On your high horse

GLOBE-TROTTING MILO BOYD GETS ON THE SADDLE IN ANDEAN ARGENTINA

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“IT'S easy. Pull the reins left, the horse goes left. Pull right, he goes right. He goes downhill, you lean back. Uphill, the opposite.”

With that 30-second lesson, I had learned to ride a horse.

In Argentina, you don’t need a helmet, a 10-week course at a riding centre or any health and safety waivers before you're let loose into the Andes.

All you need is to entrust your life to Negra the Mendozan gaucho and his Snow White-like ability to perfectly control three horses with clicks and whistles.

Just 10 minutes after becoming a master jockey, my feet were plunged into torrents of meltwater as my steed ploughed across a waist-deep mountain river, putting the equestrian crash course to a very early test.

“I can’t believe I’m on a horse,” my horse-loving-but-deprived wife beamed from her saddle, once safely on the other bank, scorching Southern Hemisphere December sun already drying our trousers. As with much else in Argentina, an experience of equal measures invigorating, chaotic and slightly dangerous.

The gauchos of the Argentine and Uruguayan grasslands are swamped in folklore. They rose to fame in the mid-18th century as European traders started buying contraband hides and tallow in frontier regions around Buenos Aires, leading gauchos to hunt large herds of escaped horses and cattle that roamed freely there.

When not “gambling, drinking, playing the guitar, singing doggerel verses about their prowess in hunting, fighting, and lovemaking”, they were bravely leading the successful charge against the Spanish colonialists, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Today they remain revered as national heroes and some continue to lead lives partially separate from their countryfolk.

We were taken out of town to Negra's dusty compound in the foothills of the Andes by Pablo, owner of family-run business Trekking Travel Expeditions, and told his level of English matched our Spanish.