Day three
Injuries: 1; some horse-related chafing
Cash: almost gone
Weather: Oh my gosh, it hasn't rained this much since Noah brought the ark out of the garage for a bit of a run around.
At the moment I am playing the 'where am I going to be in pain this morning?' game. It's somewhere new every time I wake up. My earlobes hurt right now - my earlobes for goodness sake! How can any sport exercise your earlobes to the point of pain? I suspect it may be crash helmet related. After horse riding I am fully expecting to be walking like John Wayne and to have my inner thighs and lower back trying to get on the next plane out of here in spite of a timely soak in the hot tub. The worst of it is that it's Via Ferata tomorrow which I appear to have signed up for whilst I was on painkillers for my wrist. I get a nosebleed when I stand on a chair and I'll be tackling rockclimbing up a sheer cliff - in the rain. Why, why, why?
I have a tab at the patisserie up the road now. I need so many calories to deal with all the fear-related weight loss that I get cakes delivered straight to the doo
r twice daily.
I haven't said much about Morzine itself - it's a pretty Alpine village full of chalets and hotels. Shops fall broadly into two categories; adventure clothing and speciality foods. If in doubt, you can tell one from the other this way - the food shops are the ones that smell strongly of cheese and the adventure shops are the ones that look like outpatient clinics for sporting injuries; both staff and clientelle sporting an impressive variety of bandages, crutches and casts.
There are tonnes of activities to choose from and my fellow chaleteers and I spend time every day or two agreeing what to do next in view of the most recent weather forecasts. We are getting used to the fact that this is mainly rain-related and that our choices range from 'what can we do in light rain and heavy cloud?' to 'What can we do in monsoon-like stair rods?'
So today's rain-soaked activity was horse riding. Our tutor arrived looking like a fisherman would if he had come over via a Paris fashion show complete with wide-brimmed hat. His name was Fronk (I'm using the French pronounciation there so don't send me comments about typos - you know who you are...). Feeling dangerous, I opted to have the riding lesson in French which was fine until we got to details about buckles and straps and something about polar bears, swords and fruit dessert - at this point I realised my language skills were not quite up to this and it all got a bit Marcel Marceau.
The ponies moved as one to the dry part of their stalls when we loomed up out of the downpour and pretended to be eating hay so that they wouldn't get picked - not unlike teenagers when asked a particularly tough geometry question in class. Unfortunately a little stocky black pony called Indienne got picked and gave Fronk a 'It's 9am, it's pouring down and you want me to go and entertain someone who clearly doesn't know one end of the horse from another? Are you having a laugh?' look. She rolled her eyes in a bored kind of way and Fronk informed us that she was 'a kind horse'. That was Nicky set up - now to meet my beast...
Luckily for me 'Nitro' and 'Killer' were already taken. I got Caramel, a brown and white spotted pony with a slightly more feisty world view than Indienne. Having been given the horse steering basics (pull rein left to go left, right to go right, back to stop) we were deemed equipped to lead our animals to the training ring. We were then shown the correct way to get into the saddle. TWO MOVEMENTS said Fronk and added something crucially important in advanced French, it has to be TWO MOVEMENTS, don't get on in one movement. I nodded sagely and then proceeded to leap into the saddle in one movement. It wasn't my fault, the theory was fine but in practice I just couldn't get to the mystical grey area between ground and horse. Apparently the first movement ends with you sticking like a limpet to the horse's side whilst preparing to swing your right leg over. Who knew?
Steering sorted, we were then taken through the gears; 'Walk', 'trot' and 'canter' - no reverse. This proved tricky as I was cantering headlong into a gate later in the lesson (shouting 'reverse!', 'reverse!' and looking panicked apparently doesn't count as a valid instruction in the horse world - made sense to me!). Luckily Caramel was 'just joking' about crashing through the woodwork and stopped in time. A horse with a sense of humour - lucky me.
Trotting and cantering both rely on you finding some kind of rythm with the movement of your horse. Unfortunately in our case, it was more like bad sex - all random bumping and the occasional apology to the beast beneath. I also seemed to have a worrying amount of Caramel's mane in my hand and spent a futile minute or two trying to stick it back in so that no one would notice I was returning my steed with a bald patch.
We had to feel for poor Fronk - he nearly died laughing when he asked us to do the slalom between the cones at a canter. Indienne had had enough by that time and stood in the centre of the course refusing to move until someone took her somewhere warm and dry with maybe a little fresh hay whilst Nicky was bouncing up and down in the saddle shouting 'un, deux, un, deux, un, deux' to try to get her going. Caramel and I, in the meantime, were doing laps like a Tasmanian devil around the outside of the paddock ignoring the slalom course completely.
In a nutshell, Fronk was very entertained by our efforts, especially my comedy canter, the wrong way slalom and the fact that Indienne had only one speed - slow. A good time was had by all. The only problem came with walking after dismounting, I'd expected to be a little John Wayne but it was worse than that. Your brain thinks your leg is going to hit the ground straight but it kind of veers off to the outside without a by your leave. I ended up doing the walk from ghostbusters all the way back to the chalet. Just as well there was no one else on the hiking trail in the afternoon.
Elsie
