ADVENTURER TELLS: I FOUND LOVE AT A FORK IN THE ROAD!
It wasn’t exactly love at first sight when Alienor Le Gouvello met Mitch Ballentine during an epic trek through the Bicentennial National Trail.
Alienor, a French-australian adventurer, was eight months into the gruelling 5300km horseback journey through the Great Dividing Range when she crossed paths with a man sitting on a tractor.
With his big bushy beard, bare feet and daggy dacks, Alienor describes the man who would become the love of her life as ‘peculiar-looking’.
‘I was just riding along on a hot sunny day in Queensland and the road came to a fork. Mitch was on his blue tractor and – bam – here we came to each other,’ Alienor tells Andrew Denton on Channel Seven’s Interview.
‘He was quite peculiar looking. He had this big bushy beard and bare feet. We started chatting. He opened the gate for me, which was really nice of him, and then I carried on.
‘He overtook me in his tractor and said to me: “Do you need anything, would you like a beer at the end of the day?” and I said: “Oh a beer would be amazing.” ’alienor adds.
‘How we met was crazy. It was very random,’ Mitch agrees.
‘It was a bitumen road and Mum and Dad’s track into their house. I got the tractor and was heading down to another paddock. If I was two minutes quicker I wouldn’t have seen her.
‘You don’t see a beautiful blonde woman on three horses everyday. I went and said: “G’day,” but... I was a pretty rough-looking character.’
However, the true blue Aussie’s rough charm soon won Alienor over. They arranged to meet at her camp that night and Mitch turned up with a whole case of grog!
Alienor recalls: ‘We had an amazing bonfire, we chatted for hours. We saw 24 shooting stars that night, it was really special.’
The pair exchanged numbers and crossed paths a few more times. Then, after discovering Alienor loved the ocean, Mitch borrowed a helicopter and whisked her away to the beach for the day – which was 100kms away!
‘I was quite fond of her pretty quickly,’ Mitch admits.
Alienor was completely focused on her adventure, but when she fell sick with debilitating Ross River Fever – followed by a staph infection – Mitch was her knight in shining armour.
‘My wrists, knees and ankles were in excruciating pain. Mitch was able to meet me in hospital and be my back-up vehicle for a couple of weeks.
‘I fell completely in love with him then. He was amazing at respecting my journey and being there to help me – not trying to tell me how to do things. He was just extremely supportive.’
An exhausted Alienor arrived in Cooktown, Queensland, with her horses Roxanne, Cooper and River, 13 months after their journey began in Healesville, Victoria, in November 2015.
Along the way she’d battled
‘YOU DON’T SEE A BEAUTIFUL BLONDE WOMAN ON THREE HORSES EVERYDAY’
snakes, the threat of crocs, debilitating sickness and a raid on her camp by drunken men – who thankfully never noticed Alienor hiding in her tent.
But the inspiring social worker is quick to play down her bravery. ‘I was extremely proud of my horses. They are the real heroes of this expedition,’ she says.
The trek wasn’t Alienor’s first foray into adventure. She has lived in India and Brazil, completed another horseback challenge in Mongolia, and she’s also done a motorcycle expedition from Siberia to Paris.
‘My life just seems to always take me to some of the world’s most remote places and I love it that way,’ she previously told womenwantadventure.com.au.
The passionate horsewoman decided to complete the Bicentennial National Trail to raise awareness of Australia’s wild horses – specifically the heritage breed found in Guy Fawkes River National Park, near Ebor, in NSW – which formed her team.
These majestic creatures are the direct descendants of the wartime cavalry horses, which carried the Australian Light Horse Brigade to victory in the great cavalry charge at Beersheba in 1917.
Renowned for being highly intelligent and exceptionally brave, with incredible strength and stamina, they were extremely sought-after during the First World War.
However, in 2000 there was worldwide uproar when 600 horses from the park were slaughtered in an aerial cull as part of a wild-horse management program. The Guy Fawkes Heritage Horse Association was subsequently formed and developed a natural trapping program which meant the horses could be saved and re-homed.
‘The Guy Fawkes Heritage Horse Association supported me from start to finish and my horses proved themselves to be hardy, resilient and endurant.
‘They arrived in Cooktown in amazing condition having not sustained one injury during our 13 months expedition,’ says Alienor.