Who are we?
Personal, Passionate, Professional
Silk Road Adventures is run from Wales, UK, by husband and wife team Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent and Marley Burns. 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.
We spend months travelling and working in Central Asia and the Caucasus each year and are passionate about giving you an authentic, life-affirming experience. Not only do we offer a highly-personal service, but the unanimously positive feedback from our guests tells us we must be doing something right.
Our trips have been featured in the New York Times, Financial Times, Sunday Times and many more, and we have taken celebrities, journalists and BBC television crews to Tajikistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
We are also people who care deeply about nature. Not only do we strive to connect as many of our guests as possible with local wildlife conservation efforts, but we also make sure every guest who travels with us gets an annual membership of Mossy Earth, a fantastic nature restoration organization. As of 2025, we include a £100 Nature Restoration Fee in every booking, with this money matched by us at the end of each year and then donated to nature conservation charities in the countries we operate in.
Find out more about us and why you should choose Silk Road Adventures here.
Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
Antonia is a writer and broadcaster with a background in setting up extreme and complex expeditions all over the world.
Her love of 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 Northeast 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 more, and writes for numerous publications, including The Financial Times and The Guardian. She’s also made a number of BBC radio documentaries, many of them about Central Asia.
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 or find her on Instagram at @AntsBK.
Marley Burns
Marley has long been fascinated by the Silk Road’s many sub-plots, including the Great Game era and travellers such as Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, 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 and, in ‘Life Before Silk Road’ he lived and worked as a renewable energy consultant in Nepal, and circumnavigated the Black Sea on a pair of 90-cc mopeds with Antonia after winning the 2010 Wilderness Awards.
Over the years, Marley has led many expeditions, including countless trips by motorcycle, in almost every part of Central Asia and the Caucasus, plus Iran and Jordan. He has ridden the Pamir Highway (and related routes) more than 25 times, and gravel-biked it once. He thinks he could identify almost every bend in the road.
He's equally happy off motorbikes, however, and has led trips on foot, by horse and on bicycles. Notably, he co-led the first north-to-south walking expedition of the West Bank in 2017, completed a world-first trip along the Amu Darya river from the Aral Sea to it’s source in Afghanistan in 2018, and has led several winter expeditions to find Snow leopards in Tajikistan, sometimes encountering temperatures of minus 45°C.
Planning complex trips is where Marley's interest lies, so you will know you are in safe hands with him involved. This is why the BBC, Financial Times, Overland Magazine and many others have trusted his judgement over the years.
Marley has been trained in First Aid and Trauma Medicine by the excellent team at Crux Medical. On an expedition he is rarely far from our satellite phone and medical kit. He’s good at avoiding crises but a perfect person to have around if one occurs.
Experts on the Silk Road
We are experts on travel in Central Asia and the Caucasus regions, and have been running tours in the region since 2015.
In a world of generalists, we are specialists who deal exclusively with designing trips and tours along the Silk Road. Both Antonia and Marley travel every year to our destinations, so you get first-hand knowledge that has been built-up over more than a decade of personal travel in the region.
With us, it’s personal - many bigger companies send a staff member on a single ‘familiarization’ trip to a country, and this makes them the in-house expert. We really know these countries, and we feel that knowledge sets us apart.
A handful of our tours each year are still led by Marley or Antonia. Others are led by carefully-chosen experts – authors, film-makers, well-known adventurers, conservationists, UN consultants – or our 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.
Small and Friendly
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 12 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 fire – and never a microphone or flag-waving guide in sight.
First and foremost, we believe that travel should be fun – it’s our mission to deliver experiences with plenty of character.
A Curious Approach to Travel
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.
Connecting Continents
In a world of growing fear and 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.
Positive Impact
We care deeply about nature. Not only do we strive to connect as many of our guests as possible with local wildlife conservation efforts, but we give every guest an annual membership of Mossy Earth, a fantastic nature restoration organization. As of 2025, we include a £100 Nature Restoration Fee in every booking, with this money matched by us at the end of each year and then donated to nature conservation charities in the countries we operate in.
Tailor-Made Experiences
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.
