Day 4 at the farm!
While I’ve been splitting wood for the last few days, I have encountered quite some Australian wildlife. Or should I say bugs and spiders. A big Huntsman spider jumped out of a block of wood while I was splitting it, and I literally ran away – I was happy no one saw me at that moment. And by the way: this is an Australian Huntsman spider. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have run away. Luckily I only saw one of these giants, but I saw plenty other spiders. When I described them to Tahita (the owner Brent’s wife) she said:”Oh yeah those are just the regular house spiders!” Well, I have another description for them: baby-Tarantula’s.
Some animals that don’t give me the chills are the birds here. There seem to be thousands of parrots chilling and flying around the farm, beautiful bright green birds. There are also some weird birds that make the weirdest sound, it almost sounds like a cat crying at night. Another bird sounds like a guinea pig.
Today I did my second trail ride. My first trail ride was two days ago, and the guests were Asians who couldn’t ride horses. No problem, first time for everything, but two of them didn’t speak a word of English, and the other two also weren’t fluent English speakers. So it was almost like playing a game of Hints. Today’s ride was better though. Two British people who were experienced riders and also funny and talkative. We rode through the paddocks (which are way bigger than the average paddock back home) and the forest. We also saw a wild kangaroo speed by in the distance! So yeah, I had a fun ride today!
I will be doing more with horses starting January, since Sam – Brent’s son – will start teaching me how to train a horse with methods based on Pat Parelli and Monty Roberts. If you don’t know who they are and how they interact with and train horses, please Google or Youtube it, it’s worth it! I have always been interested in these training methods so now that I’m finally going to learn how to apply the theories I’ve been reading since I was a little girl (not that I read a lot, but I like reading articles on this particular way of horse training and handling) I can’t wait to get started. So I’m just gonna have to push through December and then from January on it’s only going to be horses horses and more horses. Sam’s words.
In the mean time I’m reading a book on how to trim hooves, and once I have read through the book, they will let me practice and once I’m good enough, I’m gonna be responsible for the hooves of all 83 horses! That’s 332 hooves! Trimming hooves is quite a handy skill to have for someone that wants to end up in the horse business, so I’m happy that they are giving me this opportunity.
Okido, I’m gonna read my hoofbook until I fall asleep now.
Celestine in Australia 