It was probably a 20 minute taxi ride from CEPE to Parque Los Columnas. The six of us (Tyler, Linda, Tyler’s new housemate Jesse, Hannah, Sonja, and me) all crammed into the taxi and only had to pay 10 pesos each.
The horse place was strange because it was in a part of the park that bordered a very busy street, and you had to pass under a concrete footbridge to enter it, but once you were in there, you were in the country.
All the guys that worked there had awesome cowboy hats and equally awesome mustaches, all the horses looked like they had some donkey in them, and it definitely smelled like a farm (to put it nicely). We hardly had to say anything before they ushered us over to our horses, and only once we had gotten on the horses did they ask us to pay. It was 60 pesos each for an hour. When we first set off I thought they had just given us horses to ride around because no one was leading us, but then I realized there was a little boy about 10 years old following behind us. It was funny because Linda and Hannah had never ridden a horse before so they kept squealing and wiggling around. To contrast, Sonja apparently trains horses at home so she was coaching them through it. The little boy would tell us where to turn when there was a fork in the road and kept all our horses moving. At some point we passed through the camp again and more guides came with us.
There were a bunch of different dusty gray paths through the dry little forest, and at one point we went walking down a little creek.
It was pretty but I wish I’d had a bandana (which reminds me, I need to go brush my teeth). After a while we came to a long, straight stretch of trail and the horses just took off. They must have been trained to run on this certain section of the trail because mine had been a little lazy up to that point and suddenly he was galloping. This was no good for me at first because my stirrups were uneven and my purse kept falling down my arm to where I was clinging to the saddle for dear life. Then one of the guides told me to put my purse on the horn of the saddle and gave me some pointers for when the horse galloped. We kept on running around the different trails for maybe 20 minutes and they let us take a pass without a guide for our last go-around. It was really fun and unexpected.After horseback riding we tried to find a Japanese Garden or anything else to do in the park, but there was really nothing else there. Besides the horses it looked like the main reason people go to that park is to go running and workout. Once we deduced that there was nothing to find we took a taxi to Wings Army (a popular chain which happens to have 2-for-1 beers on Mondays). We sat around and chatted about nothing really. It was a good group of people, half old and half new. I walked back with Tyler and Jesse and got home around 8. Now I don’t know what to do with myself.
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