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Horse Care & Riding
We've both done plenty of horse riding, and Doug has owned horses in the past. I also spent an entire summer helping to care for the horses in a racing stable in western Queensland. That said, neither of us have any veterinary qualifications or experience treating ill or injured horses. We haven't had formal riding training. Neither do we have any experience leading a pack horse, or with unbroken journeys of more than a week on horseback. Those are pretty serious deficiencies, and we know it. We have no intention of letting our ignorance and inexperience lie however. The preparation has already begun.
We live right in the centre of a big city, so access to horses is time consuming and very expensive. Later this year we'll be heading out to a school once a fortnight to polish our riding skills and take some lessons in general horse care. Until then, we're sticking to theory, but we've got loads of good resources.
First we needed a really good idea of what can go wrong. While we can't anticipate everything, reading the stories of other long riders and the annoyances, troubles and on occasion, sheer horrors they've faced and the creative solutions they've come up with to deal with them sure helps. The Long Riders Guild website was of course our starting point, but their wonderful collection of books about horse journeys is the next stop.
In particular, the book “The Cavalry Horse and his Pack” captured both my imagination and appealed to my sense of the practical. The author spent 10 years in the United States Cavalry service in the early 1900's and wrote a very fine book covering all aspects of travelling with and caring for horses. I devoured it, and I'll be reading it again before we go.
I've also picked up a couple of basic veterinary guides – not because we'll be able to administer any real veterinary care on the road, but because I wanted to have an overview of horse anatomy, know how to spot problems in the early stages, to determine what the most common horse health issues are and how to avoid them and what might constitute a good basic medical kit. I also want to have a decent working knowledge of horse nutrition.
I've read some books on packing, including Packing in on Mules & Horses. I haven't found a book that's as relevant for modern packing, but a lot of the old rules apply. We (hopefully) won't need to know a lot about knots and hitching, but we certainly need to know how horses respond to different stimuli on the trail and what to look out for in terms of packs rubbing or slipping and how to track missing animals.
We'll still be no experts when we set out, but perhaps listening to the right people, reading useful books and just spending time riding will get us on the right track. We should also be able to arrange a short packing trip here in Australia before we go – just for practice ;)
Fitness
I'm proud to say that Doug and I have both achieved feats of strength and endurance I never would have thought possible but we're terribly unfit, myself in particular. Somehow, we always make it to the top of the hill, but it'd be nice to do so without the struggle. We'll need to be as fit as possible for this journey. We'll be constantly active and living on a diet that's nowhere near as healthy as the one we have now. We'll need to be strong and physically motivated to take care of the horses and all the other duties associated with rough travel. Being fit will make us less susceptible to injury and illness. In a word, fitness is essential.
We also need to be lighter. We're not large enough to bother a healthy horse, but they'll be carrying us every day and Kyrgyz horses are smaller than average. The less we weigh the less of a burden we'll be, and that can only be good.
A few months before we leave we'll be switching to a diet that more closely matches the one we'll be on during the trip – which means a lot less food, and a lot less variety. Hopefully that will mean we'll be somewhat adjusted before we get to Kyrgyzstan.
We'll both be making changes as the year progresses. I'm now walking home from the office and Doug meets me half way to ensure we're both getting as much exercise as we can out of our rather sedentary lives (we both work in front of computers day in, day out, and of course, manage our own website nights and weekends).
I bought a book on rider-specific fitness, but to be honest most of it requires equipment not available to us without a lot of expense. I'll be giving some of the more basic exercises a run through daily.
Language
Very little English is spoken in Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. In our 2.5 months in Kyrgyzstan and the Tajik Pamir in 2008 we only learned a bare smattering of Kyrgyz and Russian. I found it very easy to pick up the most common words in Kyrgyz – they are all greetings or related to the natural world. The words for rocks, flowers & grasses, animals & features of the landscape were used so often that it was impossible not to learn them a little.
Beyond that we are sadly lacking in the languages we'll require to get by. We're keeping an eye out for an excellent book loaned to us on our last journey by an American linguistics student in Osh (thanks Emily & Nurjan, you were a fantastic help to us). It was a manual distributed to members of the peace corps with a need to learn Kyrgyz. I've scoured the internet for this book, but I guess it was never distributed publicly.
I've got a Kyrgyz – English dictionary on its way, but dictionaries are not the best way to learn a language. We're hoping to find better resources – wish us luck!
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