There comes a time for every dedicated traveller to blaze a trail of their own on an expedition. We've marked the Kyrgyz summer of 2011 as that time for us.

3 horses, 6 months, 2500km of trail to be blazed. It's a very serious undertaking – one that will take us beyond the pale of regular travel and onto the ancient bridle paths of the Silk Road. We'll be responsible for the safety of the animals we travel with as well as our own necks, and ambassadors to isolated people who rarely, if ever, encounter foreigners. It's not something we're going to enter into lightly, so we've already spent half a year planning and have set tasks for ourselves throughout 2010 to help us get ready for the journey.

There's a plethora of knowledge we need to acquire, language to learn, skills to practice, fitness training and careful preparation to be done. We won't be following a path anyone has taken before.

It won't be our first time travelling in Central Asia, but it will be the first time we'll negotiate the valleys and passes of the Tien Shan, Alay, Ferghana & Pamir ranges with our own horses and without a guide. We've never been so excited or so cautious about planning a journey.

If it sounds like your cup of tea, too, then read on :)

There are only 6 months of the year when this kind of travel is possible (for us) in Kyrgyzstan. Before May and after October the passes are under snow and ice, feed for horses disappears and a terribly cold winter sets in. We would have loved to have attempted the journey this year, but financial considerations (you can read about the expenses involved here) and our desire to be as prepared as possible are holding us back until 2011. Ideally we'll leave towards the end of April and arrive in Karakol for the spring horse sales at the beginning of May. Well need every day of positive temperatures to complete our proposed route.

We've mapped out our route using a combination of Google Earth, Kyrgyz government released road maps, GPS mapping programs and the intricately drawn US army charts (charted by the Russians I assume) of the 1950s. It takes us into river valleys and over passes that have been lost in time to all but those Kyrgyz who still retain their nomadic traditions.

A Google Earth screenshot of the proposed route can be seen above. It includes a detour to Murghab, in the Tajik Pamir, for the At-Chabysh (horse festival). You can read all about the event on this website dedicated to the Kyrgyz horse www.atchabysh.com. We hope that the dates for Murghab At-Chabysh in 2011 will make this possible. In 2010 it will be held in mid-July – perfect timing.

You can also download the Google Earth KMZ file to see the route in detail. There's also this PDF containing a breakdown of the route into sections by distance and how long (approximately) each leg will take to ride.

The full listing of the US army maps we used can be found here: www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/western_siberia/

The best Kyrgyz road map we've found to date is this one (4.5MB jpg)

We're also using the maps found on Garmin's World Maps software.

Excepting the Talas and Chui provinces, the route pretty much consists of a loop around the country. We'll be beginning our journey in Karakol, on the south-eastern tip of Lake Issyk, for a number of reasons. It's a traveller's hub, so English is spoken a little and last time we visited we met many helpful and knowledgeable horsemen. It's easy to get in and out of, not too crowded and pleasant to stay in. It also has the best animal market in Kyrgyzstan on Sundays, so it's where we'll purchase our horses. There's also a beautiful valley nearby where we can take our new horses to get them used to us, and us to them before we really set out on our adventure.

We've backpacked and overlanded and trekked and cruised. Every trip has been wonderful, but it's left us with a hunger for true exploration. We'd been looking for a way to break out into true expeditionary travel but the idea for the Kyrgyz horse expedition didn't really crystallise for a long time

Our first inspiration was the 4 weeks we'd already spent trekking around in 2008. Every horse we rode was special and the goodbyes were hard. They were reliable, trustworthy, strong animals and we longed to bond with them the way the Kyrgyz did with their own horses. The air was fresh and sweet and scented with mountain herbs and every step seemed to uncover new and beautiful wildflowers. The landscapes either soared or stretched into infinity. Nothing was ordinary. It all felt remote, peaceful and so far removed from the crushing complexities of modern city living.

It wasn't until I stumbled across the world's best website for long distance horse travel that I considered a long, unguided ride might be possible in this region however. The Long Rider's Guild contains more inspiration than anyone should reasonably need to get motivated, prepared and enthusiastic. You'll find a website loaded with useful information and the stories of long riders who've risked all and mostly been richly rewarded on their incredible journeys. If you're thinking about a ride of your own, it's an absolute must-read. Not only that, but the guild's webmasters have been terrifically helpful and receptive. With the important proviso that you abide by the guild's very reasonable expectations not to injure or endanger animals unnecessarily, you could even become a member yourself, if you ride more than 1000 miles on horseback.

The clincher was reading the journals of our fellow Australian Tim Cope – a seasoned adventurer / explorer who rode 10,000 miles from Mongolia to Hungary. I won't go into the details of his extraordinary achievement, you should read for yourself on his website.

So what will each day of our journey be like? Of course we won't know until we set out, but we hope it will work something like this:

We plan to cover approximately 25 kilometres a day, 5 days a week, riding between about 7am in the morning and 3pm in the afternoon. Most days will be shorter than 8 hours, but in difficult terrain or where suitable camps are few and far between, they may well be longer.

Leaving camp at 7 will mean being awake before first light. There's a lot to do before we can break camp. We'll need to feed, water and groom the horses, purify water for the day, cook breakfast and wash if we can. Packing up the tent and sleeping gear, tacking up and preparing the pack horse will come next. Saying goodbye to any Kyrgyz friends we've been camping near may be the most time consuming of tasks – goodbyes can get quite emotional when you're a guest in an extremely hospitable country!

We'll try to stop for 10 minutes every hour to check the horses backs, packs and hooves and let them have a quick munch. Lunch will be the snack meal of the day and shouldn't take longer than half an hour.

With luck, sometime mid-afternoon we'll find a place to camp near water with some decent grazing nearby. The process of untacking, unpacking, grooming & watering will begin. Once the tent is up, the horses are comfortable and the gear is stowed away the main work of the afternoon, grazing the horses, will begin, and continue until dinner time. It will also provide us some good opportunities to explore everywhere we stop. Once the horses have full bellies we'll tether them around the camp.

We'll need to make sure that we've consulted the maps & GPS to plan our route for the next day and that dinner has been cooked and eaten before dark. We'll have minimal power and quite a few devices that need charging, so we'll largely be creatures of the sun.

Twice a week, provided we find a nice camp, we'll rest the horses and have a day of catching up on repair chores, re-stocking supplies if we are close to a village, resting and exploring. The best places for these rests might be near some of the famous Kyrgyz hot springs, of which there are many along our route. Perfect for weary bones and bums!