Toti and I awoke early and fed the horses.
“Man I think I drank too much wine last night,” I said to my Argentinian friend as he laughed and danced and screamed.
What I began to learn very quickly is that Toti only has one gear – 6th. No matter what time we go to bed, or how tired we are, he springs out of bed and begins his day with a bright smile. He puts water to boil, begins cooking breakfast, organizing things… He is a machine!
“Okay brother I’m going to drive ahead and find somewhere nice for us to have lunch. I’ll come check on you soon,” Toti said before we parted ways.
That day we trekked down a huge mountain that had us snaking our way down for hours. The highway became very dangerous with little space for the horses and I to ride on, and many blind turns. Luckily, there was an old road that made its way on the other side of the mountain. It was full of rocks that had fallen from above and many trees. A beautiful road from long ago.
At the bottom of the mountain we found the quaint home of a forest ranger. In this area of Argentina there are national parks everywhere! And every park has one or many park rangers protecting these natural gems. They live in the most beautiful wooden cabins in the middle of the mountains and forests. Extraordinary places!
We turned out the horses in a small corral near the home and made a fire. With fall quickly approaching the nights are starting to cool down very quickly. With two park rangers, we ate some burgers and chatted the night away.
They told us about their work insuring forest fires don’t start up and we told them about our ride. It was a great night. Before we bid them farewell, Chino, one of the park rangers invited us to eat dinner with his family when we arrived in El Bolson.
“You have to meet my wife and her daughters, they love horses,” he told us.
We agreed to the invitation and hit the hay. The thought of having dinner with Chino and his family sounded nice, but we still had 70 hard kilometres ahead of us.
