Rein and shine in Chile

By the end of my riding holiday in Chile's northern Patagonia, I'd grown rather fond of La Chica, my six-year-old chestnut-coloured mare. She and I had bonded after I had been separated – a tad humiliatingly – from my first steed, Volantino, whose penchant for ponderous diagonal descents had regressed into blunt refusals to advance.

In a five-day ride – during which I progressed from an apprehensive ingénue to a moderate rider with sore buttock muscles – I covered 50 miles of mountain horse trails, dirt tracks, roads, rivers and wooden bridges in and around the remote southern town of Futaleufú, in the province of Palena, 700 miles south of the capital, Santiago. I'd reached Futaleufu from the UK after 21 hours on five flights – the last, a 10-seater biplane from the port city of Puerto Montt to the coastal town of Chaitén – followed by a rainswept, bumpy, three-hour drive south-east, passing Lago Yelcho and mountain streams, in a misty, precipitous landscape.

Futaleufú means "big river" in the indigenous Mapuche dialect. Seven miles from the Argentinian border, it is surrounded by the Andes mountains, with Cerro Teta (literally "Tit Peak") and La Ventana Secreta ("The Secret Window") on either side. The town also has an enthusiastic cockerel, who began his routine at 5am.

The first day's trot was a 12-mile loop from our wooden lodge, the Hosteria Rio Grande, through the Los Escalas valley and up to the Rio Chico valley outside the town of Espolon. Leading my small group of riders was Hector Troncoso, a huaso (Chilean cowboy) whose half-brother Jaime Troncoso kept the horses on his ranch on the outskirts of Futaleufú, and our guide Lisa Wortman, from Montana. The sierra was populated by swathes of thin, spiky-leaved coihues, huge alerce trees, and spruces planted to delineate territory. Burnt fragments of trees – mementos of land-clearing settler fires that had raged in the mid-1900s – added a surreal touch to the landscape, which was also marked by prickly calafate and blueberry bushes.

It was hot and humid, and as we passed a couple of well-fed, caramel-coloured, horned cows, some sheep, goats and a gaggle of geese, the lethargic pace of my original mount, Volantino, was picked up by Wortman. "You've got a fat, lazy, horse that doesn't want to pay attention. Squeeze him a little with your heels," she advised.

Now, I'm an easy-going kind of guy and I figured, as Volantino – a seven-year-old gelding – whinnied away, that I'd go easy on him. If he wanted to chew bamboo shoots or grass, as he often did, I'd let him, for a while. The quid pro quo, I reasoned, was that he wouldn't bolt. Nevertheless, I heeded Wortman's advice and Volantino moved – a little.

As we rode back, it poured. Patagonian weather is apparently extremely unpredictable; the previous week, a freak snowstorm had resulted in a riding group being holed up in a cave near the Amarillo hot springs between Futaleufú and Chaitén. But the rain proved to be a blip: for the next few days, the temperature surged into the eighties.

The next morning, we set off for Benedicto Diocarets' isolated 136-acre working farm behind Las Escalas valley. The eight-mile route cut down a cow trail into the valley where the mouth of the Infierno Canyon ends and went alongside the Futaleufú river before crossing it on a footbridge into the centre of the valley and on to Benedicto's. I had been forewarned about getting saddle-sore, but the traditional metal-framed saddles were underlaid with foam and covered with sheepskin, easing life for those huasos who spend long days herding cattle. As an added precaution, I wore padded cycling shorts beneath my jeans.

At Benedicto's farm, the welcoming committee included pigs, turkeys and a goat, as well as the moustachioed 56-year-old widower himself, and we were soon unwinding around a wood-fired stove in the kitchen. Supper was a feast, comprising a vegetarian cazuela soup of rice, squash, peas, cabbage leaves and celery, followed by a tender shank of lamb. The wine was a spicy Ventisquero merlot from Rancagua in the Andean foothills south of Santiago. As we ate, a couple of pigs and a turkey ambled past the open barn door. The farm had no gas or electricity, so we turned in early.

Benedicto spins his own wool, and the jumpers, hats and ponchos he makes were hung from one side of the barn. I bought a black bin liner full. Before we left, I asked Benedicto if he had ever been to a city. He said he had been to Santiago once in the Eighties. Then he wrapped his hands around his head: "Silencio!" he said with feeling.

By now Volantino had protested too much. On the next leg of our journey I swapped horses, and as we headed for the Infierno Gorge, padding and sloshing along a muddy trail in the Reserva Nacional Futaleufú, my new mount, La Chica, broke into a trot if she sensed her position in the horse hierarchy was in peril. We lunched 500ft above the foaming turquoise gorge, down which we saw three kayaks pass.

Our daily adventures didn't always feature horse-riding. One journey involved white-water rafting on the Futaleufú river, a six-mile stretch featuring 12 rapids with evocative-sounding names such as torro (the bull) and cazuela (that thick Chilean soup). The river faces two threats from a developing gold mining operation in the Espolon valley and a hydroelectric dam project. Back at the Rio Grande, Alan Grundy, of the non-profit organisation FutaFriends, filled me in on the situation. As kayaker Jill Tipton, a geologist from Colorado, who was to join our riding group, put it: "Right now, there's a whole lot of stuff that's mineable that wasn't when gold was only $350 [£184] an ounce."

Once more in the saddle, our next 12-mile route went through the Espolon valley and passed Lago Noroeste to the crystal clear Lago Las Rosa, two miles from the Argentinian border. We then slipped and slid along a muddy boulder-strewn path, leading the horses by their reins on the crumbly descents. The scarlet and blue flowers of wild fuschia bushes lit up in the early evening light as the horses quickened on their return home.

The final day's ride was a gentle nine-mile route along the turquoise-coloured Espolon, which snakes around the Cerro Teta and reaches an overview of La Garganta del Diablo (The Devil's Throat). As we sat beneath a cloudless blue sky, "El Diablo", a class VI rapid, burst out of the upper lake into the valley several hundred feet below, its light green foam pounding down in a ceaseless seething mass that was as frightening as it was beautiful.

Traveller's Guide:

GETTING THERE
The writer was a guest of Expediciones Chile (020-7193 3214; www.exchile.com), and went on its Futaleufú Lodge riding week, costing $1,895 (£997) per person. This includes all meals, lodging, transportation, horses, guides and equestrian gear while horseback riding, and transportation between Futaleufú and Puerto Montt in Chile or Esquel in Argentina – but not international flights. The programme varies according to the desires and skill level of the group, the weather or other factors. ExChile's other activities include canyoning, fishing, mountain biking, sea kayaking, rafting and yoga retreats. The writer flew with American Airlines (020-7365 0777; americanairlines.co.uk) to Chicago and Buenos Aires, and with LAN (0800 977 6100; www.lan.com) to Santiago and Puerto Montt. Buenos Aires is also served by British Airways (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com) from London Heathrow with an en-route stop in São Paulo, Brazil. Connecting flights from the UK are available with airlines such as Air France (0870 142 4343; www.air france.co.uk) via Paris. Santiago is served by airlines such as Delta (0845 600 0950; delta.com) from London Gatwick, with a connecting flight at Atlanta; and by LAN from Madrid with a connecting flight from London Heathrow on Iberia (0870 609 0500; www.iberia.com).

CONSERVING THE FUTALEUFU VALLEY
Futafriends (www.futafriends.org). Patagonia under siege (Patagonia-under-siege.blogspot.com).

MORE INFORMATION
Latin American Travel Association (020-8715 2913; www.lata.org). The Chilean Tourism Agency, Turistel (www.turistel.cl), has prepared maps of Patagonia.