RIDE ’EM COWGIRLS
Crossing the border into Lesotho, Claire Keeton and photographer Marianne Schwankhart have their best time ever on horseback
WHEN you pack a book, toothbrush and change of socks in a saddlebag for an overnight trip to Lesotho on horseback, you feel like you’re leaving civilisation behind and heading into the Wild West.
The worn donkey trail we followed from the Bushman’s Nek border post near Underberg in South Africa — how often do you get to cross a border post on horseback? — into the Sehlabathebe National Park heads west into largely deserted terrain.
The climb from the valley into the mountains is steep and rocky but the Basotho ponies from Khotso Horse Trails are sure footed.
With Marianne and me on their backs, they ascended roughly 1 000m and, as soon as the path levelled out, they would gallop.
This was the most exciting journey by horseback we have experienced.
Moreover, the landscape in this remote part of the Maluti mountains — pristine tarns, caves, arches and dozens of boulders on a plateau under the “Devil’s Knuckles” — is unique.
Khotso Horse Trails is based on a horse-and-sheep farm in the Underberg, near Sani Pass in the southern Drakensberg, and that’s where we set out from one wintry morning.
Our guide Gareth Maré summoned our horses from a field. When they heard his voice, they came to him. He grew up on a farm where racehorses were trained, and rode as a young boy.
As an adult, he walked out of a profitable job, parking his car and
“On the Eurostar they would fine me at once. But since these slower, long-distance trains are so much cheaper, Trenitalia doesn’t want them to be comfortable for anyone. They want people with money to use the expensive trains. So they don’t bother policing first class.”
As she speaks, the carriage is filling again with the same folk who fled a few minutes before. They take their seats, where these haven’t already been taken by those who had tickets but were standing. Everybody is relaxed. At Brescia, people get on who perhaps have first-class tickets but can’t sit down.
“They’re conflicted,” the girl says. “They have to run a few cheap trains to keep up the myth of social pricing. But they make it a nightmare to travel this way to get us on the fast trains.” I ask: “So why offer first class at all?“
“They have the carriages. Someone is always stupid enough to pay, even when they don’t get a service.” “Grazie! ”“Prego ,” she laughs.
In Milano Centrale, a new system zigzags you back and forth two floors to ground level, past a new in-station shopping centre, adding five minutes to your journey in the hope you’ll buy something and thus recover some of the money they’re losing by keeping tickets cheap.
The following week, in the refreshments carriage on a superfast Frecciarossa , I find a barman mixing the foam for cappuccinos in a tiny paper cup. “There are no more jugs,” he complains. They won’t give him a jug? “Run out of money.”
Yet this wonderful high-speed network, as fast as any in Europe, cost à150- billion to build, money that will never be recovered through fares or in-station shopping. The fascinating thing is how determined the barman is to get that cappuccino foam just right.
Travelling from Rome to Palermo, a woman observes that somewhere south of Naples they stopped bothering to make announcements or check our tickets. “And when you get to Sicily they’ll disappear altogether,” she says.
After 30 years in Italy, I realise how much I know about the country has been learnt on the trains. Here, you have a chance to soak up all the different accents and dialects; overhear the interminable phone calls back to
mamma; witness the curious way Italians do and don’t apply rules that seem to have been made as intricate as possible precisely to offer opportunities for heated debate. A group of passengers rises up and rebels against an inspector trying to fine a pretty woman for using a fast-train ticket in a cheap
regionale . “This while the whole governing class are stealing!” someone shouts.
Trains, anywhere, are a measure of how a society is balancing the claims of individual and collective, meeting the needs of the needy and satisfying the whims of the rich. From Bolzano in the Germanspeaking Alps to Modica on the southern Sicilian coast, if you understood a fraction of what is going on on the rails, you’d know more about what makes Italy tick than all the diplomats in Rome put together.