Justin McCandless

This past weekend me, César, and Pria took a bus to Vilcabamba to go horseback riding. It was a four hour ride in the mountains nearby the town, and it ended up being way more fun than I expected.

Our guide was a guy named Holger who runs a little horseback riding place out of Vilcabamba. César knew him before hand, and he was a really cool guy, so if you ever find yourself in Vilcabamba and you've already had your fill of eternal youth water and panela, check it out. Just start in the plaza and wander randomly for 2 minutes and you'll find it, it's a small town.

After putting on some boots and a cowboy hat to make myself look arguably less like a gringo and more like a vaquero, I hopped on my horse Señor and we headed out of town. At first my problem was that Señor would not keep up with the rest of the horses and just wanted to amble around, but a few minutes later he had a complete personality change. Once we got to a more open road a bit further out of town, all three of our horses got an incredibly urge to just go galloping as fast as possible all of a sudden. Señor would not stop despite all my pulling on the reins and yelling "Shh!", which Holger told us is supposed to mean stop. Luckily he rode up in front of us and got our horses to calm down and stop running through town. A few times during this and similar situations on the ride I lost the stirrups and seriously was picking out places on the ground to bail to, but luckily Señor would come to a screeching halt just before I completely lost balance each time.

We passed by a corner store a bit later, and by whatever chance Rommel popped out, an AIESEC guy from Loja who was supposed to meet us somewhere in Vilcabamba after our ride. His grandparents lived in town, and apparently they owned that very corner store.

Another random and kind of cool thing from in town and in the country a bit was that many houses had fresh coffee beans laying out in front of their houses drying. I had to ask César to figure out that's what they were, but I found that pretty cool that people just pick the beans and dry them and make coffee like that.

Towards the end of the inhabited Vilcabamba countryside we crossed a river on horseback, which I was kind of freaked out by at first but ended up being alright. The water was only a foot and a half deep or so at the deep parts anyway. I took the lead from here, and at this point I realized that Señor idled at about 2 miles per hour or so. A few times we had to stop, but Señor would just keep on walking at a super slow pace, again despite all my shhhing and pulling on the reins. I eventually figured out to just turn him to make him go in a circle while I waited.

We went way up a mountain and there were some crazy views. The mountains here are so steep and green, and with the wispy clouds look just like Jurassic Park as I've said before. And also to add to the movie list, The Emperor's New Groove, since that's about the same part of the world as here and doesn't involve dinosaurs. Back to the view, we could also see back to the majority of Vilcabamba at a lot of points. It took me a second to be comfortable trusting Señor to not fall over and send me off a cliff.

After passing a bunch of big cows grazing on the mountainside (but I didn't see any llamas), we arrived at our destination, which was a pretty massive waterfall. I got some good pictures here, and along the whole trip, but unfortunately I still don't have a USB cable for my camera. We hiked back up to where we had tied up the horses and started the ride back.

We went alot faster in this direction to make better time, there was a pretty important soccer game going on at the same time between Ecuador and Peru. A lot of my near horse evacuation events happened in this part of the trip. I started to get the hang of it at the end though, I just needed to keep tension on the stirrups so my feet didn't come out when we were galloping. My back and legs were killing me the next day though, so I think I could still use a lot more practice.

By talking to people on our way back into town we learned that the soccer game was still going on, and also that Rommel had already caught a ride back to Loja. We signed Holger's wall when we got back to his place and said adios to him and our horses. Then we stopped in some place to get lunch just in time to see Ecuador finish off Peru. After a bit more walking around Vilcabamba we called it a day and caught a one dollar bus back to Loja. It was only an hour and a half ride, so no complaining this time.

It's back to work this week, but I already have some stuff set up for next weekend. I had planned on making a trip to Cuenca, but I may be making a different trip for work Wednesday through Saturday. That one would be to some town on the coast that I can't remember, but I heard a mention of Costa Rica island, which through my extensive translation of text about natural reserves at work I know is south of Guayaquil and therefore not all that far away. Maybe 6 hours. Anyways, I'll write something about whatever it is that ends up happening this weekend soon.