Well I'm a bit behind in the blogging business, there's been heaps going on so I'll try to do a bit of a catch up over the next few days. This blog is pretty much all about horses, not last weekend but the one before they had the 'Hipico' or horse festival and it was awesome. I didn't actually realize it was on but I as was heading off on my bike to a girl's night at Raquel's, suddenly there was all this noise and the street was filled with dancing horses of all varieties, some of them were huge and extremely well bred, decked out in amazing saddlery, others were work horses controlled by nothing more a frayed rope bridle and decked out with just a few coloured tassels, it really was something to see.
I quickly went back home to get Porl and my camera and we spent the next hour or two wandering the streets with the horses and lots of lovely loud latin music. The rider's were downing copious amounts of beer (beer actually seems to be the recurring theme of most of the festivals here, 'religious' or otherwise) and everyone was in a very festive mood. As the riders circled the town riding down the streets the restaurant owners would bring them out beer, apparently some were even giving it to the horses but I didn't see that.
The horses were amazingly clever and were doing all sorts of high steps, side steps and dance steps to the music, it was fantastic! Anyway here's a few pics, and a couple of short clips of the event.
Some horses had their moments ....
Even some very young riders were involved ....
Some were real showmen .....
Some were very excited to be there ...
Some just calmly went about their business ....
Others made the most of the free beer ...
While the local street sellers made the most of all the visitors.
This little brown horse (with the yellow rope) was so clever, it rode quite a way up the street backwards in a straight line, not easy for a horse I'd imagine!
And watch the front feet of this black horse ...
There were also a couple of stages set up in town. A smaller one with a traditional mariachi band on it and a massive one with a young band playing lots of great latin dance music, merengue, salsa etc.
It's amazing how this town can put on events just like that, they seem very well organized and very frequent. Unfortunately they often attract an unsavory element of humanity to town so when it started getting dark we headed home and left them to it.
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