I should have been a cowgirl.... not really.

This weekend I discovered that no matter how much I long to be a cowgirl, it’s just not happening. The “great” outdoors is fantastic but I’m learning rather quickly that I am a city girl at heart.
This weekend, I spent three days on top of a horse in the mountains. The first two days were just great but by day three I was longing for my bed and stable ground.
A horseback trail ride in Spanish is called a cabalgata. The company through which I take riding lessons offers weekend one-day cabalgatas frequently, and as we had a holiday on Thursday (Labor Day), they decided to offer a three-day excursion. We piled into trucks (one which carried a horse in its trailer), and headed to the mountains. We had to drive for about two hours, the last of which was on a dirt road, before we ended up in a little town called Cumbrecita. This was Wednesday night. We spent the night in an amazing hostel (there was HEATING and I only shared the bathroom with one other person! That’s better than my house!). In all, we were 17—three American students, 1 guide and his son that lived in the mountains, and 12 Argentine adults who pretty much knew what they were doing on top of a horse and had been doing these cabalgatas for years. In the morning we had breakfast (homemade bread, homemade marmalade and mate, every day), then picked our horses and we off. I realized that I had made a bad choice almost immediately. When we had to cross a little bridge less than five minutes after leaving, my horse went wild and ran directly to the river. Inevitably, I was freaking out and pulling on the reigns, which only pissed the horse off more and made him start tossing his head and probably start cussing as much as I was. Anyway, everyone was yelling at me to “Dejele tomar!” (Let him drink!), so I gave in and sat there contemplating whether I would lose my money if I turned around and walked home on my own two feet.
So eventually we were off! Little did I know, the land that we were exploring was covered with rocks and narrow passages. I learned quickly. The views were amazing, as we continued climbing, climbing up rock after rock. Luckily, steep, winding trails meant that we didn’t have to trot or gallop. One comedian in the group wore out the phrase “VAMOS TROPAS” (Let’s go troops!”) very very quickly. He continued relentlessly to belly it out for the entire three days and eventually we were all yelling “SHUT UP!” whenever he started carrying on. Anyway, approaching the tops of mountains we would occasionally hit a patch of plain grass, on which we would completely abandon the trails and take off trotting. I’m pretty sure we paved our own way without a clue for where we were heading for the majority of that first day.
Lunchtime came and we stopped at the first sign of civilization that we had encountered all weekend. A little house sat in the middle of the plains and as we tied our horses to trees, we were met with quite the pleasant surprise. Snow began to lightly fall. Then it picked up and we were basically in the middle of a mini-blizzard. For a Southern girl, I thought the world had ended and we had entered some twilight zone. We were all ecstatic, and those who had a signal were on their cell phones telling the whole world. We took refuge in the little dining room and were served an amazing asado and proceeded to drink more wine than we should have been considering we’d have to mount horses in a bit. Someone pulled out a flask of whiskey and I became confused as to whether I was in an old Western or a study abroad program. The snow tapered off right as we finished our dulce and cheese desert. We loaded up the troops again and fortunately found that the precip had not stuck much, so we were off again. We rode through the afternoon until we approached the next stop, the guide’s home. His mom was incredible and met us with hot coffee and warm homemade bread. Some of us walked to the nearby SCHOOL, which houses 70+ kids for three weeks a month between September and May. The kids weren’t there when we went but the director and some teachers were, and they gave us a little tour. The place runs on solar power. In the middle of the mountains, in the middle of nowhere Latin America, there is this progressive green movement. The school hosts local kids ages 5-18 and prepares them for technical or agricultural careers. Everything is amazingly organized and some of the adults were commenting that it was much better run than many schools in Córdoba. We said our thanks and headed back over the treacherous rocks as the sun was going down to go to the house/refuge. On the way down was a herd of sheep and a caged pig. Dinner?
It turns out that dinner was actually goat, I think, and chicken. We had another asado but the whole time in the mountains I had no idea what kind of meat I was eating. I bought a goat skin in the morning, so I think that’s maybe what we were cooking. After dinner, we continued the lunch tradition and drank some wine and Fernet, trying to reduce the weight of our saddle bags in the morning. This led to a big dance. We turned up the music and moved the dinner table to make room to dance Corteto and some other dance that is unique to Argentina but that I can never remember the name of. Corteto is by far the most fun dance I have ever experienced. It consists of a series of twirls and silly hand movements, and the music just makes you move your body. I love it. Check out the Mona if you get a chance. They are the most-famous cuarteto band from Córdoba, and they have created lyrics for each one of the neighborhoods in the city. After that, they went on to create rhythms for each region and province of Argentina. I think they might have gotten big enough to do the same for various Latin American countries. Okay, enough of the history lesson. The brother of our guide was a dance instructor and taught me this other dance that I can’t remember the name of. Cumbra I think. It was a little different but fun none-the-less. The entire night left us stripping off our layers and made us nice and warm to sleep in the non-heated home. Luckily, the family was awesome, and each bed had a ton of covers so I slept very well.
The next day was more of the same. After about three hours of riding, we had geiso of noodles for lunch (delicious!) in a tiny home in the mountains then continued riding for about five hours that afternoon until we reached the next refuge. The owner was a drunk, and we discovered that we would be sleeping 14 in one room. The beds were like bunks BUT four across for three levels. They told me I was too big to sleep on the top layer because whenever someone got on it, it noticeably sunk in. So I slept on the side nearest the window. And when I say “slept,” I mean I worked on getting frostbite. I wore two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, a tee shirt, sweater, sweatshirt, and ski coat to bed with one single blanket and shivered the entire night. For some reason, my toes were absolutely freezing and in the morning I could barely feel them. I might have actually slept for 30 minutes total. This left me very cranky for the day. My crazy horse didn’t help matters. So I spent the last day climbing Mount Champaqui, which is known as a place for hiking and mountain biking, very unhappily. We ran into pack mules, packed with saddle bags and running much faster than our own horses, “huge four by fours” (regular Jeeps), and bikers. We rode for a ridiculous amount of time, and I wanted to kill my horse as we climbed really steep passes of rock, and he wanted to pass everyone without stopping when I pulled back. When we had to pass through a gate and I tried to lean down and open it, he kept walking through, getting us both stuck between the gate and the fence. I hit it hard enough to make the poor thing go off galloping through a pasture. You can imagine for yourselves what this must have looked like. Eventually, I traded horses with the retard little one and it was much better. We descended into some pine forest, and I thought I was in Seashore State Park in Virginia. After stopping for a bit to eat, we rode for about two more hours to the base from which we started. I wound up sleeping for twelve hours that night and then twelve again the consecutive.
So that was my weekend. Seven weeks left here. For me, it’s an odd amount of time—it’s so much and so little at the same time. About 50 more nights without heat. But only 6 or 7 more asados?!