Ordinary Day On An Amazing Adventure

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!