I’m awed by vast vistas in desert around Luxor. Would our guides feel the same among our trees?

Close to my farm in Maryland, there is a stretch of road that my children called the cathedral. Narrow, straight, and banked on each side by forest, passing down this road -- whether on foot, by car, or on horseback -- feels a bit like progressing along the aisle of some grand church. In the spring, the sun shimmers through the delicate green leaves. In the summer, the deep shade is cool and welcoming. In the autumn, the cathedral blazes orange and gold. And in the winter, the sun shines down through the bare branches but they quiet the wind that everywhere else rips at your hair and clothes. I wonder what my Egyptian horse guides would think of our ‘cathedral.’ Would it awe them as the vast vistas of their desert awe me?

When the breezes blow across the grassy hills that gently roll around my home, it makes them undulate like waves on a green sea. By late spring, those grasses often reach to our horses’ bellies and they crop at them as they push through, their broad chests like the prows of ships. When the ride is done, their flanks are peppered with seeds and the petals of small flowers. I wonder what my Egyptian horse guides would think of our rolling seas of green grass. Would our gently hills amaze them as the steep, crumbling walls of the canyons here do me?

Co-Owner of Horses and Hieroglyphics and guide extraordinaire.

My horses at home have no shoes. Their pasture is grassy and the soil along the edges of the farm fields we ride is either soft with mud or powdery when it has been dry. In the woods, the ground is carpeted with fallen leaves. Our rides are largely silent or accompanied only by the snap of a branch under foot or the whisper of the wind through the tall standing corn. I wonder what my Egyptian horse guides would make of the quiet of our rides. Would it charm them as I am charmed by the drum of our horses hooves on the hard, hard desert ground, the steady rhythm occasionally broken by the clang of metal on rock.

When we were riding on our first day in Giza, the guide called me sister and asked me to take him back to the USA with me. He promised me he’d treat my horses like kings. Tourism is the heart of the Egyptian economy and those like him who have the opportunity to work with tourists are considered lucky. Personally, I think the ones also able to work with horses are doubly blessed. If he managed to come to America to be employed at some stable, the work would be the same but the social status much lower. So, was his request simply a joke; was it an attempt to secure a life he assumes would be more abundant and secure; or was it that like me, he hungers to see new lands and be awed, amazed and charmed?

EGYPT RIDE – AWED, AMAZED, CHARMED