Much excitement! Emily and Oliver had a horse riding lesson today.
Waiting for the Horses at El Questro
Quick breakfast, cleaned teeth, washed up. If only the children were this helpful every morning!
Christian showing Ems and Ollie the handlebars. Ollie can’t wait to get going!
We were met at the stable by Christian, a tall, straight-talking, good humoured guy from Victoria. He’s responsible for everything horse-related at El Questro. Within a couple of minutes Christian had Ems and Ollie hanging on his every word. Charlotte and I watched from a shady spot near the stable. The children absolutely loved the experience, Christian made it an enjoyable and informative – so-much-so that Charlotte and I were bombarded with facts and technique tips for several hours after the ride.
Ready to Go
After lunch we drove to Moonshine Gorge for a swim. We were a bit low on fuel, and the El Questro fuel pumps were out of service for the day. Based on the Moonshine route description we decided that we had enough and set off. The fuel light came on as we headed down the Moonshine Gorge track but we carried on (She’ll be right mate!”).
We arrived at the most daunting river crossing that we’ve seen so far. It was wide and looked deep, and there was a sign saying that it should only be attempted in high clearance 4WD vehicles. While we pondered whether we should cross, another 4WD turned up. The driver got out and joined us at the river bank. As he looked across pensively then said “Looks alright, I’ll walk it first”. Charlotte asked him if there were any Crocodiles. “Nah, it’s the same creek that we’re gonna swim in and we’re upstream from there”. I was just about to ask him if he was sure when another 4WD arrived at the far bank and slowly edged into the water which came up to the middle of the radiator. I noted that the car didn’t have as much ground clearance as ours as it rocked from side to side and pushed a bow wave before it.
On reaching our side the car stopped and, after our applause, the driver assured us that we had enough clearance as long as we stayed right of centre.
As we slowly crossed I could hear the water lapping around the doors and the exhaust blowing bubbles but eventually we chugged up the far bank without any problems.
The track onward was extremely rough and we realised that we should have asked the other guy how far it was to the swimming section. We trundled on for a while before we decided to turn around, go back to El Questro, and fill up from our Jerry Can (great idea! Why didn’t we think of that before setting off?).
After refuelling we retraced our journey and reached the swimming section which was only about a kilometre past our turning point (if only we’d known! Still, better safe than sorry).
The swim was lovely, the river was not too deep with a sandy bottom and surrounded by tall trees and Palms.
Spent the evening at the Swinging Arm – Waygu Beef Burgers and a couple (or three) beers. We joined in with a Trivia Quiz (our team was called the Smawleworld Stars) and finished second, Woohoo! Not bad for two adults and two children against other teams of up to six adults.