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All it took was a couple of two-hour rides through the Pantanal to convince myself that I should become a cowgirl. Yes, I wanted to give up a life of science and spend my days riding the range, wearing chaps and wrasslin’ cattle—-or whatever else it is that cowboys do. I’m a little hazy on the details.

Like most pre-adolescent girls, I took horse-riding lessons when I was young, but I haven’t ridden much since then. I’ve also never ridden Western-style before, with a one-handed grip on the reins and long stirrups, but it was a lot of fun. My horse and I developed a reasonable working relationship, and broadly agreed on the direction and speed of travel, which is always a bonus. Watching wildlife from horseback is actually quite a good way to go about it. Many animals seem to see you as some kind of weird centaur-like half-human, half-horse creature, and so come a bit closer than they might if you were on foot. It’s great until one of the horses accidentally kicks a bees’ nest, as happened on one of the rides I went on.

The horses—-quite sensibly—-decided that the best policy was to get the hell out of there with as much haste as possible. However, the humans riding them hadn’t realised what was going on, and merely thought that their mounts were misbehaving. There followed some comical¹ mis-communication between species, where the humans were trying to calm their horses and make them stand still, and the horses were trying to press the point that a tactical withdrawl would really be the wisest course. As soon as some of the riders got stung, the message became clear.

I mentioned chaps earlier, which the real cowboys were wearing, and which I eyed with some jealousy. I’ve always thought that chaps were rather odd pieces of horse-riding kit. Stupidly, I thought that they were designed the wrong way around; surely you’d want the leather to be on the inside of your thighs to stop the friction between your inseam and the saddle from chafeing you? However, the functionality became absolutely clear the first time my horse strolled through a thorn bush—-riiight, that’s what they do.

So, if you hear tales of a chaps-wearing, big-knife-tucked-in-back-waistband, English vegetarian vachero (or should that be vachera?) roaming the wide open spaces of Brazil, that will probably be me.

¹ From my safe position at the back of the group, well away from angry bees and stampeding horses. ↑