Shhh! Do you hear it? Barely
audible? Wait… Yes, the thurram-thurram-thurram, that terrible sound, is
growing, coming, gaining ground. Onto the horses! The thunder of hooves is
ricocheting off the canyon walls. Lightning speed: they’re coming to catch us;
no time to lose!
Did you ever imagine how it would be, in
the American Wild West, in the movies? I did. Robbing a bank or a stage coach,
flying away on horseback in a hail of bullets, red-check handkerchief over the
mouth, disappearing in a cloud of desert dust? And if the trail ever became too
hot, if the sheriff was too close or the Pinkerton Detective Agency too diligent
in their hunt for the stolen loot, for the thieves and the bounty for capture,
one could always do as the infamous bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid did in 1901, and escape to South America.
What better way to experience Tupiza,
where Butch and Sundance finally met their ends, than to hire a horse and
gallop like a train, fly like the wind, through a desert canyon, past a cactus
or two? Thurram-thurram-thurram: that was the idea.
Helpful hint: of course it would be
better to know beforehand how to ride a horse.
It was just yesterday, several years
later, I was remembering that afternoon on horseback, how it had been. It was a
world away from Bolivia ,
with the steamy, monsoon Mekong idling by,
beyond the cabana. Tourists gathered to chat and sip on drinks, to take the
edge off the Thai afternoon humidity. Across the river were the distant houses
and tiny motor cars of Laos
Come to think of it, Tupiza, my first
full day in Bolivia
Still, I clambered boulders at the edge
of town, followed a goat trail past the Stations of the Cross to a hilltop. The
mountains are thousand-pleated like the inside of lung, ironic given the
altitude’s shortness of breath. To the south, three red rock houses with little
stone goat yards clung to a canyon wall; to the east, a cemetery of white
crosses, artificial flowers and tinsel. To the west, traffic uninterested in
Tupiza’s bridge drove instead along the dry riverbed.
I followed a veinlike gully that
zigzagged into the hills, in parts so narrow you could touch both walls at
once. The rocks were pebble-filled, the olive green willows lit by the shard of
late afternoon sky contrasted with rock red. Shadows climbed canyon walls. The
air was still.
There was a stand-off in that canyon, but
it wasn’t a pistol-toting Pinkerton detective that found me; rather a Doberman that
suddenly appeared from around a bend, barking ferociously and running wildly in
my direction. The canyon walls too steep to climb, I tried to recall all I knew
of dogs and did the only thing worth doing. I stood still.
Fortunately, seconds short of my leg
entering its mouth and needing several rabies shots, the dog baulked. My bluff
worked. Soon its human arrived, yelling, managing to ward it off. Did they have
wild Dobermans in the Wild Wild West?
Like me, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid started their South American adventures in Argentina Bolivia
At San Vicente outside Tupiza in 1908 came
the showdown. Trapped in a house, three soldiers of the Abaroa Regiment of the
Bolivian Army’s cavalry, the police chief and local officials sought to arrest
the fugitives. The bandits opened fire. There was a gunfight until, at 2 a.m.,
from inside the house two shots were heard, minutes apart. Two dead,
bullet-ridden bodies were later found. It appeared that one had shot the other,
who was probably already mortally wounded, before turning the gun on himself.
Tupiza: there should at least be a bit of
galloping.
Like
Butch and Sundance we were two: there was another Australian tourist, Richard. The
hostel offered a lazy triathlon: a first leg by bicycle, all downhill, the
second on horseback and the third by jeep, along a dirt road far up into the
mountains.
I had
only one question. ‘Do they have a really docile, placid horse available?’ I’d
barely ridden before. They said they did: a dirty-white horse with a kindly
disposition and his name was Sanchez.
We were
led into empty country, from a stretch by the railway into just the kind of
dry, rocky terrain where an American movie about the Wild West could be filmed.
It was picture perfect for galloping, flying off in a trail of dust. But of
course, there’s a difference between how things are imagined and reality.
Thurram-thurram-thurram,
imagined, is not always how it turns out.
Sanchez
was quite good but it wasn’t without trepidation that I sat up there on his
back. I was pretty strong on the reins, thinking he should know I was in
charge, and far short of galloping, if Sanchez even attempted a light trot,
much less a canter, I became nervous and pulled him back. In the country of
Butch and Sundance, there was a lot of slow walking that went on. On that day,
Sanchez may as well have been a donkey.
Yet
there was something more worrisome about his behaviour. He kept trying to twist
his head around towards my leg. I didn’t mind if he only wanted to sniff it but
I couldn’t be sure of his intentions so I pulled his head back to the front
with the reins, just in case. If Sanchez is the placid horse, I’d hate to try
the other ones.
‘Do
horses bite?’ I wondered.
It’s not
often that one needs to consult a horse expert. They’re not like doctors or
hairdressers that everyday people visit time to time. Even the tom-tom owning
Dhakaiyas probably know enough about horses not to spend much time consulting
experts. Indeed, should I require a horse expert I wouldn’t know how to go
about finding one.
So it
was odd that as I was re-considering Sanchez and the day in Tupiza, Annie sat
beside me. She was a British horse-riding instructor living in Hong Kong , where she taught at a riding school. She was
on holidays in Thailand
She was
polite enough not to laugh when I explained the afternoon I spent onboard
Sanchez. ‘Horses do sometimes bite,’ she said, ‘but it’s usually when you’re
standing in front. It’s very hard for a horse to twist its neck to bite when
you’re sitting on it. Maybe you were pulling on the reins too hard?’
Of
course there are rumours about Butch and Sundance. It’s said they didn’t actually
die in San Vicente. There are people who said they met them, years later,
living discreetly back in the United
States
Travel by...
or camel...
