Riding on Horseback

This past week the trip with the school was horseback riding. I have ridden several times before on my Uncle´s farm in Lubbock, TX, so I was pretty excitied to go riding here. There was a total of eight students from the school and we rode up to a smaller community in the moutains about 3km away. My horse was great, but I could never get it to respond to me digging my heals into it´s side or clicking my tounge at it. It would only pick up speed when the guide leading us would give a certain whistle, then you had to hold on for dear life.

The small community that we stopped at is called La Pintura. It is a poorer community and most of the families that live there are decendents of the Mayans. Some of the students that come with us, a family, had brought clothes and gifts to hand out to the children of the community. Once they got off the horses and opened thier backpacks they were swarmed by all these children. I stood there off to the side watching as they were doing this and couldn´t help but wonder if there was a better way to do this. The girls that were getting the clothes and gifts obviously needed these things, but some of them were pushing others to the ground and I saw a couple of girls toward the end that had armfulls of things while others only had 1 or 2 items. I guess every little bit does help though. It was very interesting and eye-opening to see this community so close to Copan that had so little.

After spending quite a bit of time at the community, myself two other students, and the main guide broke off from the group to visit Hacienda San Lucas, a small little resort up in the mountains with beautiful views. The resort was beautiful, the views breathtaking. There were plants everywhere and everything was green. One of my favorite part of the Hacienda had to be the puppy that lives there. The owners have a yellow lab puppy that they let wander around the grounds and when we got there he greeted me by licking my toes! We probably spent one hour at the resort looking around and relaxing, and then we all headed back down the mountain on our horses. On our way back I thought I was try one more to see if I could get my horse to respond to my commands. Sure enough, when I clicked my tounge, she broke into a trot.