An Eye Opener

Part of owning horses in Egypt is having friends come to experience the extreme pleasures of riding in the Sahara or through the villages of the Nile Valley. I love my visitors and get a special thrill out of showing them my Egypt. So when my old friend Laurie wrote to me to say that since she was retiring she felt that it was time to come riding with me, I was delighted. She told me that she'd be bringing a friend and that the friend was blind. Now that would be interesting. When I suggested that we could always use a lead rope, her laughter rang out over the internet. Gail has been blind for about 20 years and riding for at least 15 of them, many of them with Laurie shouting out "Duck! There's a branch!".

I have to admit that I couldn't wait to meet this woman who as far as I could see was some sort of marvel. I ride in the desert all the time and sometimes even being able to see where I'm going, I'm terrified. My horses are lovely and kind and fit and fast. The thought of tearing around the desert without being able to see where I was going was a bit more than I could comprehend. And then there's the interesting fact that I have 17 dogs wandering around the farm as well. What if she fell over one? These were some of the thoughts racing around my brain while I went to the airport to pick Laurie and Gail up.

Within a couple of days I was having to remind myself that Gail couldn't see the things that Laurie and I could. The first time we went out riding I put Gail on Nazeer, my favourite Mr. Responsible. To my vast relief they were utterly fine. Laurie rode next to her and cued her to move right or left as needed, but the job was rather different from riding down the trails of Massachusetts. Our desert is EMPTY! But at the same time there are hazards such as changes in sand consistency, hills, and archaeological excavations.

I think that it would be an understatement to say that I was impressed with Gail's willingness to risk life and limb on a horse. That has always been my forte, but not with my eyes closed. Definitely. At one point, Mr. Responsible decided to show Gail a shortcut during a gallop up a wadi, which even she acknowledged was a bit more than she had bargained for. He made a big loop to the right and as she heard our hoofbeats moving off into the distance she got rather concerned. But Mr. R came to his senses and stopped so that we could gather our lost duckling.

I don't know what the impact of Gail's trip to Egypt was on her, but for me it was, to use a bad pun, eye-opening. She gave me a chance to see some of the boundaries of our ability to come back from adversity and to adapt to less than friendly conditions. After watching her having a great time on horses and camels, negotiating through a crowded, crazy horse fair and appreciating fine stone work in the Coptic museum, I have a sense that there are fewer limits on my life than I'd previously thought. Thank you, Gail.

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Evolution

In the fall of 2001 I was invited on a trail ride in Mexico by a friend. I'd never been on an organised riding vacation and in the wake of all the chaos of my husband's death my children pressed me to accept the chance to take this holiday. It was not a commercial trip, but a group of friends and acquaintances who were traveling to Morelia in central Mexico to ride most of the way between Morelia and Uruapan, through the volcanic mountains and green countryside. It was a lovely trip and opened my eyes to equestrian tourism.

I'd been riding in Egypt for over ten years at that time and had seen the kind of riding that was available to tourists here. Most people would get cornered by one of the horse touts at the pyramids of Giza and if they were lucky would sort of toddle around in a circle....or if they were unlucky they would be chased raggedly over the desert hanging desperately onto a 50 year old saddle on a 3 year old horse. It wasn't a pretty picture at all. I had been riding in the countryside near the pyramids of Abu Sir for some time and thought that it would be interesting for other people to ride there too.

When I returned from Mexico I began thinking about what I would need to be able to take people out on my horses. The first thing was training, quite obviously to me. The thought of someone having an accident on one of my ponies horrified me, so I began testing them out with a variety of situations. They were already fine with diesel pumps, sheep flocks, hanging laundry and cars, but I gradually expanded the range of experience. I also had two four and five year old geldings to bring along into the group, so we worked each of them with one of the older horses to allow them to learn by observation the proper trail etiquette. With at first four horses and then gradually a few more, I developed a string of horses who I felt confident in offering to paying clients. I was blessed with my first clients who were the wife and daughter of the then Belgian ambassador to Egypt. Nathalie and Pauline had a wonderful sense of adventure and over the years became friends much more than riding clients. A good friend of mine who has a local travel agency advised me not to advertise too much as I would end up too busy too fast and not be able to deal with it. Good advice, but I did build my website.

Over the next few years things changed gradually for me. I realised that with the children gone to study and work in the US the huge house in Maadi was simply too big for me. I rented it out and moved to the area near the pyramids of Abu Sir where I was keeping my horses on some rented land. I also began a serious hunt for some land that I could buy so that the horses and I would be in one place. I found 2.5 feddan (roughly 2.5 acres) only a few metres from my rented house and over 18 months built a small house for me and paddocks for my horses, who now numbered roughly twelve. We were working fairly steadily, but fortunately I wasn't having to depend on my income from the riding to support the horses and myself. I was thrilled when our income almost covered our expenses, but that wasn't all that often. Growing pains can really be painful.

Fast forward about six years and things have seriously changed. I now have over twenty horses at the farm, many of them gifts from people who had a special horse that they couldn't bear to sell when they had to leave Egypt. They've moved into the herd gradually and joined the group. I've had a few babies born and have two three-year olds and three two-year olds. Word of mouth has been good to me. Many of my local clients are from the various embassies and international businesses in Cairo, many of them are women who appreciate being able to ride in a place where no one is hitting on them, where they can totally relax and enjoy the experience. I do beginner rides for the Community Services Association to introduce novices to trail riding, work with some local schools' riding clubs and take visitors to Egypt who find me through guide books or my website out riding.

Then last fall I was contacted by Wendy Hofstee of Unicorn Trails who wanted to come to the farm to ride and talk about equestrian tourism. After years of not being able to work in Egypt, they were looking for someone to work with and my work seemed to please them. So last week I had my first group of clients. From one end of the system, a client, to the other, an operator, in a few years. And it is a major change.

As a client my experience was all about laughs, comradeship and fun on the trail. I was riding a sweet little ranch mare for the 8 days of riding and the pace was leisurely to say the least. I don't think we broke into a trot more than a couple of times, but then the tour leader was a gentleman of 92 years of age who rode every day but one. Slow was fine because there was so much to see and enjoy. As an operator, the experience is somewhat more stressful. I'm watching my horses prior to a trip to be sure that they are sound. We check saddles and pads to be sure that the tack is going to be comfortable for the horses and riders...but the horses are more important from my point of view. We adjust the feed to accommodate the increase in work. I try to combine horses and riders to make happy combinations for the week. While we are riding, I'm watching the horses and riders to make sure that everyone is doing all right. Considering that a tour involves over 20 hours of riding and about 150 km of trail in 6 days, that is rather a lot of work. At the end of the week, I'm in bed at about 8 pm for a twelve hour stretch. But would I miss it? Not for anything.


copyright 2009 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