the three amigos

Four days on ponies. Average duration of ride to be seven hours. Three nights in village huts with no water or electricity. A bring your own food requirement. One rider suffering from a slipped disk. A second rider very nervous about her very weak shoulders. The last of the trio recovering from flu. None with any horseriding experience. Large Lesothan mountains to scale. No turning back policy insisted upon by the Lodge.

Guiding for the adventure would be the very short-tempered Pelan. His fuse would be blown by any small mistake from a rider. (He regarded horses as being identical to bikes. In other words, they behave rationally at all times. Axiomatically, the rider should be blamed for any horse intransigence.)

Given all of the above, what could possibly go wrong? Well much obviously could have gone ‘Lesotho mountains up’. But not much did. Instead, we were able to enjoy our characterful horses and our majestic surroundings.

Each of the riders quickly bonded with their horses. Eimear on Esanu, Mary on Baafor and Henry on Strike. And each immediately adopted their own horse behaviour management policy. These differing approaches were to be stuck to steadfastly.

Eimear put all her faith in a ‘loving’ technique. All of Esanu’s foibles were embraced. None needed correcting. Esanu’s favourite trick was taking the route less travelled. Eimear explained this away as ‘Esanu knows best’. (I’m convinced that these would her been her first words had Esanu ever unseated her. Thankfully, he never succeeded.)

Mary adopted a ‘reasoning’ strategy. She did not try to hide Baafor’s shortcomings – such as disobedience. Instead she would try to coax him into recognising the error of his ways. ‘Oh Baafor. Please don’t do that. Ok Baafor enough. Fine, this is the last time I’m telling you.’ And so it continued. Her efforts to communicate with Baafor were made significantly more difficult by Pelan’s attempts to shout repeatedly at her with instructions on what she should be doing, ‘Go left. You are meant to be left. Take the left path. We are going left. Not right. Up. Not down. Not through the tree.’

Lastly, Henry adopted the carrot and stick approach. With the carrot substituted by kind words. And how well the (aptly named) Strike responded. Any visual sight of the stick and Strike immediately charged forward. The girls disapproved of my style both on animalitarian grounds and also because the threat of stick for Strike acted as equal encouragement to their horses to move quickly.

While the horses kept us thoroughly amused for our whole journey, we also managed to notice the mountain scenery. For good reason is Lesotho known as ‘Little Switzerland’. The peaks enveloped us as we travelled from hut to hut. In winter they are snowcapped. In summer they are green and blue. All year round they are decorated with many waterfalls.

Each night was spent with a local tribe. With almost no signs that life had changed since 100,000 BC, we felt transported. After cooking (no small challenge) we would spend the rest of daylight hours mingling with the community and watching the animals. We were ‘in bed’ in our hut by 8.00 – in time for the local donkey to sing us to sleep.

By the end of our 4 days we all felt very sad to be leaving the horses and the mountains. As we rode closer to the main lodge the occasional satellite dish told us we were re-entering the modern world.