BREEZY RIDER
Wild south: As well as its famous horses, this wide, marshy delta of the Rhone River is home to the cowboy-like gardians and an abundance of birdlife. / All photos: Staffan Widstrand
Jane Cornwell saddles up the stuff of legend – a white horse of the Camargue - February 5, 2005
WIDE-eyed with fright and fury, a black Camargue bull wheels to a halt some 20m from where I'm sitting on the roof of a Citroen 2CV. Around me, in a car park-cum-picnic-area near the town of Saintes Maries de la Mer, people are seeking sanctuary up poles, on cars, lorries, fences.
Our horses, tethered to a railing while we watch the festivities, bunch together for comfort. Down to my right, a small man is making entreating gestures. "He's asking you," translates Anna Widstrand, leader of World Horse Riding Holidays, from her position atop a Land Rover, "if you will please get your feet off his windscreen wipers."
The thunder of hooves signals the arrival of the gardians, tough guys in floral shirts and Stetsons for whom horse and cattle rearing is a way of life. They are the cowboys of the Camargue, the wide marshy delta of the Rhone River, by the French Mediterranean coast.
The renegade bull is deftly returned to his mates in the corral.
A riding week with Widstrand – a bossy, fortysomething Swede with a passion for horses, ecology and adventure – is not your average pony trek. There are no conga lines of steeds walking nose to butt. No holding on to saddles. No clueless bouncing about. World Horse Riding Holidays caters for people who love to ride, on horses that love to be ridden. Our small group (Widstrand's always are) includes two polo-playing book publicists from London, an equine-mad couple from Milan and myself who, like many Australians raised in outer suburbia, spent their youth on the back of a horse.
You'll need a holiday after this, says a grinning Widstrand, after collecting us from Montpelier airport and driving us to the medieval village of Aigues-Mortes for lunch.
The white horse of the Camargue is the stuff of legend. As a girl, my imagination was sparked by a well-thumbed photo annual; how exotic, how powerful they seemed, galloping beside salt lakes full of flamingos, or scrublands dotted with sea lavender, flanked by their foals.
I knew before visiting, that part of this 70,000ha is a nature reserve, one-third agricultural land, the rest grazing or marshlands. That the Camargue has its own micro-climate: if it's raining elsewhere in Provence, the sun might be blazing between the petit Rhone and its bigger, wider sister. That when it rains, it buckets down.
I knew there were birds, lots of them (hoopoes, kingfishers, herons, the mysterious southern nightingale) and sturdy black bulls. I didn't know that the Camargue – where fields are flooded for five months each year, then dry out during summer – is also home to rabbits, muskrats, wild boar and an ecosystem's worth of bugs.
A lifelong Camargue aficionado ("The colours! The elements! I believe in God when I'm here!"), Widstrand is nothing if not prepared.
Essential to her armoury of extra boots, leather chaps, sunglasses and sheepskins (for chafed behinds) is a selection of bandanas which, before we set off on our daily five or six-hour rides, we wrap around our heads, tightly. The feisty, straight-backed Camargue women never show their hair when out riding – which is as much to do with keeping gnats out of hair and ears as tradition.
In the Camargue, tradition counts. And though Widstrand takes groups to the Camargue three or four times a year, it's in hot, changeable, itchy-bite June when tradition counts the most. Summer is festival time in Saintes Maries de la Mer, the gateway to the Camargue. There's the gypsy festival in late May, when the travellers descend to pay respects to their patron saint, Sara.
June, however, boasts the Fête du Cheval, and the festival of the gardian. Activity is charged, frenzied: bulls are run through the streets in an abrivado – a sort of equine pincer movement – to be fought in the arena, ole-style, but never harmed. Razeteurs, reckless young blokes in cricket whites, pluck rosettes off bulls' horns with metal combs.
At night, riders jump their white horses over a fire on the beach, a ritual linked to purification and new seasons that ends up with a few (usually sozzled) gardians on their backs. When you're living the life of a gardian – which, in effect, we are – risk-taking is a given. The locals who assemble in our small, family-run hotel bar at night look, in their Stetsons and moleskins, every bit as hardened as their Wild West equivalents. Two such locals, the rugged Louis and the chic, culottes-wearing Lulu, lend us horses for the duration – horses with names such as Eclat and Nuage, ordinary names (Flash, Cloud) that sound tres romantique in French.
