Birds of a Feather

 One of the things that I truly love about having horses who are well-socialized is watching children learning to communicate with them. The horses are especially gentle with them. This girl and this young mare were special friends.

copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Walk Dammit!

Sometimes I help people learn to ride. I wouldn't say I'm a riding instructor, but sometimes I help people learn to ride. When they want to really learn to "ride" as in dressage, jumping or just the proper way to sit a horse, I usually send them to friends of mine who are riding instructors...and most of the people who I help to learn to ride do end up with proper instruction at some point.

So what do I do? I really like to start people in their quest to learn to relate to horses. I particularly like to help women in their early days with horses. Women have a special love affair with horses. Horses are beautiful, strong, soft, gentle, powerful, fast, free creatures...horses are all that we all want to be and often feel we aren't. But horses can teach us so much as well, much more than we realise at first. On weekend mornings I host the local American school riding clubs for the middle and high school, most of whose members are teenaged girls. Some of them have established their relationship with horses and some of them are just trying it out. I teach them about the kind of animals we are, horses and humans, and how it is little short of miraculous that our horses learn to trust us predators so completely. I teach them about the natural hierarchies in a herd of horses, how the older mares who have the nerve to push up to the hay pile and tell everyone else to move over get the respect. I point out to them that the horses are not saying "please" or making quiet requests but they are asserting what they feel are their natural rights. Most teenaged girls are a bit fuzzy about what their natural rights are, so I think that it's good for them to learn to boss someone around.

When I got my first horse, Dorika who is currently my partner of over 20 years, I was in heaven and hell simultaneously. I wanted desperately for her to be my friend and ally...and she bit me. A wiser horseman told me that before she could be my friend, she was going to have to respect me. In order to earn her respect, I had to be able to order her around, tell her what to do, have her obey me. In short, I had to stop saying "Please" and just say "Do it". I tried it and we found a new way to work together.

Most of the girls who come to ride here are really polite young women. I put them on horses who will stand around looking at the flowers until they are told in a believable way that the rider wants them to move. Don't get me wrong...these horses know how to move just fine. Tell them to go for a two mile canter in the desert and you will get one you'll never forget, but if an unsure student is sitting on their backs, they will await their orders. We start out with "Please walk" and work our way up the ladder of intensity and force. After a while, I tell them that I promise not to tell their mothers but they need to be able to at least think "Walk, dammit!" in order to get their point across. Giggling nervously, they mutter "Walk, dammit!" and lo and behold, the ponies amble off around the arena and young women grin.

As I point out, if you can boss around a horse, the sky's the limit.

copyright 20010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Sharing the Japanese Hill

Sometimes Christmas holidays are my busiest time, but this year everyone decided to come for Easter. Easter holidays in Egypt are especially fun because we have three of them usually within 10 days of each other, first the western Easter Sunday, then the Coptic Easter Sunday and the day after that, Sham el Nessim, the ancient pharoanic spring holiday that is celebrated also with coloured eggs and such. This Easter also brought me some old friends who wanted to share part of their experience of Egypt on horseback with some new travelers.

The day had started out most inauspiciously with a bang-up sandstorm and winds out of the southwest, the southern western desert. I'd gotten a phone call from a family from Cyprus who were visting for Easter. They'd been riding at the pyramids of Giza and had not been happy with the experience, so when someone recommended me, they thought they'd try again. Horseowners themselves, they weren't put off by the weather even when I warned them that it would be an experience somewhat like being sandblasted. We went out into the desert for about half an hour where we found a rather forsaken group of tourists on camels and horses who had obviously started out when the weather was good in the morning and were wearily making their way back in the dust. Once my Cypriot clients were safely headed back to the city, I worried over the weather for the afternoon ride, which included two young Belgian girls who were new to Egypt.

The ride was organised by my friend Nathalie and her daughter Pauline, whose friends were the novice riders. It was the girls' first trip to Egypt and they'd spent the week with friends of Pauline's learning first hand about the life of teenagers in Cairo. Annabel and Laura arrived at the farm with Nathalie and Pauline, tired from a busy social schedule but game for more experience. Fortunately by then the winds had dropped and we were not going to be blasted by blowing sand.

We put the girls on two of the trusty geldings, Aybek and Bunduq, gave two of the grooms lead lines to ensure safety, and set off for the desert about 4:30 pm. The shock of the transition from the green fields of the valley to the bare desert set the girls aback, much to the delight of Pauline who admitted that this was really the only way for anyone to really understand the contrast. Explanations simply don't do justice.

We rode out towards the new Czech excavations behind the Abu Sir pyramids and I showed them one of the old shaft tombs, happily surrounded by an old stone wall so that we could admire the hole without worries of falling in. Then we went on to the Japanese Hill, which has to have the best view of pyramids in the entire world. From the top of this little outcropping one can see, on a clear day which unfortunately this wasn't really, all the pyramids from Giza to the lake at Dahshur. This is one of the best ways of realising just how many pyramids Egypt has.

From the top of the hill, the descent to the desert below is a steep climb down a sandy slope, prompting tips to our novice riders to recall the hill scene from The Man From Snowy River...but they not being horse nuts hadn't seen the movie, so the tips were pretty worthless. At the bottom of the hill, Pauline, Nathalie and I sent the girls on a quiet direct route to our exit from the desert, while we roared off in another direction to have a gallop around the area before meeting them again in a couple of minutes. We cantered past a number of village football games in the sand at the edge of the desert and rejoined the group to amble back to the farm along canals and past water buffalo and weary farmers.

At one point in the ride, Pauline took my camera to immortalise some of the moments of the afternoon, taking in the process a series of fairly hysterical mugshots. Only Pauline would be riding across the desert while staring into the lens of a camera. Back at the farm, the girls clambered off the horses on stiff legs, but gave their mounts big hugs despite the promises of even more stiffness the next day. Both of them said that the experience was definitely worth any stiffness as now they could understand the stories that Pauline had been telling them all year about her riding weekends while living here in Cairo. Nothing like sharing experiences.
copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani