Road testing the rides less travelled

TRAVEL

Kate Pilcher, founder of Globetrotting, one of Australia’s leading horse riding holiday travel agencies, talks to JANE CAMENS about making people’s riding dreams come true.

Kate Pilcher was frantic. It was the first week of March this year, when countries around the world were starting to close their borders because of COVID-19. Kate was suddenly busy rescheduling riders booked on Globetrotting’s 40 rides around the world, while trying to ensure that the horse-riding establishments that offer the holidays could still feed their horses.

“We all need to escape!” says Kate, referring to horse riders who like herself, love to ride and travel. She has been a serial escape artist, travelling for long chunks of time to horse riding facilities around the world then, through Globetrotting, sharing that experience with like-minded others.

“For the time being, during the COVID-19 shut-down, we might need to choose to travel locally,” she says. For Australians ‘stuck’ at home, Globetrotting offers a number of fabulous rides in Tassie, the Barossa, the Kimberly, Central Australia, Margaret River, the Victorian High Country (Silver Brumby territory), the South Coast of New South Wales, and Rainbow Beach in South East Queensland.

Kate, 39, has been running Globetrotting for more than a decade. She and her small team — who essentially comprise her husband Steven, her dad Angus, and her former intern Laura Rae — have built up their portfolio of 40 rides slowly because of Kate’s insistence on riding every ride and working with the chosen riding establishments to design boutique experiences that meet five key criteria.

Each ride has to offer spectacular scenery changes; must be led by charismatic and knowledgeable guides; provide level-headed quality horses that are independent thinking and not dead to the leg; offer appropriate accommodation in line with the price of the holiday, and, importantly, provide clients with a cultural experience of the region beyond the superficial experiences of what Kate calls ‘vanilla travel’.

Kate wants her clients to follow the rides less travelled, and to be able to sing and dance and laugh with locals, not simply visit tourist sites.

MAIN: Globetrotting family from L to R, Birdie, Steven, Finn, Kate, and Poppy.

LEFT: Kate Pilcher, Globetrotting’s founder and guide, riding in Patagonia, Chile.

Kate and Steven’s 30-acre property in Kureelpa, below Mapelton. They live with their three daughters, aged eight, five and two, and seven horses, including four polo ponies and a Shetland. From their property, Kate and her two eldest girls can ride straight into the State forest. The two-year-old is often plonked on one of the ponies. She’s already following in Kate’s hoof prints. Kate herself was put onto an old 17-hand thoroughbred from the age of three at her parent’s former property in Dalby in Western Queensland.

Since Kate began riding with her father as a child on the Western Queensland plains, they have ridden together all over the world.

“I was sent to boarding school, to Fairholme College in Toowomba, and horses were my touchstone when I came home on holiday. I’d bring girlfriends home and double-dink them around the property. But when I went off to university in Brisbane, horses weren’t part of my life,” she says. “Horses come in waves, when you need them.”

She graduated with degrees in Communications and Business and then, at the age of 24, went backpacking around Europe in what she now thinks of as a superficial way of seeing the world. “That sort of travel doesn’t take you under the skin of a country,” she says. “I would prefer to be eating, drinking, laughing and living with people who share my love of horses.”

When Kate returned to Australia she rejoined her parents who had retired to the lovely Sunshine Coast hinterland town of Maleny. She started work as a journalist-photographer and advertising sales person for the local newspaper, but really wanted to establish her own magazine. With her dad, she started Salt, a quarterly magazine for the Sunshine Coast and Noosa areas.

But, around the age of 26, Kate had what she calls a: “Quarter life crisis - Dad asked if I’d like to do a horse riding holiday in Africa and we set off together to ride in the Maasai Mara in Kenya. That was a transformative experience for me, a pivotal moment in my life. I fell in love with it. I’d never been to a Third World country. If I close my eyes, I can still remember every moment of that time, and that was 15 years ago.”

When she got home, something had changed for her, she says. “My boyfriend, Steven, who is now my husband had proposed but all the things I thought I wanted had changed. I said ‘no’ to him. I told him I had to get away again, that I needed to be anonymous.” She laughs. “Poor guy.”

Kate ran away to Argentina where she lived for six months on a 100,000-acre estancia. “It was very isolated, as far

Kate in the Maasai Mara, Kenya. MAIN: Meeting the neighbours in Kenya.

BELOW RIGHT: Steven and Kate Pilcher.

away as I could be from home,” she says. There, she helped the gauchos break in their horses, using a soft technique they call domale rationale, not disimilar to Pat Parelli’s training.

“Argentina is like Australia was 100 years ago,” says Kate. “There are very few fences and you can ride everywhere.” (Argentinian rides now, of course, feature among Globetrotting’s rides.)

After Argentina, she went back to Kenya and worked as a horse-riding guide there. But after four months her dad told her it was best to come home. Her magazine business needed her. “Fortunately, Steve was still waiting for me,” she says.

“People who love horse riding wanted to know about my experiences away. That’s why I wanted to set up Globetrotting. I set it up alongside Salt,” she says.

Her business enabled her to return to Africa, this time to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, to ride and write about it for the magazine. “They do amazing riding holidays there,” she says. “It’s water meadows, and you’re cantering along viewing elephants. It’s the X Factor of encountering wild life. For any advanced rider, you can’t not do that in your life.”

The first Globetrotting trip she organised was 12 months later with 10 clients from Maleny. They were members of the polo club to which Kate and her dad belong. Kate’s very patient boyfriend Steven went with them, and Kate proposed to him.

But the idea of being what she calls “ordinary”, terrified Kate. When their eldest daughter, Fin, was nine months old, Kate went back to Argentina, this time with Steven and Fin. “One of the most beautiful experiences of my life was riding back into the estancia in full moonlight with baby Fin asleep in front of me,” she recalls.

These days, as well as running Globetrotters and riding with her daughters in the neighbouring forest, Kate ‘dabbles’ in eventing and hunter trials, but mainly competes in polo. “I’m addicted to speed. As soon as I had my children I was back in the saddle two or three weeks later,” she says.

Because of her speed addiction, one of her favourite Globetrotting rides these days is the Scottish Borders ride, which Globetrotting designed. It takes riders to one of the oldest horse riding festivals in the world, the Common Ridings. On this ride, clients are mounted on Irish Sport

Horses and ride shoulder-to-shoulder with Scots who are dressed in tweed, bursting with good cheer, happy to share a time-old tradition. This is surely the ride for Outlander fans.

As well as the rides already mentioned, Globetrotting has road tested and offers spectacular rides in Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Tanzania, USA and Wales. That’s a lot of riding holidays to choose from.

As Kate says, the rides give us horse people something to dream about and look forward to. This awful time of virus will pass. In the meantime we can dream of the wonderful times ahead.