The Camargue horse turns out to be smaller than the silver runaway of imagination, but for strength, temperament and responsiveness can't be beaten.
We're up early each day; the first 10 minutes in the saddle are the sorest. It seems only fitting that Claudio, one half of the Italians and our only man, gets the sheepskin. Complaints, however, seem churlish after traversing an environment (much of it off-limits to, er, ordinary tourists) as beautiful as this. It's easy to understand why painters such as Matisse returned time and again.
We canter, arms flapping like butterflies' wings, through elephant grass higher than our mounts, and pick our muddy way past colonies of wading flamingos, marvelling, if they take off, at their shocking-pink bellies. We load our horses onto a river ferry and travel a few hundred metres across the Rhone, before heading through pine forests to lunch on a sand dune.
We note the huge, unrefined salt mountains at Salin de Giraud, sparkling with bird life, and amble past sprawling rice paddies, eyed by Mistral-surfing kestrels. Inevitably, we fall in love with our horses. For us they will gallop through mud up to their bellies, splash through currents (the man-made channels of the Camargue are always moving, however slowly), snicker their greetings in the morning. Supervised by Loulou and her wisecracking, slim-hipped mother (women who, like most Camargue women, are bloody hell on horseback), we take them to herd cattle.
At various points we become part of the festivities. The hundreds of gardians who, horses tethered to horse and cattle boxes, gather for a barbecue breakfast on the salt flats a few kilometres out of town, seem to have no problem with Widstrand's group joining in. When they release the bulls and, en route to Les Saintes, sort them into clusters of abrivados – squeezing in so close that bulls' heads invariably rest on horses' rumps – we bring up the rear of one of them.
We notice the long row of cars and Jeeps lining the adjacent road, the tourists pointing their cameras, and sit up a little straighter. That night we eat black bull casserole (a little shamefacedly), and go to sleep dreaming of a life on the (marshy) range.
Jane Cornwell, February 5th, 2005
Jane Cornwell travelled with assistance from World Horse Riding Holidays.
CHECKLIST
A week in the Camargue costs Euro 1395 (AUD$2195) per person excluding drinks and flights to Montpellier. More: www.worldhorseriding.com
End of article
Wild south: As well as its famous horses, this wide, marshy delta of the Rhone River is home to the cowboy-like gardians and an abundance of birdlife. / All photos: Staffan Widstrand
Jane Cornwell saddles up the stuff of legend – a white horse of the Camargue - February 5, 2005
WIDE-eyed with fright and fury, a black Camargue bull wheels to a halt some 20m from where I'm sitting on the roof of a Citroen 2CV. Around me, in a car park-cum-picnic-area near the town of Saintes Maries de la Mer, people are seeking sanctuary up poles, on cars, lorries, fences.
The thunder of hooves signals the arrival of the gardians, tough guys in floral shirts and Stetsons for whom horse and cattle rearing is a way of life. They are the cowboys of the Camargue, the wide marshy delta of the Rhone River, by the French Mediterranean coast.
The renegade bull is deftly returned to his mates in the corral.
A riding week with Widstrand – a bossy, fortysomething Swede with a passion for horses, ecology and adventure – is not your average pony trek. There are no conga lines of steeds walking nose to butt. No holding on to saddles. No clueless bouncing about. World Horse Riding Holidays caters for people who love to ride, on horses that love to be ridden. Our small group (Widstrand's always are) includes two polo-playing book publicists from London, an equine-mad couple from Milan and myself who, like many Australians raised in outer suburbia, spent their youth on the back of a horse.
You'll need a holiday after this, says a grinning Widstrand, after collecting us from Montpelier airport and driving us to the medieval village of Aigues-Mortes for lunch.
The white horse of the Camargue is the stuff of legend. As a girl, my imagination was sparked by a well-thumbed photo annual; how exotic, how powerful they seemed, galloping beside salt lakes full of flamingos, or scrublands dotted with sea lavender, flanked by their foals.
I knew before visiting, that part of this 70,000ha is a nature reserve, one-third agricultural land, the rest grazing or marshlands. That the Camargue has its own micro-climate: if it's raining elsewhere in Provence, the sun might be blazing between the petit Rhone and its bigger, wider sister. That when it rains, it buckets down.
