FEATURE
Trail Riding in the Land of the Long White Cloud JANE CAMENS recently saddled up for a five-day ride through New Zealand, meandering her way through the beautiful scenery of the South Island.
K
ia Ora koutou! In other words, ‘greetings’, New Zealand style.
We’ve been four days in the saddle, riding through spectacular glacial valleys, when our guide Jess announces: “Tonight, we reach Paradise.” That sounds perfectly possible. Everything so far has been glorious. We’ve seen the afternoon sun light up snow-capped peaks, watched the moon rise in a crystal-clear night sky, ridden through ancient forests, cantered across grassy plains featured in the movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings, swum our horses in glacial creeks (some of us), stood beneath waterfalls, and experienced numerous Middle Earth moments for the soul to hold onto. We do reach Paradise. It’s a lodge on a manicured historic estate. Apart from fresh scones, jam and cream laid out to greet us, we are offered massages for aching limbs, then shown to beautiful private bedrooms where our duffle bags have been placed for us. Hard, perhaps, to imagine how fabulous this is unless you’ve spent two nights camping, as we
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just had, with a bush toilet, and an open air shower where bandit sandflies hung out. But here In Paradise there is a candlelit lamb dinner, with all the trimmings, served in a charming separate building that was once a schoolhouse. This is our last night before the ride back to base, High Country Horses. Looking back at the photos of this five-day riding holiday through the Glenorchy Back Country, I shake my head in wonder that the trip went without a single hitch. We were all well mounted, and we had the opportunity to join a couple of good canters every day. We all got on well and helped each other, and we were blessed with the best multi-skilled guides, Jess Mullins and Bijmin Swart. The horses were selected for us based on information we’d provided almost 12 months earlier. Every one of us had forgotten we’d given these details so each of us was pleasantly surprised when the horse we were introduced to our horses. I was mounted on Solly, a thick set 14.3 paint, a bit like my little
HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE - MARCH 2019
quarter horse back home. He was the only slightly grumpy horse in the group, but Solly and I dealt with that, happily riding in our own bubble. Others were mounted on partPercherons, one on an Anglo-Arab, most on horses that were crossed with a heavy breed. The horses needed to be sturdy to carry riders for up to five
