Explorer, author, trail prospector & travel writer

The story of the volunteers hacking a 3,000km path across the Caucasus Mountains

I recently penned this 1,500-word piece for Horizon Guides, whose founder Matt I’ve known for many years. Their mission is to expand our understanding of the world through guides, journals and curated travel experience – a mission that has much in common with my own.

There is no particular blueprint for creating a long-distance hiking route across a region fragmented by closed borders and frozen conflicts. This is perhaps the biggest challenge faced by the tribe of people who are gripped by the seemingly impossible task of building the Transcaucasian Trail.

If there’s a characteristic that unites us, it’s that of starry-eyed idealism – a kind of faith that there exists a distant future in which this 3,000km-long trail is complete. This is not a quality that would get you very far in a job interview with an international development agency. But it is an important reminder – when we’re down at the level of budgets and procurement plans for trail-building tools and signposts – that what we are working on is not a project. It is a dream.

Read the rest of the article at horizonguides.com.


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