The caravan is on the move - third time’s a charm?

The month of April has been a very busy one. We’ve been hit by a series of bad luck and had to move a grand total of three times! Out of which two moves happened during a completely unseasonal storm and pouring rain. Many horse owners in India have moveable stables, built rather ingeniously based on an army design that makes it easier to dis- and reassemble. ‘Easy,’ however, is a bit of a relative term. It’s still quite a lot of work, especially given that the cloth we put on top of the tent weighs about a billion tons. We also have to manage to disassemble the stables and move the horses to the new place (oh, and also move the dogs!) then reassemble and do all this within the day. Luckily, we moved to a site with other horse camps and we had plenty of helping hands to make sure the horses had a roof over their heads by nightfall.

Taking the stables down

Loading the horses - we made this ramp ourselves!

Ploughing the new plot

Manjeev & Lal Singh did a fantastic job setting up the new camp which has a bamboo wall all around in a rather pathetic attempt at keeping the dogs in. It took no less than 5 minutes for Marvin the mongrel to find an escape route and now our pack is pretty much mixed with the local dogs. That is, except for our youngest Shelty who still needs to be neutered. The last thing we need is to add to the dog overpopulation problem!

We still need to put the round pen, and a few final touches but these are all rather pleasant things to do (well, apart for the round pen which is also hard work!) and almost feel like decorating a new house. Luckily our horses are fantastic at adapting to a new place - the same goes for the dogs.

Welcoming Speed to the family

Right when we were in the middle of our third move (when we did not yet know where we would set up next) a friend was looking for a home for his retired polo pony. In India, most polo ponies are in a pretty tired state by the time they are deemed to need to be retired (mainly because of severe arthritis) and end up in local riding clubs where they usually don’t last for very long. This is not the first time someone had asked us this - there is an oversupply of old horses looking for homes - but for some reason, we decided to take this mare. Like so many other things in life, we don’t know why we took this decision but we did. Maybe it was a case of still being able to offer a ‘home’ even though we technically didn’t even have a place to live!

When Speed met Luci

And so we welcomed 15-year-old thoroughbred, ex-race and ex-polo pony to the gang. She’s a tall beautiful bay mare, very calm. It looks like she has an old knee injury combined with some arthritis so she’s a little wobbly but seems to be doing well after she warms up. We’ll be taking it very easy and we have some great expertise around us to pool from to find the best coping mechanisms. We’ve already moved her to a bitless bridle and as soon as our magical farrier comes over in a few days we’ll be transitioning her to being barefoot.

We put Speed in the stable next to Luciana who was absolutely furious about the arrangement. She spent several hours lunging at her with her ears pinned back pretending she was about to bite. Luckily, Speed seemed to know better and by morning the air had settled.

Speed passed out in a fresh pile of sand

It’s quite nice to have an experienced mare in the team, a calming change for our 4/5 year olds who are always so full of energy!

Summer is here!

April is, as usual, the start of summer. We’ve already hit 41C during the day and last year it went up to 48C in May/June. Our new camp does seem to benefit from a cool wind but there’s limited shade so we attached a long jute cloth in front of the stables to create additional shade during peak sun hours. It has given a bit of a desert camp feel to the stables and even the dogs were delighted!