Nine days in Patagonia

Scrolling a marketplace of riding holidays, you notice that the trips sort themselves into two groups without anybody saying so.

One group lists what is included: airport transfer, all meals, instruction in English. The other lists what is required.

The requirement is the interesting part

Six days, intermediate to advanced, Northern Patagonian Andes, all meals, from around 16,600 kroner. Or nine days, described as traces in the wilderness, in Patagonia, from around 23,400.

“Intermediate to advanced” is doing more work than it looks. It is not really a statement about your equitation. It is a statement about where you will be when something goes wrong.

On a beach ride in Morocco, a rider who cannot manage a horse gets helped within a minute. Nine days into Patagonian back country, the same rider is a serious problem for the whole group, and the nearest road is a day away.

The skill gate is a logistics gate wearing different clothes.

What you are paying for

Twenty-three thousand kroner for nine days is not cheap, and it is worth being clear about where it goes. It is not going on luxury; most of these listings are camps and simple lodges.

It goes on the horses, of which there are more than there are riders, on the people who know the route, on getting supplies to places without roads, and on the fact that a guide is responsible for a group of foreigners in country where being wrong is expensive.

You are buying access to somewhere that is difficult to reach, which is the same thing you buy on any expedition. The horse is the vehicle.

Why this is the one I want and not the one I will book

I would like to ride somewhere I cannot drive. That is the whole of it.

Everything else on my list has a road in it somewhere. A trail class has a fence around it. A beach has a car park. The appeal of a nine-day wilderness ride is that for most of it there is no version of the day that involves a vehicle, and everything you have is on a horse or on the horse behind it.

But I am a beginner. I rode western at a riding school, mostly trail, on somebody else’s horse, and I was not good at it. Nine days at intermediate-to-advanced in the Andes is not a stretch goal, it is a misrepresentation, and the person it would be unfair to is the guide.

So this is the one I file rather than book. First the four-day trips, then a week somewhere with a road, and then, maybe, the version where the road stops.

I have not been on any of them. I have a marketplace open in a tab and a reasonable idea of the order.