I knew there were birds, lots of them (hoopoes, kingfishers, herons, the mysterious southern nightingale) and sturdy black bulls. I didn't know that the Camargue – where fields are flooded for five months each year, then dry out during summer – is also home to rabbits, muskrats, wild boar and an ecosystem's worth of bugs.
A lifelong Camargue aficionado ("The colours! The elements! I believe in God when I'm here!"), Widstrand is nothing if not prepared.
Essential to her armoury of extra boots, leather chaps, sunglasses and sheepskins (for chafed behinds) is a selection of bandanas which, before we set off on our daily five or six-hour rides, we wrap around our heads, tightly. The feisty, straight-backed Camargue women never show their hair when out riding – which is as much to do with keeping gnats out of hair and ears as tradition.
In the Camargue, tradition counts. And though Widstrand takes groups to the Camargue three or four times a year, it's in hot, changeable, itchy-bite June when tradition counts the most. Summer is festival time in Saintes Maries de la Mer, the gateway to the Camargue. There's the gypsy festival in late May, when the travellers descend to pay respects to their patron saint, Sara.
June, however, boasts the Fête du Cheval, and the festival of the gardian. Activity is charged, frenzied: bulls are run through the streets in an abrivado – a sort of equine pincer movement – to be fought in the arena, ole-style, but never harmed. Razeteurs, reckless young blokes in cricket whites, pluck rosettes off bulls' horns with metal combs.
At night, riders jump their white horses over a fire on the beach, a ritual linked to purification and new seasons that ends up with a few (usually sozzled) gardians on their backs. When you're living the life of a gardian – which, in effect, we are – risk-taking is a given. The locals who assemble in our small, family-run hotel bar at night look, in their Stetsons and moleskins, every bit as hardened as their Wild West equivalents. Two such locals, the rugged Louis and the chic, culottes-wearing Lulu, lend us horses for the duration – horses with names such as Eclat and Nuage, ordinary names (Flash, Cloud) that sound tres romantique in French.
The Camargue horse turns out to be smaller than the silver runaway of imagination, but for strength, temperament and responsiveness can't be beaten.
We're up early each day; the first 10 minutes in the saddle are the sorest. It seems only fitting that Claudio, one half of the Italians and our only man, gets the sheepskin. Complaints, however, seem churlish after traversing an environment (much of it off-limits to, er, ordinary tourists) as beautiful as this. It's easy to understand why painters such as Matisse returned time and again.
We canter, arms flapping like butterflies' wings, through elephant grass higher than our mounts, and pick our muddy way past colonies of wading flamingos, marvelling, if they take off, at their shocking-pink bellies. We load our horses onto a river ferry and travel a few hundred metres across the Rhone, before heading through pine forests to lunch on a sand dune.
We note the huge, unrefined salt mountains at Salin de Giraud, sparkling with bird life, and amble past sprawling rice paddies, eyed by Mistral-surfing kestrels. Inevitably, we fall in love with our horses. For us they will gallop through mud up to their bellies, splash through currents (the man-made channels of the Camargue are always moving, however slowly), snicker their greetings in the morning. Supervised by Loulou and her wisecracking, slim-hipped mother (women who, like most Camargue women, are bloody hell on horseback), we take them to herd cattle.
At various points we become part of the festivities. The hundreds of gardians who, horses tethered to horse and cattle boxes, gather for a barbecue breakfast on the salt flats a few kilometres out of town, seem to have no problem with Widstrand's group joining in. When they release the bulls and, en route to Les Saintes, sort them into clusters of abrivados – squeezing in so close that bulls' heads invariably rest on horses' rumps – we bring up the rear of one of them.
We notice the long row of cars and Jeeps lining the adjacent road, the tourists pointing their cameras, and sit up a little straighter. That night we eat black bull casserole (a little shamefacedly), and go to sleep dreaming of a life on the (marshy) range.
Jane Cornwell, February 5th, 2005
Jane Cornwell travelled with assistance from World Horse Riding Holidays.
Our horses, tethered to a railing while we watch the festivities, bunch together for comfort. Down to my right, a small man is making entreating gestures. "He's asking you," translates Anna Widstrand, leader of World Horse Riding Holidays, from her position atop a Land Rover, "if you will please get your feet off his windscreen wipers."
CHECKLIST
End of article
About this