Stories from the steppe to the sea
Slow travel, wild landscapes, and cold-water swims — from Mongolia’s grasslands to the moors of Dartmoor.
I’m Jess. I first went to Mongolia in 2006 and somehow ended up building a large part of my life there. I grew up on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, and these days I spend more time back there too, helping to care for and support my mum.
This blog is where those two parts of my life meet.
There is Mongolia and the reality of running Eternal Landscapes Mongolia, the small tourism business I co-founded with my Mongolian business partner Turuu. There is Dartmoor, the landscape I grew up with and continue to return to. And there are the things that sit somewhere in between: books, swimming, nature, community, ordinary places, running a business when you don’t particularly think of yourself as a businesswoman, and trying to work out what travel is actually for.
There is no highlight reel and not much of a big sell. Mostly, these are stories and thoughts gathered along the way — from the steppe to the sea, and quite a few places in between.
A Bit About me
I’m a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. I have spent much of my adult life travelling around Mongolia, although I remain just as happy with an Ordnance Survey map on Dartmoor, a library card or a book I can disappear into.
I swim whenever I can. Sometimes that means the sea or a Dartmoor river. Sometimes it means a very cold Mongolian lake. More often than either, it means swimming lengths in a municipal pool in Ulaanbaatar.
I also co-founded Wild Oke, a small community wildlife initiative in my hometown of Okehampton. Spending more time back in Devon has made me pay more attention to what is immediately around me — hedges, rivers, dark skies, gardens and the ordinary wild spaces that are easy to overlook.
If you had asked me when I was younger what I wanted to do, my ambitions were fairly modest. I wanted to be a librarian, or perhaps run a little coffee shack somewhere by the sea that also sold books. I even chose a pair of glasses partly because I thought they made me look suitably librarian-like.
Instead, I ended up co-running a tourism business in landlocked Mongolia.
I am not a natural businesswoman and have never particularly wanted to become one. But building Eternal Landscapes has taught me a great deal about people, place, responsibility, getting things wrong, trying again and the difference between travelling through somewhere and actually paying attention to it.
This site is a place for some of those thoughts, along with the occasional bad karaoke story, cold swim and diversion into whatever book I happen to be reading.
Eternal Landscapes: The Story Behind the Name
The name Eternal Landscapes was created in Bulgan, back in 2010. Now, there are a few towns called Bulgan in Mongolia, but the one I’m referring to is the provincial capital of Bulgan Aimag, located in northern Mongolia. As a tour leader, many of you might have joined me on a visit to the local shop for ice cream (I still fondly remember the day in 2015 when I discovered chocolate mint ice cream in their freezer). Some of you
