I arrived in Paso de Los Toros under a light drizzle and heavy winds. A dark skinned man with a chiseled face came to open the gate for me wearing a big brown poncho.
“Did you get wet or what,” he said offering me a strong handshake.
Tito had a big smile and an even bigger heart! The kind of person you can immediately see through and what I saw was that he is an amazing human being.
I untacked the mares and let them go in a huge pasture with a few Hereford bulls. With Tito, one of his friends and Mario, we sat in the ranch’s barn and drank mate. Passing the warm tea around in a circle we began to get to know one another.
“There is a small museum here with some artifacts from this area, would you like to see it,” Tito asked.
“Yes, I would love to,” I responded.
In a few minutes we were all in his truck headed to town. We drove to an elderly gentleman’s home and were welcomed to the town’s museum.
“I have been showing people my private collection of artifacts for over 30 years now,” he said with pride.
We learned about the indigenous people that lived in this region and saw their arrowheads. We held the Gaucho’s boleadora, a weapon made from leather straps with 3 rocks tied at the end used to hunt wild ostrich. The gauchos would grind the rocks into perfect circles using larger stones. We were able to see the entire process and the end result! So cool.
After we left the museum Tito took us for a tour of his town. We visited the large statue of a bull, which symbolizes the town’s name (paso de los toros – path of the bulls) which Tito thinks looks more like an elephant. We drove by the main church, one of the first buildings built in the town. And we finished on the shores of the Rio Negro, a beautiful river that divides the country in half from north to south.
Watching the sun set over the sparkling water was breathtaking. An old iron railway bridge sat proud in between us and the blazing sun making the spectacle even more spectacular.
With my face lit orange and my soul bursting with flames of joy, I thanked the universe. We were halfway through Uruguay. My mares were in great shape, gaining weight as we rode, and I couldn’t feel better.
