AIM SILK ROAD EXPERT LLC

Vivien, UK: Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan 2019

We are a husband and wife team, working from our home office in mid-Wales, UK. Inveterate travellers, we’ve been exploring the threads of the Silk Road since 2007. We’re proud to be specialists, not generalists, and strive to be the best, rather than the biggest.

With us, you will always deal personally with one of our two directors. We intimately know our destinations and are passionate about giving you an authentic, life-affirming experience.

We offer a highly-personal service that you won’t find elsewhere, and the unanimously positive feedback from our guests tells us we must be doing something right.

Antonia – often known as Ants – is a record-breaking traveller, writer, public speaker and broadcaster with a background in setting up extreme and complex expeditions all over the world. She has worked and travelled in over 50 countries. You can read Antonia’s Wikipedia entry here.

Her penchant for extreme travel began in 2006, when she drove a pink tuk tuk 12,500-miles from Bangkok to Brighton with her friend Jo. They set the world record for the longest journey ever by auto rickshaw, wrote a best-selling travel book “Tuk Tuk to the Road” and won Cosmopolitan Magazine’s “Fun, Fearless Female award.”

During four years at The Adventurists, Antonia was a founding director of the Mongol Derby, the world’s longest multi-horse race, organised the Africa Rally from London to Cameron and nearly froze to death attempting to drive a Ural to the Russian Arctic in mid Winter.

She’s written three books, including: A Short Ride in the Jungle, about her solo exploration of the remains of Indochina’s Ho Chi Minh Trail, and Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains, about her travels across the remote and little-known Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. The latter was runner-up Adventure Travel Book of the Year in the 2018 Stanford’s Travel Writing Awards. 

Antonia was formerly a TV producer. Among her credits are BBC2’s Worlds’ Most Dangerous Roads, ITV’s Tom Hardy’s Poaching Wars, Joanna Lumley’s India and Joanna Lumley’s Silk Road.

She’s spoken at The Royal Geographical Society, the Adventure Travel Show, The Financial Times Festival and many more, and writes for numerous publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph and Radio 4’s From our Own Correspondent. Her first radio documentary, about conservation in Nagaland, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2020.

Antonia is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and  was the recipient of the 2019 Neville Shulman Challenge Award, using the grant to fund a two-month solo expedition across the Naga Hills.

To find out more about Antonia see her website The Itinerant or find her on Twitter and Instagram @AntsBK.

Marley is the MD of Silk Road Adventures, keeping the books balanced and the show on the road.

Marley has been researching and reading about the history of the greater Silk Road network for many years and has travelled along many of its strands. He’s also fascinated by the route’s many sub-plots, including the Great Game era and travellers such as Marco Polo, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Combined with a natural curiosity about language and a desire to explore anything quirky or off the map, the lands of the Silk Road are his idea of heaven.

Passionate about off-beat travel, Marley has travelled extensively in the Middle East, South East Asia and Central Asia.  In ‘Life Before Silk Road’ he lived and worked as a renewable energy consultant in Nepal, ran some large renewable energy companies, dragged two tonnes of mobile sauna around eastern Europe several times (in the name of fun) and circumnavigated the Black Sea on a 90-cc moped with Antonia after winning the 2010 Wilderness Awards.

Travel featured early in his career with a stint at well-respected publisher Sawdays, writing about special places to stay. Marley still delights in finding the most characterful, comfortable and welcoming accommodation in each country he visits.

Marley is an extremely experienced road and off-road motorcycle rider and has been leading motorcycle expeditions for many years.

As the principle Silk Road Adventures ‘doctor’, Marley has been trained in First Aid and Trauma Medicine by the excellent team at Crux Medical, and is exceptionally good at dealing with medical problems and crises. On an expedition he is rarely far from our satellite phone and medical kit.

Marley speaks once-fluent French and German and is in the process of learning Russian too.

An experienced public speaker, Marley has spoken at numerous travel and adventure shows, and is also a regular contributor to Overland magazine.

Anthony and Ommar, UK : Georgia and Azerbaijan, 2019

We pride ourselves on being a friendly company who make an effort to get to know all of our guests personally. We aim to meet all of our tailor-made guests in person and, if that’s not possible, we’re always at the other end of the telephone or an email.

The same mentality applies to our small group tours. We only travel in intimate groups of ten or less, and many of our guests become lifelong friends – both of ours and with each other. With such small groups, there’s always plenty of room for everyone around the yurt fire – and never a microphone or flag-waving guide in sight..

We love the quirky, the creative, the surprising and the unusual – those hidden corners and untold stories in the wrinkles and creases at the edge of the map. And we want to show you these places too.

You won’t find us among the hordes at tourist hot-spots; we’ll be around the corner having tea with a local baker or nosing around those ruins over the hill.

That’s probably something to do with our background in journalism and TV production. Each and every turn that we take on our trips is informed by expert research, and inspired by our taste for the unusual.

A lot of our guests travel on tailor-made trips that are designed to suit their own style of travel. Perhaps you want to explore Uzbekistan’s Silk Road Cities, visit Georgia’s natural wineries or go snow-leopard spotting in Central Asia. Whatever you wish to do, and however you would like to do it, we can make it happen..

In a world of growing distrust, we want to be a travel company that builds bridges. On our tours we drink toasts with nomadic families in Kyrgyzstan, eat belt-breaking feasts in Georgian villages and hear folk songs around camp fires in Tajikistan’s Wakhan valley.

Our guests return home with an arsenal of new friends and a renewed connection to the world beyond their own shores. Time and again our guests tell us how much they love the personal nature of our trips.

As children, we were told stories about the swashbuckling campaigns of Alexander the Great, Babur and Chinggis Khan.

A handful of our expeditions each year are still led by one of our directors, Marley or Antonia. Others are led by carefully-chosen experts – authors, film-makers, well-known adventurers, conservationists, musicians, UN consultants – or tried and trusted local guides.

All of our guides are hugely knowledgeable, brimming with energy and care deeply about the welfare of our guests. They also share our passion about the places, people and stories of the Silk Road.

We started our company in 2015 under the name Edge Expeditions. That year, we ran our first expedition in remote Tajikistan. Our business was born from passion and enthusiasm for the places we now share with you. Our research is obsessive and never stops. There is always something new to discover.

Nowadays, we’re called Silk Road Adventures and we specialize in Central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus.