Latinalicious: The South America Diaries by Becky Wicks

Author:Becky Wicks [Wicks, Becky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays & Travelogues, Nonfiction, Retail, Travel
ISBN: 9781743098295
Google: sSA-AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00ED5FPRQ
Barnesnoble: B00ED5FPRQ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

30/10

Horsing around …

When I was fourteen I landed my first job earning £1.50 an hour in the local Spalding chippie. My shifts were Saturdays and Thursday nights after school. Everything went well until one day when an old man came in and asked for a fried egg with his haddock and chips. I panicked. I had no idea how to fry an egg. No one had ever asked me for one and no one had ever shown me how to fry one, so I told him we didn’t have any.

When he’d finished his meal sans eggs and left, my boss called me downstairs. He was not pleased.

‘Why did ye tell tha’ man we’ve go’ no eggs?’ he asked, pointing to the store room. ‘He always ’as eggs. We’ve got tons of ’em out back.’

Of course, I didn’t want to admit I’d reached the mighty age of fourteen without ever frying an egg for myself, so I did what any other embarrassed schoolgirl would do in the face of an angry man: I burst into tears. I think that was when he realised he’d hired a child.

However stressful my job was at such a young age, it was nothing compared to what our horse riding guide Juan Luis has had to endure. For the past two days, Juan Luis has accompanied myself and a group of four other girls (two Australian, one German, one Austrian) on our horse trek through the valleys surrounding Tupiza.

Trotting through dust clouds and sporadic fields of green encircled by perpendicular scarlet cliffs, Juan Luis, now just sixteen, told how he started leading horse tours at the age of seven. At that age, he says, he was working with his father, but when he got to fourteen he was taking groups of up to ten adults across the valley all by himself.

Imagine leading tourists on horseback when you’re seven. How can you even stay in the saddle when you’re only as big as the saddle yourself? The story was not unlike that of Daniel at Estancia Los Potreros (who was put on a horse as a baby), or Santos with his llama skins. But looking at this waif-like schoolboy in front of us in his Adidas jacket and baseball cap, denim legs wrapped round his rather unruly pony, it was like watching a scene from a cowboy movie before the kid grows up to be a jaw-droppingly handsome horse-whispering/herding champion with an insatiable appetite for women in jodhpurs with foreign accents.

Aaah … he has so much ahead of him. But yet so much to learn. Juan Luis, like so many landlocked Bolivians, has never even seen the sea. I should mention here that Bolivia is in a bit of a state. They’ve had over 190 different governments in the years since claiming independence from Spain almost 190 years ago and it’s never really had much independence at that. In 1883, it lost its part of the Pacific coast to Chile, who nabbed the Atacama Desert while they were at it, making the most of the nitrate there.

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