About Us
Mongolian horse trekking. Adventure travel. Wild Stride. Mongolia. Horse riding.
Our Story
We are Luke and Munkh-Od, two friends, with a passion for adventure and a lust for life. We met in 2017 during a tour Munkh-Od was leading in Central Mongolia. The two of us got on instantly both sharing a fascination for the Mongolian countryside and a love of meeting new people.
When we met, Munkh-Od had already been working as a freelance tour guide for the past five years. He had built up a strong reputation as a knowledgeable guide and developed some great ideas for tours he wanted to run himself. Luke had left the Reserve Army and University a few years previously and was travelling and organising expeditions around the world whenever he could. It was clear to both of us that what we wanted to do in life was share our love of adventure and Mongolia was a perfect place to do it.
The tours currently on offer were great but we both felt they didn’t take full advantage of the vast playground of wild spaces Mongolia had to offer. They lacked a sense of adventure and many were copy-and-paste versions of one another. We wanted to offer something different, to add a sense of freedom to explore and a feeling of being accepted into Mognolia’s unique culture. For this reason, we started Wild Stride.
Our goal was to offer tours with more activities and more adventure than anyone else. To get more immersed in the culture and go deeper into the wild places. We would do this by involving local tour guides and people in the planning of our tours using local knowledge to inform our planning and using our connections to get us access to little-known secrets. Munkh-Od’s years of tour guiding and unique charisma would pay off by providing the connections we needed. Luke’s ability and enthusiasm for planning expeditions would give us the confidence to try something new.
We now offer a range of carefully selected departures that we believe showcase the best of Mongolia with plenty of opportunity for you to create your own adventures. We also offer bespoke tours where we listen to your ideas and create custom options for your enjoyment. In the past, we have created cycling tours like the Tour De Nomad and Cycyle Mongolia and we have worked with film-makers to plan BASE jumping world records that will hopefully get funding in the near future. This country is a massive and mostly unexplored wild playground so let us know if you have any ideas.
Mongolia is an extraordinary place and we aim to give you a truly unforgettable experience so book your tour today!
What do we stand for?
Ethical tourism
Climate change and global industrialisation is making life harder for Mongolian herders to survive. Fortunately ethical tourism is having a really positive impact which is why Wild Stride has partnered up with local communities in Central and Northern Mongolia to provide authentic and responsible travel. Some of the skills and knowledge the people we work with posses has been passed down over thousands of generations and by running tours that celebrate their culture we hope to preserve their way of life long into the future. We are fortunate to be supported by such great people and grateful that we have been accepted into their lives with such love.
Protecting the environment + Carbon Balancing
Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints and kill nothing but time. We take all of our rubbish with us, none of the wildlife is harmed and we respect the local people’s way of life. Our tours are designed to help you get in touch with nature, which is why we do our best to run low-impact tourism that supports the local wildlife and people. Mongolia is changing but by inviting tourists to experience some of its most beautiful wilderness we hope to preserve as much as we can. To combat the effect of travel to Mongolia we are engaged in the Mongolia Nomad Project with C-Level that balances the carbon emissions through encouraging sustainable grazing and planting of trees.
Animal welfare
Mongolians have a deep love for nature. It is obvious in their art, music and how they identify themselves. All of the animals we use in our tours are well-treated. The horses we use are semi-wild and roam free under the supervision of the nomadic herders for most of the year. It’s a wonderful life for the horses in this land they are perfectly adapted to. Many can end up getting quite fat in the fertile northern regions and the exercise of being ridden can be good for them, keeping them fit and healthy. The reindeer and other herd animals also have it pretty good. The Tsaatan like many other traditional herders show immense respect to their reindeer, protecting and nurturing their herds. This level of respect for their herds is universal amongst nomadic herders as for many their animals are their livelihood. The respect for nature also extends to the wild where local councils help to manage and protect the local wildlife with local herders by controlling predator populations and preventing poaching to keep populations stable.
More on how we balance the Carbon cost of our tours!
Many of our operations in Mongolia are relatively low in their carbon cost, our preferred methods of travel are horseback or cycling, we eat primarily local produce and have the beautiful landscapes of Mongolia to entertain us. However, in order to get to this low carbon paradise, we do understand that many travelers may have to come from far away, and doing so has its own Carbon costs. When we first started Wild Stride this was a concern for us and we looked into ways in which we could cover this cost by reinvesting into the places we loved. That is how we came across the Mongolian Nomad Project. The project aims to capture carbon and return it to the soil as well as supporting sustainable Nomadic ways of life that have preserved the natural landscape for hundreds of generations.
So now every time we run a tour we calculate how much carbon that tour took to run and we reinvest that cost into supporting the local people we work with and preserving the natural environment we inhabit. Win-win!
If you would like to find out more about the project you can visit the website @ http://www.clevel.co.uk/mongolian-nomad-project/
If you would like to know more about us then please get in touch for a chat.