If I had to define one part of my first trip to Monterrey in January 2018 as ‘touristic’, it’d be our visit to la cascada cola de caballo — the horsetail waterfall.
So-called because, much of the water trickles down over the bedrock rather than plunging straight down like you’d imagine in a typical run-of-the-mill waterfall, creating a sort of ‘frayed’ look, much like an actual horse’s tail.
With just a few days until I was due to fly back to the UK, Kass and some of her closest friends wanted to show me something a little further outside the city, so we headed to Santiago via a highway cut between two of the biggest mountain ranges, parked up, paid 50-ish pesos (a couple of pounds/dollars) to enter the park that the waterfall calls home, and walked to the horsetail.
The footpath — lined with stalls selling shirts, ponchos, hats, bags, purses, artworks, and all number of other wares and tchotchkes — culminated in an outlook that brought the waterfall nearly within arm’s reach, and certainly close enough that you could feel its spray.
This was the day I was introduced to ‘litros’, which literally just means ‘litres’, but specifically refers to cocktails served in huge polystyrene cups that you might typically pick up from roadside spots when heading out of town on the weekend.
Though somewhere like la cascada cola de caballo is a fairly one-and-done affair unless a hobby like hiking or climbing gives you a reason to keep coming back, one of Kass’ longest-time friends shared my interest in photography, and visiting such a picturesque place gave us the perfect excuse to bring our cameras. With just three weeks to get to know Kass’ friends and family (and this is México, so… that amounts to hundreds of people), I was so thankful for little moments of connection like that.
