Every foreigner that comes through Cairo will, at some point during their stay, find themselves on a horse in the “desert” at Giza (why the quote marks? Cause if you can see civilization and you’re constantly stepping on old bottles and bags of chips, that’s not the desert). Even if you swore off horses due to an embarrassing incident at a state fair when you were 12, or if you have no interest in channelling your inner Brendan Frasier as you bolt across the dunes, or if you’ve already done the whole horseback-riding-in-the-desert thing (like me), you’ll more than likely end up on that horse in that stretch of sands. So when invited to some dawn horse riding, I accepted my fate – although I have to admit as a random timekiller it’s kinda cool to have it as an option (New York: “Hey, you want to get Starbucks?” Cairo: “Hey, you wanna go ride around on horses next to enormous monuments thousands upon thousands of years old?”).
So we found ourselves on a back street in Giza at 5:30am eyeing a range of horses way more interested in eating than in taking us around. We got delayed by the fact that the stable owners lost the key to one of their stables (resulting in 20 minutes of beating the shit out of the chain holding the doors closed with a rock), but soon we were trotting comfortably into the desert. This would not last.
If you’re in a wide open space on a large animal in need of exercise, it’d be natural to open the throttle a little bit, right? At least that’s the theory; pretty much everyone you see out there is hitting about 80mph (or at least trying very hard to). Unfortunately, this time that caused problems – you see the thing is, at a steady gallop the horse tends to bounce up and down a decent amount, and at no point during the trip did I manage to get the tempo right.
Maybe a demonstration will help explain exactly what happened: hold your left palm out flat facing up, and make a fist with your right hand pointing down into your left palm. Now vigorously smash the two together over and over again. This is basically what was going on as we sped over the desert, only the palm was a horse and the fist was my butt cheeks.
So there I was, racing over the desert sands bouncing uncontrollably in my saddle, giggling uncontrollably at a) how goddam stupid I looked to the other riders passing by, b) how bruised my undercarriage was getting and c) how the hell I was going to stop. Item C was finally accomplished by managing to wrench back on the reigns – with the horse stopping abruptly and my crotch absorbing most of the impact, I was finally able to compose myself.
So long story short, my ass got wrecked (especially seeing as how the horse I had coming back was a lot jumpier and the saddle a lot harder); fortunately the long weekend we have this week gave me the chance to sleep off most of the bruising before returning to sitting in a chair for several hours every day. Plus I’m a firm believer in the understanding that every so often you’ll need to sacrifice something to get a good story – sometimes it’s your free time, sometimes your ego, and sometimes it’s an unbruised coccyx.
