Eighteen years ago this week, my wife Alicia and I packed the last of our belongings into the loft of our house in London and left for a new life in Argentina with our two year old son Calixto.
We started by opening the big house we’d bought a few years earlier to the public, turning it into a B&B, and later, after a few trips with guests, set up Poncho Tours.
When I first came to north west Argentina in 2000, I had been stunned by the variety of landscape in an area which had been completely off my radar; and, to judge by the paucity of non-Spanish speakers in earshot, was equally alien to most travellers around the world.
As those of you who have visited will know, there are different experiences in every direction: whether you go east into the sub-tropical Calilegua Cloud Forest (from where you can cross into the wine region of Bolivia), west into the mountain plateau and across the Andes to the Atacama desert of Chile, north through the multi-coloured rockscape of the Quebrada de Humahuaca and crossing the border to the biggest salt flats in the world, Uyuni in Bolivia: or south along the world’s highest altitude wine route through the Valles Calchaquies and on to Mendoza.
This year our English-speaking driver/guides have done more days on the road than in any other year since we started: 255. Though 70% of our guests come from the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and Italy (in that order), since 2008 we’ve had visitors from 51 different countries across the world, as far afield as Kazakhstan, Slovenia, Russia, Japan, China, Singapore and India.
And that’s despite spending nil on advertising, simply uploading photos to Instagram every week or so, and writing my monthly blog.
This is an area we will always come back to and will always call home (Alicia, after all, was born in Salta city and her father is from Cachi), but now we have the travel bug and there are so many countries to discover while we’re still (relatively!) young.
We will be passing Poncho Tours on to the next generation: that may be someone who already works with us, a fellow tour operator, or it may even be a former guest who enjoyed their trip. It could be anyone looking for a new life in a wonderful country.
Who it will be we’ve yet to discover, but the early months of 2026 will be a transition to new owners; one thing we will want to be sure of is that they will keep the original spirit: personalised contact, tailor-made tours… and whatever you do, don’t rush the experience!
Poncho Tours has always been a lifestyle more than a business for us.
I hope my first blog of 2026 will be with more news about the future for Poncho Tours. Meanwhile, Happy New Year to you all!