Sabado Huaraz

16.5.09
Even though I woke up with the sorest pelvic bones in the world from biking almost 30km, I agreed to go look for a place to go horseback riding with Andrea because she´d been wanting to go since we got to peru. We were about to leave our hostel to go check out the town when some guy asked us if we were waiting for a tour. When we said no he was like ¨Oh did you want to ride horses?¨ which we thought was hilarious and too convenient to pass up, so we said yes. Because everyone here has a friend who has a friend, this guy called someone who said they would be there in 5 minutos to pick us up. We eventually agreed on an hour later, and surprisingly a guy came to meet us right on time at our hostel. From there we took a colectivo minibus for about 30 minutes which dropped us off on the side of the road in Carhuaz. We walked with this guy down a small path to his house where 3 horses were grazing outside and where he introduced us to his 10 year old son Resbel who was apparently going to be guiding us up the mountain.

The guy told us in three sentences how to steer or change speeds on the horse and then said ciao and left us. For the most part our horses wanted to walk at an incredibly slow pace, unless one of them started running a little, and then all of them would take off galloping until we frantically pulled on the ¨brakes¨. My horse always wanted to bite Andrea´s horses tail and then would get all excited and start galloping, which surprised me so much the first time that I really almost flew off the saddle and straight over his head onto the ground. The boy also wouldnt really talk to us, and was so bored that he was sometimes sleeping on his horse, so we didnt know how to make them go trotting instead of crawling along or sprinting. Nevertheless, the views were absolutely beauuutiful.

We went for a total of 2 hours and eventually we succeeded in getting them to trot, I even got comfortable enough to snap pictures while we were moving along!