Chile. Baños Morales

What´s the best thing to do after a three hour bus ride into the Andean foothills?
That´s right: a six hour horse ride! Especially when you´ve never ridden a horse before.

(Harry parousing a menu at a restuarant called ¨Life Experience¨)

Waiter: Good morning, sir. What would you like?

Harry: Well, the horse looks good. I´ve never had that before.

W: How would you like that? An hour of gentle riding or a gruelling six hours?

H: Um, the gruel, I think.

W: It´s ¨gruelling¨.

H: Fair enough.

W: And how would you like your testicles?

H: What do you offer?

W: We have lift-and-separate or repeatedly-squashed.

H: Repeatedly squashed.

W: An excellent choice, sir. See you in six hours.

The landscape was scarecly vegetated steep scree slope (say that five times fast) with a white river tumbling in the valley. All the water was melt water from the galcier we ended up at. It was a small sized glacier, but still very impressive. I´m not about to argue with the size of my first glacier. It probably wasn´t all that impressed with me, surely having seen Australians before. If it had a glacial lake of soothing ointments, that really would have been something.

My thighs. My thighs, I tell you.

Look, I just don´t get horse riding, ok. Genuinely, I would much rather walk. Yes, for six hours. I only vaguely knew what I was doing, and the horses (particularly mine, which had to be abandoned after two hours) were tired and hence hard to control. Fernando, the fifteen year old cowboy, effectively herded Maho and I up the path, which was a bit embarrassing really. And I was so physically uncomfortable that when we finally got within sight of the village I jumped off with a petulant cry of ¨That´s me done!¨

So, fuck horse.
And the horses they rode in on.