Spending the summer like a Sioux
Madeleine Pickens is responsible for our wanting to sleep in a tent under the Nevada sky. This philanthropist (whose biography is the most entertaining) is behind the Saving America´s Mustang foundation. Her obsession was/is the conservation of Mustangs, the country's wild horses. She first bought the land and then decided to create an eco-resort , the Mustang Monument Eco Retreat to share it with others.
It could have been a hotel, a ranch, but it's not some kind of Indian camp that seeks the immersion of the traveler in the culture of the Mustang and the Wild West . There, in more than two hundred hectares, horses live and we can live for a few days. Let's explain this how exotic and so john ford It sounds like us, ordinary Spaniards.
The interior of the rooms, fully cared for
Mustang Monument has just opened with a goal very alienated from the feeling of guilt that many North Americans have regarding the culture of the Indians of their country. This place seeks understanding of a culture relegated and made up by fiction . Also a nostalgic and stylized experience. Conscience washing and search for extreme experiences at a thousand dollars a night.
In this eco-site you will find outside of Wells, Nevada , a small town of 1,200 inhabitants that was a stop on the routes to the West. At Mustang Monument you sleep in tents , in the so-called tipis or teepees. In them you sleep in large beds with thread sheets. They have a butler 24 hours a day walking on the wooden floors decorated with handmade rugs. This is not how the natives or cowboys lived, but it is the hook with the world of luxury that the traveler who dares with this type of experience expects.
A breakfast with a western flavor
This is as far as rest is concerned. But you will also have to eat at this ecoresort. Of course, the menus recover recipes and flavors of this culture that join other more contemporary ones; they are served in good dishes in the moonlight while the cowboys play ballads. We easily imagined the situation because as children we watched many westerns.
And, what is done in this curious All-Inclusive? Horseback riding would be the idea, but you can also watching horses, watching others ride, or whispering in their ears . also do desert safaris, wagon tours, enjoy a spa treatment according to traditional customs or attend rodeo classes. Or if what we want is to get excited around the corner, we can learn to make our own moccasins. All this is told well in that friendly window to the world that is Instagram.
In the heat of the fire
This ecoresort reproduces the kind of experiences that Kenya has so perfected: integrate luxury with the local culture and provide bursts of integration with the environment ; seek, even for a few days, empathy with an unknown culture. Calling a tendency to sleep in an Indian camp is audacity. There is no sign of it spreading in this traveling or cultural or eco (or whatever you want to call it) exercise because it is something very geographically localized.
However, the experiences they seek are consolidated immersion in foreign environments with the alibi of his protection. Let's call it postcolonial tourism, postpostmodernist or simply, desire to do something different, without so much borrowed prefix . But let's not be cynical: we'd all like to spend a few days at Mustang Monument and come home knowing how to handle the lasso in some homemade moccasins.
*You may also be interested...
- Glamping: the five-star campsite
- Crazy plans for a crazy summer
- Ode to the roadside motel
- All suitesurfing
Welcome to Wild Wild West