Giddy up!

Yankee Doodle may have gone to town riding on a pony, but you can get out of town in your Jeep Compass. Just follow the hooves

- Aninda Sardar

“WE ONLY DO TRAIL RIDES ON weekends,” said Kunal Boyatkar of Pune Equestrians. It had all started as a random idea that has snowballed into a story idea for the magazine. Could you be man enough to take a Jeep Compass to places a horse could go? Questions and challenges, like a couple’s quarrel, should never be left unresolved. The Compass would have to prove its mettle by going on a journey alongside a horse. So, after an hour on Google and another one of squabbling with the team, I had tracked down Pune Equestrians. On their website they offered trail rides and camping.

As a child hooked on to good ol’ westerns that Hollywood churned through to the mid-1970s at a rate that could put an assembly line to shame, I remember reading an article on trail riding in Reader’s Digest. It used to be the go to rag for curious children looking for info beyond their world long before the ’Net became a worldwide web.

At the time, trail riding had seemed like a particularly adventurous thing to do. Riding through trails on horseback in the age of the automobile, somewhere in the wilds of Canada had an appeal that couldn’t really be put in words. I wondered if I would ever get the opportunity to go on a trail ride.

A quarter of a century later, with the iconic whistle and guitar tune of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly playing on the Jeep Compass’ 7-inch Uconnect touchscreen infotainment via Android Auto, I was chasing dust somewhere in the rocky hills behind Pune. I still can’t ride a horse but I couldn’t help admiring the muscled flanks of Rajvansh and Prince, the two stallions from Pune Equestrians, as they galloped ahead of the equally muscled and grand looking Compass that I was in.