Michael Bruno

Review of Spice Adventure

My wife and I did the Gobi Desert tour in 2019. Un...

My wife and I did the Gobi Desert tour in 2019. Unfortunately at the time of this review it was apparent that Spice Roads had not actually experienced the details of this excursion and as a result the description on the website is very inaccurate and I feel slightly misleading. For context, my wife and I are very athletic, outdoorsy people and also have mountain biking experience in the USA. At the time this would have been our first multiple night off road bike tour. I waited a few months before writing this to see if after some time and more days on a mountain bike back home would change my mind about the bad parts.

The Good: Excellent and experienced guides, food was very good and clean (no one got sick), beautiful scenery (amazing stars at night!), we also got very lucky with the weather overall (August).

The Bad: Some thing to be aware of that I feel is not advertised: the terrain is horrible and I feel really spoils the trip. Our trip was ~ 400km and I would say 85% of that is on washboard roads. The areas you go thru see a lot of tourism vans and the unpaved roads suffer tremendously. I would equate the overall experience to riding a jack hammer with wheels on a mostly flat and straight road. The really cool red rock canyon picture on the website is a ~30-45 minute excursion loop thru a park after which you jump back onto the jack hammer roads. Also be aware, that red rock excursion would be graded a black diamond run in the states for sure as it is very exposed in certain places.

The aftermath: Our entire group (guides included) had sore wrists and bottoms at the end of every day. If you need to test your mental fortitude on your vacation this is the trip for you, although renting a jackhammer on a nice week of weather for 6 hours a day would be much cheaper. If you would rather have a fun mountain biking tour our guides recommended visiting the central and northern parts of Mongolia.

Spice roads was sympathetic in hearing our complaints and did process a partial refund, I would probably try them again but not on a trip that had zero reviews. The fact that they sub-contract some of their trips out means you are going to roll the dice and have to trust the description on the website.