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’ve been based in Mongolia since 2006, and I grew up in Dartmoor, in Devon, where I still spend part of the year. This blog is where those two worlds meet: running Eternal Landscapes Mongolia, a tour operator built around slow, small-scale trips rather than mass tourism; building Eternal Landscapes Dartmoor, celebrating the landscapes and communities on my doorstep; and working out, post by post, what I actually think travel is for. Expect no highlight reel and no big sell. Just honest musings on running two small tourism businesses on opposite sides of the world, and on trying to travel—and live—properly, wherever you happen to be.
A Bit About me
As a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a published guidebook author, and a passionate advocate for meaningful travel, I’m constantly inspired by the connections between people, places, and cultures. I’m also an avid reader, a lover of libraries, and a sea swimmer in a landlocked country, because I believe in finding unexpected ways to connect with nature, wherever I happen to find myself. None of that quite explains why I started writing this blog—only that curiosity, sooner or later, tends to turn into words.
If you’d asked me years ago, my ambition was fairly modest: be a librarian, or run a small coffee shack somewhere on the coast that sold books. (I even picked my glasses because they made me look the part.) Instead, here I am, running a tourism business in landlocked Mongolia—about as far from a coastline, or a library, as it’s possible to get. I’m not a natural businesswoman, and I’ll be the first to admit it. But apparently, that’s how these things go.
Thanks for stopping by—there’s a place here for all of it, and more of the story over on the About page.
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
