Stephan Schwab

This is the second part of the story about the access we are going to build. We’ve made several attempts at finding the best path. Now we’ve settled down on this one:

After the segment through a forest area the path comes out into the clear. It has been well traveled as you can see. This is the trail Didimo our neighbor uses to get to this own farm and old house.

This path isn’t bad at all but we were trying to find more even terrain. We had some hopes that we find a path where the Jeep could travel on without the need to drive a bulldozer through in the beginning. But all we found was rough terrain with just too many ups and downs even worse than what you can see in these pictures.

The current trail crosses two creeks and has some sharp turns.

This is at the entrance to Didimo’s house. Looks like steps – doesn’t it?

Then the trail continues on Didimo’s land towards our farm. The whole trail from where we have to leave the Jeep to the door of our farm is about 2.5 km.

This part doesn’t look that bad. It’s a gentle slope and in the clear.

But then you turn around the corner and once again encounter some challenge.

We are lucky to count with Criollo horses. These are kind of a mix between a horse and a mule. They don’t go fast. They favorite speed is a gentle walk not even trot. Unlike more hot blooded horses they are just perfect for rough terrain. Before they do a step they analyze the terrain in front of them and then move forward one step at a time. They rebalance themselves, make a step to the side or whatever move necessary to stay safe.

Another creek and we are almost there.

This would be easy, if the logs weren’t there.

In zick-zack and avoiding to harm the belly Toby and his rider Luis go uphill.

Finally we’ve reached the door to our farm. The “door” is actually a cut into the barb wire fence. To open it one has to untwist the wires and the twist them together again to close the “door”.

Now that we have found the path for the access road we have to wait for some paperwork and the land survey so that we can actually say “our farm”. Up until now it would have been too much risk to actually invest a significant amount of money. We bought horses so that we can explore on our own, paid a few guys to clear the trail so that we can see what the challenge of building the road would be – but all that isn’t hardly a real investment. I guess we’ve put about $5,000 into this adventure so far. There is still the possibility for the deal to fall through but in this case we can take our horses elsewhere and the only loss would be the expense for the exploration.