hence and it was lying pristine just in the middle of the pavement, between being run over by a truck and falling into the flowing river beneath. Saying my prayers to insert-your-favorite-universal-overlord-here, I ran back to the border, got the final stamp and proceeded to wait for a truck that would take us on the bumpy bumpy road to Zumba.

Zumba as well was uneventful. Just a quick nights rest and another Colectivo ride into the fabled town of Vilcabamba.

And onto our most dangerous horse riding adventure.