Hanging out with Riffraff in South Africa

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I love Joya. I did not fall in love with another mare, going by the disreputable name of Riffraff, during my recent trip to South Africa.

It's true that we spent a glorious five days together. Yes, I fed her carrots by hand. Yes, I was overheard admiring her deep brown eyes and the fetching star on her forhead. What can I say? The sun was shining, the whales were jumping, the fynbos was blooming. It was a brief moment of madness, but I'm completely over it.

I'm sure Riffraff has forgotten me by now in any case. Meanwhile, Jane, who makes it a rule to never, ever fall off a horse, is almost back to normal after inexplicably finding herself on her back on the road after her safari partner took fright at the sudden appearance of cow from behind a bush. 

Our five-day ride, organized and guided by African Horse Company founder Howard Krut, was terrific. Jane and I were joined by another Nairobi friend, and a young South African woman none of us had met before, a 29-year-old endurance rider, A. Before we set off, and before we met her, Jane and I had been quite intimidated at the thought of heading out on trail with such a young and undoubtedly fit companion.

In retrospect, I think it was very brave of A. to sign up for five days with three strange (well, not very strange) women...I can't imagine anything worse than spending up to eight hours a day in a saddle in the company of people you don't like, so it was a great relief to discover we all got along.

Our trail started at Farm 215 in the Overberg region of the Western Cape of South Africa. Given the name, we didn't know quite what to expect. It turned out to be a lovely guest house with a Scandinavian flair, good food, and very comfortable rooms. It's on what is being marketed as "the fynbos trail," which is a network of hiking trails through the famed fynbos ecosystem of this part of the South African coast. I can't really explain what fynbos is, except it translates as "fine bush" and is made up of a staggering variety of unusual plant life, most of which was in flower as we rode...proteas, everlastings, and who knows what else.

(to be continued...)

A tick in the ointment

Poor Joya has billary! A nasty tick-borne disease that can really knock a horse back. So it probably wasn't my cheese-cucumber sandwich diet to blame for our poor showing at the Kabete Happening.

My vet says at least two weeks of no riding, others I've talked to say it can take up to six weeks for a good recovery. Apparently billary puts a real strain on a horse's heart so you have to be very cautious. So we've withdrawn from the Sanctuary Farm Event in Naivasha and may have to withdraw from the Horse of The Year Show here in Nairobi in early December.

Fortunately our scyce Peter caught on very quickly that Joya wasn't feeling well. We came back from the show last Sunday afternoon, at which point she seemed well enough, and Peter called me Tuesday morning to say she wasn't eating and wasn't acting like herself. The vet came out right away to draw blood and could tell immediately what the problem was, so she started treatment even before the blood test was done.

By Wednesday, she was eating her hay, though still turning her nose up at her feed, and was perfectly content to inhale the carrots I brought her. Thursday, she didn't want her carrots, so I panicked a bit. Today, Saturday, she ate her grain, gobbled her carrots AND pinned her ears at me in a classic Joya mean-girl moment, and I knew she was going to be OK.

Kids & Ponies

I've had some time recently to watch and photograph one of life's great relationships, the one between children and their ponies. There is a lot about the horse-human relationship that is so instructive for kids, and sometimes so difficult.

This image, which I think of as the Centaur, sort of sums it up. (And has the advantage of not being a recognizable picture of the child involved, which is why I can't post most of the nice pictures I have taken recently). 

I've never been to a horse show without tears, falls, frustration and fear for some young riders. But I've never been to one where I didn't also see children encouraging their ponies, ponies working hard to keep their children safe and in the saddle, and both children and ponies rejoicing in the sheer fun of running, jumping, and hanging around together.

Last weekend at the Kabete Happening I spent half an hour at one of the cross-country jumps at the far end of the course. Cross-country is an interesting thing to watch, because the course is so long that there is no audience at all, just a judge at each jump, and the rider and horse have a feeling of being out there all alone. The horses are going faster, because it's a timed event, and because with the jumps so widely spaced the horses don't need to be so controlled in their speed (because they don't have to turn sharply to the next obstacle).

