Last week Kevan and I embarked on an epic adventure of a lifetime. One of the top 10 things to do in Australia. Something that deep down, every boy and girl wants to do when they're growing up - and usually play acts. Yes, we've come down to Bingara NSW to learn to be cowboys and... cowgirls. No Indians here! Well, none that we've seen...yet!
We've come here on a Jackaroo Jillaroo experience, which I discovered online after googling "top things to do in Australia". And so far, it has been awesome.
We drove down yesterday from Brisbane to Bingara, which surprisingly took a lot longer than I expected. This though was probably due to one or two things, firstly, the fact that we were using my GPS, which is rubbish, or the fact that we were a bit distracted talking to Mel on the handsfree in Warwick and missed the turn to Goondawindi. Regardless, when it became perfectly clear that we weren't going to be here by dinnertime, we stopped off for a very yummy dinner in Glen Innes at the local pub, and then moseyed on down to Bingara to the Sportsman Hotel, where we spent the night. That in itself was an experience. However we got a good nights sleep and woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready for our horse riding adventure.
At breakfast we met 3 others who would be doing this adventure - Sal, Tom and Katarina. They're very nice. We then met our leader John, who immediately took us to muster the horses - using his ute! I certainly have never seen anyone muster horses with a ute - and John did it with such finesse - here we all were, riding on the back of the ute, bouncing up and down, whilst John waved his jumper out the window and make clicking noises at the horses. And they did what he wanted too - in next to no time we had the horses rounded up, and then had the job of putting them in the yard. Huh? How?
What a sight we must've looked, waving our hands frantically and making 'get up' noises to these horses, who just looked at us with expressions of "what on earth do you think you're doing?" and then just standing there. It was quite comical.
Once we had corralled the horses John then gave us our first lesson on horsemanship - how to bridle the horse - and then we loaded the horses up in his truck for the journey out to the farm, "Garrawilla".
Upon arrival we met some of the others who would been in our group. Turns out there's about 13 or so in our group. The first thing we did was watch John break a horse in. It was really interesting, watching the horse come around from doing his own thing, to doing John's thing. There truly is a real art to it.
This took us up to lunch time after which it was time for some real jackarooing around - the trail ride. John and Cathy picked out the most suitable horses for us, with John matching Kevan and his horse up against their natural abilities - or at least that's what Kev thought, when he found out he was riding Big Willy! I on the other hand was introduced to a real, live, Cowboy - my horse - who was very sweetnatured and broke me in tenderly - and I do mean tenderly, as after a 3 hour or so ride I have discovered aches and pains in parts of my anatomy that I didn't know existed.
It was a wonderful experience, and John and Cathy are very good teachers - no sooner than they got you up on the horse, then they got you walking - and no sooner were you walking and it was 'up, down, up, down' as you learned to trot. We even managed a bit of a canter towards the end of the day.
When we returned to the homestead John asked if anyone wanted to see a sheep being slaughtered. Straightaway the kids were right into it! Kev was kind of keen too, and although I saw one being slaughtered in the markets in Damascus, I thought it could be kind of interesting also, so off we went. It was so sad, we rode off in the ute down to the sheep paddock and they beeped the horn so the sheep would come (the horn beeping is the signal that they have food). But this time we didn't have food - John was looking for a fat but young male lamb - and he selected his prey and loaded it back up on the ute. The poor thing was bleating away and trying to get up but it was no good. We brought him up to the slaughter area (an old camp bed and a bucket) and lickety-split, John slit its throat, broke its neck and the thing was dead. I was alright with that part, but then John started to skin it - and that was me done. Just suddenly came over terribly nauseous and faint, and I was out of there. Kevan stayed til the end though.
Back up at the homestead Cathy was preparing dinner (which smelled yummy!) and the others were sitting around talking. We chatted into the early evening and played cards but everyone was just so tired that it was an early night. Another fabulous day awaits tomorrow....
