Riding with the gauchos
Jim White hadn’t been on a horse since he was twelve but was persuaded by his wife to take to four hooves in the Argentine hills
‘W e’ve reached the point,’ said our host Kevin Begg, ‘where many of our guests think: “Oh God, I’ve been kidnapped”.’
You could understand why. Kevin had just steered us in his four-wheel drive vehicle off the tarmac, past a chained gate and onto an unmade track, seemingly heading off into the middle of nowhere. There had been no trace of humanity since we had passed a police road block about five miles previously. Phone signal had disappeared. The only sign of life came from three condors circling nonchalantly above the parched hillside, apparently licking their beaks in anticipation of imminent carrion. If my life were a movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, this would have been the moment when the soundtrack changed to some long-lost surf music as an ironic warning that drama lay ahead.
Except the truth was we were heading to Kevin’s ancestral farm in the hills far above Cordoba, Argentina’s second city. And frankly if you were kidnapped and taken to Los Potreros, then the moment Kevin’s wife, Louisa, met you at the gate with a welcoming glass of ice-cold homemade lemonade, the moment you were shown to a sumptuously comfortable bedroom warmed by a flickering log fire, the moment you read in the notes to visitors open on the antique sideboard that mobile phones are not encouraged at the dinner table, you would be urgently hoping none of your relatives could meet the ransom demands. After a couple of days relishing the trail rides, the barbecues, the wine, the hospitality and the sense of delicious dislocation from modern life, you would wish you could stay forever.
Kevin’s family have farmed in this part of the world for more than a century, since his great-grandfather arrived in Argentina from Scotland. Back then, there was a fortune to be made from breeding cattle and sending their hides back to Europe. The invention of refrigeration only increased the financial opportunity as it opened up an intercontinental market for Argentine
meat. For a while it seemed like an eternal seam of gold had been struck on the rolling hillside. However, this being Argentina, where institutional incompetence, government corruption and fiscal cack-handedness are a way of life, after four decades of declining yields, these days the country that once supplied the world with steak is now a net importer of beef. And to keep Los Potreros functioning as a cattle ranch, Kevin has been obliged to open it up to visitors. For the past fifteen years, Britons, Americans, Germans and Brazilians have flocked here, drawn by the promise that they might – for a few days at least – live like gauchos.
For me, there was but one small drawback to Kevin’s offer to go out rounding up his herds. Unlike the legendary Argentine cowboys, with their innate horsemanship, my entire history of horse riding was restricted to a pony trek in Wales aged twelve. The second we set off that day my mount, instinctively noting the incompetence of its rider, sauntered to a hedgerow where it munched away, unmoved by increasingly desperate attempts to make it shift. I took the hint. For the next 46 years my only experience of horses was watching the one I’d backed finish a distant last at Cheltenham. Not once since had I climbed aboard.
But my wife had booked us into Kevin’s place under some misplaced belief that riding with gauchos across the Argentine pampas was somehow romantic. Which immediately alarmed me. After all, round our way back in the Seventies, growing pampas grass in a suburban front garden was rumoured to be a sign that the householder was a swinger.
None of that in Los Potreros, however. Not least because after returning from five-and-a-half hours riding across the hills you are in such muscular difficulty you are walking like John Wayne.
Yes, five-and-a-half hours a day in the saddle does sound unlikely for a total novice. But at Los Potreros they are not remotely fazed by beginners. Kevin may speak with the clipped accent of the English public school alumnus, but there is no old-world exclusiveness about the riding here. This is a place that exudes a New World evangelism. Kevin likes nothing more than introducing the hapless beginner to the gaucho’s craft. There is no age limit to the sense of discovery either: the week before we were there, a woman in her eighties was out cantering across the grassland.
Mind, it helps that the horses are so accommodating. A mix of Criollos and Peruvian Paso, the Beggs’ herd of more than 100 carefully nurtured steeds are remarkably welcoming to a beginner. Quick, nimble, responsive, these are horses much in demand in British polo circles. And visitors ride the same animals that are used to round up cattle and chase after the ball in a chukka. Though the word ride implies you are somehow in control. The truth is you sit there, sinking into the sheepskin-covered saddle while the horse does all the work.
Your apprenticeship begins with a day of trail riding. Accompanied by a cowboy and an enthusiastic British guide (ours was a delightful woman called Kelly, who at the age of 41 had decided to pack in her job in office administration and unleash her inner gaucho), you head off into the depths of the farm. Covering 6,000 acres of scratchy, scrabbly Argentine scrubland, it makes the average Scottish sporting estate seem cramped. And the trails across it take you to astonishing places, from mountain ridges affording views over Cordoba thirty miles away, to astringently cold waterfalls (where the gaucho wisely remains fully clothed as his foolhardy guests dive straight in).
Occasionally the gaucho will ask you if you fancy ‘ uno medio galope’. And off your horse canters, picking up speed as it goes, allowing you for a moment to imagine you are Clint Eastwood in pursuit of a black-hearted bounty-dodger.
As you go, you pass all sorts of wildlife, from Pampean grey foxes to ring-tailed parakeets, all of it head-turningly exotic. Then, as the sun begins to set, you return exhausted to dinner, a heaving banquet of chargrilled steak, accompanied by the estancia’s own Malbec.
A couple of days of that and Kevin reckons you’re ready to help the gauchos work. So out we went with Daniel and Enrico. It wasn’t hard to tell us apart as we set off. We were in travel insurancefriendly riding helmets, the gauchos in casual Basque berets. We sat erect and rigid in the saddle, they slouched with an easy relaxation.
Yet I soon convinced myself I was blending in. After we had galloped across the flatland behind a dozen or so charging thoroughbreds, encouraging them towards a corral where they could be counted and checked for signs of the ever-present danger of puma attack, for a moment I thought I had somehow found the wherewithal to take on gaucho ways.
I was quickly disabused. Our next task was to round up some of the Aberdeen Angus cattle that lead the life of Riley in the hills. My job was to ride in a wide arc behind them and encourage them through a gate. But they took no notice of me and scurried off in the opposite direction. I gave chase, kicking my horse into action, certain I was approaching maximum possible speed in the pursuit. Then I felt a whoosh of air as Daniel swept past me, moving across the ground like a South American Ryan Moore, chasing after the cows to block their exit route and send them back the way he wanted them to go. When his horse swished past by me for a second time, it farted extravagantly in my direction. As a critical notice of my riding ability, it could not have been more pointed.
‘As the sun sets, you return to dinner, a heaving banquet of chargrilled steak’