A Love Affair with Horses – 4: A Fitting Finale in Colombia

Colombia! The land of Salsa, Coffee and other stimulants. We’d spent a couple weeks in this gorgeous country doing touristy things. But my itch for riding horses had come back.

I found a couple small places to be on horseback for a few hours. In Salento, part of Colombia’s coffee triangle where we did the obligatory coffee tour,

we could go on a very tame horse trail to a waterfall and back.

In Parque Tyrona, we rented horses to ride back out of the park. It was well and good. However, these were horses extremely jaded by having tourists with no experience on horses at all riding them, and had been trained to completely ignore any command from their rider, and instead listen only to the main trainer who was walking in front leading the pack. As you can imagine, these rides were very slow and quite boring, as it didn’t matter what you did. All you could do was to sit atop the horse and wait for the ride to finish. In addition, you could tell these horses weren’t treated well. In keeping with the traveler stereotype, the closer you get to mainstream touristy spots, the more trash, pollution you will find, and the worser treated the animals are. At one point, our guide pulls out a stick, and the reaction of the horses to it was visceral. You could feel their bodies tense. That sight, you could tell, was unfortunately an all too familiar one for these poor work horses.

I wanted a closer experience with horses. One where they were treated better, and where you could actually ride them, not just sit atop while they plodded along mechanically.

And so began my hunt.

A search through multiple google sites lead me quickly off the standard tourist websites of things to do in english with verified reviews and planned routes, off into a lot less polished section of local Colombian sites. Sites only in Spanish, sparse information, and with a phone number for those thirsting to know more…
Showing up repeatedly among these sites was a place called Villavicencio. In a region of Colombia known as Los Llanos, east of Bogota (or as per my Bogotano friend Mauricio, North of Bogota)
Mustering all of my knowledge of Spanish, I started to make phone calls, and soon had reservations at one of the fincas. The only criterion I had was whether they had horse riding and whether you were allowed free rein on the horse, as opposed to a fixed tour.
We soon found ourselves on a very bumpy bus bound for Villavicencio. As we were nearing the place, there started popping up huge signs of people in Military uniforms holding very menacing looking machine guns with very friendly looking smiles on their faces. They all had military uniforms emblazoned with the words ‘Ejercito’ on them. Below the pictures were bright letters proclaiming: “Military, making it safe for you!” in Spanish. As we shifted from Bus to taxi for the final stretch leading out of the town of Villavicencio to the Finca halfway between there and Puerto Lopez, the signs were replaced with actual men in military uniforms, menacing machine guns and ‘Ejercito’ on their jackets. The friendly smiles were a bit more faded this time. I queried my taxi guy what was going on with the military presence. He told me that these neighborhoods were run over by the Paramilitar till about ten years ago, and was a very violent place during the infamous drug wars of Colombia. The guerrillas, he said, were pushed back into the mountains way out east. The military was placed here just in case they decided to make a grocery run into town. Though the presence of soldiers and guns was a bit unnerving for me, the driver said that he and his fellow residents all felt much safer with their presence. I couldn’t begin to imagine the fear they must have lived with till just the recent past…

Soon, under the failing light of the twilight sun, we were hopelessly lost trying to follow the website directions of ‘just after the Hacienda’ and ‘if you reached the toll booth you’ve gone too far’! We stopped a few times, knocked on a few doors (mind you these are doors of ranches, the only things that exist here. So knocking on a door always meant driving half a kilometer in, avoiding guard dogs and annoying a slumbering watchman. Finally, we found our Finca.

As we checked in, we realized that we were the only guests on the farm. This was a good thing. We had arrived during a weekday. These fincas usually served as weekend getaways for the well-off Bogota residents. So on weekdays they normally remained empty. Perfect. It was just us, the caretaker, 2 dogs and 3 horses on the farm. This was exactly what I was looking forward to!

Then plains of Los llanos are famous for being Cowboy country. Miguel, and the other folks that live on the farms, are still legitimate cowboys. In the real sense of the word. Not the gun-slinging fast talking’ cowboys from the Sergio Leone movies. These guys take their horses out onto the pasture everyday to roundup the cattle, stamp them, and spend most evenings relaxing by a campfire. But far from being 10-gallon hat-wearing, spur-rocking, chaps-donning, slow-talking, fast-shooting alpha males, these folks looked a lot more like farmhands.
Miguel was quite agreeable and when I told him I wanted to run with the horse, not just walk around the farm. He first took me for a trial-run where he kept an eye on me to see how I was with the horse. By the third time out, he would tell me to take the horse and go off and running while he relaxed back at the farm. It was awesome! Just me, the horse, and the farm dog that loved running with us across the glorious grasslands of Los Llanos!

The first morning we spent at the farm, after a quick and not very appetizing breakfast, we saddled up the horses and took them out for a first slow walk. These horses seemed to be treated well. They responded well to a complete stranger-cautious but curious, and were receptive to orders. We walked across two fields and saw the cows that were grown for milk, and the ones for meat. Around the meat cows Miguel told me to be quiet and to walk the horse real slow so as to not scare them. Upon being queried he told me that if they got scared it would release cortisol (or its equivalent, he told me a spanish word) which hardens up muscles, and they liked them soft and supple to sell them for higher quality meat! These cows lead a charmed life roaming the plains and being mollycoddled till they get slaughtered. Definitely better than industrialized meat processing where the animals are kept in pens and suffer till they die. This definitely did get reflected in the meat. Later on I got a chance to have some ‘Llanero’ steak (steak made from cows raised on the plains of Los Llanos) and the meat was definitely tender and delicious.

That evening, I got a chance to let loose on the horse for a bit. I would take her and go for a run around the field, the dog chasing us, tongue hanging in the air as he plowed through the puddles, happy as only a dog in the fresh wind can be. The horse took to me really well, and responded well to all of my instructions. Well, almost all. The one directive she didn’t like to follow, and only did so grudgingly was the directive to stop. She loved to run, and hated to stop! I could feel her sentiments. She would give me a snort every time I would bring her to a halt. I wish we could go for longer runs. But the stirrups which keep my feet connected to the horse were small metal cups made for small Colombian feet. I could barely get my toes into it. So anytime the horse started to gallop, my toes would slip out! And soon I’d be hanging on with just the strength of my thighs holding on to the horse. This kept repeating every time she started to gallop. Unfortunately that kept the length of my gallops to short spurts.

By the next day, Miguel felt comfortable enough that he would stay back at the farm, and I’d be out on the grasslands on my own. It was glorious! If a bit scary. However, my horse’s ability to feel me had me feeling calmer. And very impressed. Remember how I’d said in the earlier blog that a horse can feel you? Well, this was just the case. By the third time I was riding her, but she could sense my intention even before I expressed it! There were multiple occasions when I would stop to say adjust my shoe in the stirrup or myself on the saddle. When I felt comfortable, I would think ‘ok that feels good we can go. Let me tell the horse to move forward’… And before I could kick the horse, she would start moving forward! This would happen on multiple occasions. Times when I stopped to look around and get a sense of my bearings, would see the gate to the ‘potrero’, and before I would tell the horse, she would know to start moving. Other times when I was ready for a gallop I would think it and the horse would start galloping. It was uncanny! I was awestruck at how intuitive these creatures were….

By day 3, my thighs were extremely sore, and I was walking like a cartoon cowboy. And we were both getting tired of the food which was essentially rice and a piece of dry meat. We decided to move on. We packed our bags and bade farewell to Miguel. The move out seemed easy, till we started the walk out to the waiting taxi. I turned my head towards the farm, and noticed all the horses standing in silence watching us depart, and suddenly my heart sank. Next to them were the dogs, tongues hanging out, also watching. They were all silent, witnessing. I had known these animals only for 2 days. The young dog that kept my company as I went horse riding, and loved to jump on the boat that I took for a ride in the evenings. The horse that would snort at being bridled, but then be happy to run across the fields. I didn’t realize how they had found a place in my heart. My eyes filled up as I looked for the last time into the eyes of my newfound companions. They continued in silence watching us leave till we turned the corner at the end of the road.

I hope I’ll be able to return someday. I wonder if they’d remember…