Beginning of day one of horse trek: Happy face. End of day two of horse trek: Sorry arse. This is the story of a silken-assed young city boy, the ghosts of some famous cowboys, and a feisty ride called Cynthia. (Sounds like a night in Coppers).

Sunday Business Post, September 23, 2007

There’s a certain comfort in some of life’s old reliables, the things you can count on staying the same when all else goes haywire. Yesterday will always be better value than today, and night will always follow day. In the travel world, backpackers will always blindly follow the highlights list in the front of guidebooks but claim they’re trailblazing pioneers.

Most of the trails in the world were well blazed long ago, of course, but a few still lie relatively unbeaten and not far from the main bottlenecks in South America’s backpacking logjam. Notorious highwaymen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hit them in the early 1900s when they hung up their outlaw spurs in search of an honest life. They didn’t want to settle somewhere well signposted, so they headed for the isolated plains of Bolivia. [Read more →]