Dream Travel
My husband and I (Americans, so we have no other posts on Trustpilot UK!) have done multiple tours with Nataliya since 2018, including Ukraine (twice), Georgia, Romania, Morocco, and Kyrgyzstan.
We have already booked her Moldova tour for next October, and are crossing fingers she will consider doing the tour of Herefordshire we suggested.
We don’t even know or care about the itinerary, we just know, if our “travel fairy” Nataliya organizes it, it will be a dream trip, well worth going on. As soon as she says “I’m thinking of going to…”, we just tell her “add us!”.
Nataliya’s trips are outstanding. The lady had a little black book of international
connections, a taste for the offbeat,
and a zest for “that looks interesting, let’s look!” that just blows my mind.
I wish I could point to a favorite trip, but it’s hard. They’ve all been so unique and totally different, and utterly special.
However, the last one to Kyrgyzstan? It was like stepping through the mirror into a place that was both wonderfully familiar, yet totally alien. Stepping back through the mirror to resume our “normal” lives has left me nostalgic. I keep scrolling through my photos of our adventure. The textiles, the eagle hunter, the yurts, the tables groaning with food. The lovely, lovely people we met there. Kyrgyz are so full of joy. So much more so than “western” countries.
I have a particular interest in textiles. On trips with Nataliya, we each woven a rug (a REAL rug, not some trinket you’d stick on a dresser), my husband has done Ukrainian woodworking, I’ve learnt embroidery techniques with a young man who was an absolute master of the craft. We’ve felted in yurts, seen private collections everywhere we’ve gone, visited weavers and master craftspeople in their homes. Buying rugs straight off the side of a mountain in isolated rural Morocco was an adventure. Slipping away and spending time with one of the weavers, who laughingly let me have a go at her loom- while her sister baked fresh bread in the adjacent mud oven-well, you don’t get that on other tours.
Oh, the food!!!! Glorious, glorious food! Did I mentioned heaving tables? We’ve eaten nettle soup (only edible one week every year!) in the high Caucasus mountains; milked a cow, separated the cream, and helped make sun-dried fermented yogurt balls (popular and nutritious nomadic food). We’ve stuffed our faces with incomparably sweet Romanian tomatoes. Eaten feasts cooked by a magician who used only a camp stove. Been lovingly served handmade seffa on a covered pergola in a dreamlike, perfumed garden. The food is varied, delicious, farm-to-table, and extraordinarily generous. Dear heaven, I dream about that seffa still. Everywhere I travel, I search for seffa in hopes of finding it on a menu. No luck.
Accomodations on various trips have ranged from very basic (but clean and comfortable, and did I mention the food?!!!) guesthouses to dreamlike riyads that were straight out of Scherezade. When you are traveling in extremely rural (part of the delight and joy of Nataliya’s trips!) you do need to be flexible. If you want 5-Star tourist accommodations with pool and jacuzzi, go somewhere else. If you want friendly hosts and food that exceeds anything you can imagine, book here.
I’d also like to mention, unusual tours also attract unusual guests. We’ve met some really lovely guests, had wonderful guides, and minibus/dinner conversation never falls flat.
Also, when we asked for an extension in Kyrgyzstan to attend the World Nomad Games, Nataliya arranged a private guide and housing for us. We were shocked to learn that “private guide” meant she was with us 24/7, helping us with transport, attending the Games with us, translating, and even making us oatmeal and plying us with Kyrzyg milk tea when we were both under the weather. That was just above and beyond on both Nataliya’s, and, later, our guide’s part.
I cannot recommend Nataliya’s tours highly enough. I normally post over on TripAdvisor (nom de plume Springlering, if you want to make sure I’m a legit reviewer) , and I think I said there, I’m almost hesitant to sing her praises for fear I’ll get shut out of future trips. Once people glom on to how wonderful and reasonably priced these small group tours are, I’m afraid there will be a stampede. There darn well ought to be.
