Twenty-five years, and the same conversation every time.

It began with a broken axle and a family who fed us anyway.

The first season was four tourists, one Russian van and a route I had convinced myself I knew. We lost a day to an axle two hundred kilometres from anywhere. A herding family put five strangers in their ger, fed us, and refused every attempt to pay.

That is not an unusual story here. It is close to the ordinary experience of travelling in Mongolia, and it is the reason the company exists. Nothing quite prepares you for being looked after by people who stand to gain nothing from it.

Twenty-five years on I have taken groups into the Altai in February, across the Gobi in July, up the Khangai on horses and north into the taiga on foot when the ground would not take a vehicle. I still lead several journeys a year. A route you have not travelled recently is a route you do not really know.

Diplomats, film crews, families, palaeontologists.

Over twenty-five years the passenger list has included ambassadors and their security details, television crews with more cases than seats, a violinist who wanted three weeks of silence, researchers counting argali, and a great many ordinary families who had read one book and could not let it go.

They want different things and they are told different things before they come. What happens to them once they are out past the last road is remarkably consistent.

The country makes everyone the same size.

This is the part I did not expect when I started, and the part I would now say is the whole point.

Mongolia does not care who anyone is. A cabinet minister and a graduate student get the same wind, the same track, the same hour of waiting while a driver works on a wheel. Titles matter less with every hour you travel, and within about three days almost nobody is using them.

Then comes the second thing, and it is always the same. Somebody they had no claim on takes them in — pours the tea, gives up a bed, sends them off with food for the road. Guests go home able to describe that hour in detail years later. Very few of them can remember which day they saw which monastery.

The landscape is what gets people here. The scale of it, the emptiness, the light at either end of the day. But it is never what they talk about afterwards. They talk about being made small by the country and then made welcome by the people in it, and about how strange and good it is to feel both at once.

Every journey on this site is built to protect that, which is why the driving hours are honest, the households are paid properly, and the welcome you receive is a real one. How we work → · Who runs this →