At this jump, as each child came by and negotiated the obstacle (a big log), every single one had a nice thing to say to their horse..."Good girl!" "Nice job!" "Way to go!" And I though how lovely it was that as these pony-rider teams were tearing through the landscape jumping solid and sometimes scary obstacles,  the kids were so focused on how their ponies were doing.

High-contrast images

My last post was made just before setting off on a five-day horse safari in S. Africa. The safari was great, and I will be going on and on about it later, once I get my pictures sorted and my laundry done.

I got back last Wednesday night, and then on Thursday it was time for Joya to head over to Jamhuri Park for the Kabete Happening, a sort of short-form event plus regular horse show. Maybe because I was tired, maybe because I hadn't ridden Joya in over a week, maybe because our safari organizer could only think of one thing to feed a vegetarian for lunch, and that thing was cheese and cucumber sandwiches...whatever the reason, it was a tough outing for Joya and me.

But when it was all over, what stuck with me most was a painfully sharp sense of contrast.

No mystery as to the source of that feeling...I've posted before about the uneasy contradiction between horse sports on the one hand, and extreme poverty and underdevelopment on the other.

From about jump 4 on the Jamhuri course, that contradiction is a slap in the face, a kick in the ass, and a knock on the head, as one of Africa's best-known slums, Kibera, presents itself as the backdrop to the course...

In the past, while aware that Jamhuri Park and Kibera are near neighbors, I had never really understood how near. That's because I had something of a habit of falling off my horse at jump 2 or 3, so we never got past the stable area. This time, with a somewhat firmer grasp on what I was doing, I actually walked the course (twice), and with a somewhat firmer grip on the saddle, I actually made it all the way around the pre-Novice course (though not without various stops and starts and bobbles and errors).

(The Kabete Happening, it's worth noting, raises quite a lot of money through sponsorship and entry fees to support various child-centered projects in Kibera. It's not like I'm the only person to NOTICE the enormous slum and the enormous need it represents.)

South African adventure

We are starting our horse safari this morning...In about a half-hour, I will meet the horse I'll be riding for the next five days.

A friend and I spend the day yesterday meandering along the coast from Capetown to Hermanus and beyond, whale watching and snacking on enormous strawberries (hard to find in Kenya). Then we drove to Farm 215, the starting point for our safari, a very cool, Scandinavian-style eco-lodge surrounded by windswept hills with a distant view of the ocean.

Now I'm sitting at the guest computer with my helmet on, which must look pretty silly, waiting for our guide.

Not Good at Sharing!

I have just agreed to let someone else ride my horse at an eventing clinic Joya and I are doing this weekend. I'll be riding her too, but young T. will borrow Joya for the show-jumping and cross-country portions of the clinic.

I was not easily convinced. My arm is still sore from all the twisting. I hope I made the right decision -- Joya will probably learn something, and I will have a chance to watch her from the ground, which is always instructive.

But it got me thinking about what would be the equivalent, for a non-rider, to my agreeing to loan someone my horse.

Here's what I came up with: a combination of me loaning out my first-born child, and my brother-in-law letting someone else drive his Porsche Boxster. The first-born child covers the "you want to borrow MY BABY????" feeling, and the Boxster covers the "this is something that flies, and needs expert handling, and must not be scratched or dented" factor. (And probably, now that I think about it, the "you want to borrow MY BABY" part as well, at least as far as my b-in-l is concerned.)

In the Money???

Yesterday morning was the wrap-up of the Nairobi Fair horse show.

Joya and I placed second in the Division II show jumping (80 cm) and in the Novice Combined Training (which is scored on results in a preliminary dressage test from the previous day, and the 80 cm jumping).

That was a great result for us -- though due to a scoring error, not as great as we'd thought. The announcer called us as the winners in combined training, then had to take it back! Bummer.

