Why I am glad to have broken my vow never to ride a horse again

‘Put your left foot here, into this stirrup’ — I glanced down at a decorated steel half-shoe hanging on a leather strap — ‘and grip this stubby thing with your left hand….’ — I looked up at a sort of leather knob about the size of an orange set into the prow of the saddle — ‘and now lift your weight on to your left foot in the stirrup, swinging your right leg over the back of the horse.’ A bit of an effort, this, but it was how I was taught to get on to a boy’s bicycle and I found I still could. ‘Put your right foot into the stirrup on the other side, and settle into the saddle.’

I write this from Colombia where I am travelling this month and about which I shall hope to write for the Times. Picture me in the yard of a little farmstead, gaily painted, with high ceilings and old-fashioned verandas: the Finca San Jose, in a nature reserve on the lower slopes of the valley of the Corcora river which rushes down from the snows of a range of volcanoes between Bogota and the Pacific, themselves an immense national park, the Parc los Nevados.