My ribbon was blue though -- here in Kenya, the winner gets red. I assume this is a British thing. 

Joya was just flying over the jumps. When I saw how easily she was going over at 80 cm, I put us down as a last-minute entry in the 90 cm class. That's a height we haven't jumped since before the long summer break, and one we haven't jumped very often ever. It still looks pretty big to me.

And she did great. We only had one rail down, at a jump right in front of a huge crowd of kids. She hesitated, then I gave her a kick and she did a sort of kangaroo hop over the fence. I almost fell off, but she kindly stopped until I could fight my way back into the saddle, then off we went and finished the course clear.

It's a good thing she stopped. There's a new rule this year that falling off your horse means instant elimination. Last year, you could fall off once, remount, and continue.

The experience made me feel that at least one of my goals -- a clear round at 1 meter -- is within reach, knock wood.  Still, those 10 cm are somehow quite a bit bigger than the ones between 80 and 90. Something for the physicists to figure out.

On the other hand, my dressage goal seems quite far away...though we won the preliminary class, our score was nowhere near what is required for 60 percent.

Our results netted us 700 Kenyan shillings in prize money...that's about $8.50. But when I went to the office to collect, I was told I couldn't get my prize money unless I could produce my passport!

Whenever I win any prize money (which has happened only twice before) I hand my meager winnings to Peter, since without him I would not be able to function at shows at all. He braids Joya's mane and tail, keeps her gleaming, keeps her fed and happy, sits with her in the trailer, holds the reins while I fiddle with my stirrup leathers. Also, I've been teaching him to use my camera, and he took these pictures.

So, I felt morally obligated to give Peter 700 shillings, even though I didn't get it from the show organizers. Which is just another example of way the horse riding life will come up with new and creative ways to eat your money.

Camels, balloon hats, and schoolkids, Oh My

Today was the first day of the horse-show portion of the annual Nairobi Agricultural & Trade Fair.

Talk about a horse of a different color! Usually, shows here feature lots of horses and competitors, a sparse but knowledgeable audience made up predominantly of competitors, competitors' family members and pets, and the odd (as in occasional, rather than strange) boyfriend or girlfriend.

This show features a tiny handful of competitors, a HUGE audience (in horse show terms, anyway), and a thrilling bass beat provided by the entertainment going on in the main stadium a few hundred yards away.

The cozy, cliquish familiarity is entirely swept away by the presence of  hundreds of people with little experience of horse sports and a stolid refusal to be caught up in our own heartfelt enthusiasm for this oddball activity. I have titled the image below "Huh?", which seems to sum up the audience attitude.

And I'm not sure these guys really got the finer points of our warm-up for the Preliminary Dressage test:

I was not surprised to learn that Joya takes a dim view of camels. There were about a dozen camels at the show, giving rides to delighted schoolchildren, and making their own feelings known through their distinctive growl/rumble/roar. Which I think is the part Joya really doesn't like. Unless it's another version of the old horse-not-a-horse problem that makes donkeys so problematic.

We were pretty pleased to come home with a 1st place ribbon and a cute cup in the Preliminary Dressage...and to make our way around the Division I jumping course (70 cm) with no rails down and only a couple of mild freak-outs. Brought down a few notches by a very low (and deserved) score in the Novice B dressage...and heading back tomorrow morning for Division II at 80 cm, and if we go clear and are feeling brave, perhaps Division III at 90 cm as well.

Helicopter coverage, anyone?

My horse safari on South Africa's whale coast starts in just a couple of weeks, so I've been filling out forms full of questions about my riding abilities, my preferred type of horse, my weight (the nerve!), etc. etc.

Among my favorite questions: "Does your medical insurance cover evacuation by helicopter?"

Doesn't that make you stop and think for a minute? Doesn't it give this horse safari a certain James Bond glow? It's the illusion that we'll be living life on the edge...within a reality that includes a cozy bed and a glass or two of nice South African wine at the end of each day.

Cheers.