Together on the Road of Rural Development through Responsible Tourism
The partnership between our agency Wind of Mongolia and The NGO Ger to Ger started about 6 years ago, when the two men Joël Rauzy and Zanjan Fromer first met. Their ideas of working in tourism are similar in several ways, even though they have taken different ways to achieve them. This story is the best evidence that private sector and non governmental organisation can support each other and work together in tourism.
We collaborate in three different ways: first of all, as an agency, we propose to our clients special trips to explore Mongolia and experience mongolian nomadic life, including in the journey one of the routes of Ger to Ger. Adding the comfort of a driver and a guide dedicated to the travellers, we completely agree in term of how to work with local population and how important is the regulation and control of sending people in the countryside.
As a matter of fact, we want our travellers to really go deeper into the culture, the country, not only go from one place to another superficially without understanding anything. For us as well as for our partners from Ger to Ger, being involved in how we want to travel shows how much we care about the impact, and what we want to experience. Using tourism for other goals than just visiting a country is what offers this collaboration. All our clients, mainly from France had what they were expecting from: living with nomads, respecting their land, their traditions, their privacy also.
We have opened new routes with Ger to Ger, like the blue lake trekking. We had a strong demand in trekking trips, and it sounded perfectly suitable to do it within the spirit of Ger to Ger.
We regularly prospect together new routes through Mongolia, like Selenge horse back riding trip. As a french – mongolian agency, we diversify the kind of people who travel with Ger to Ger, and we constantly talk and work on our products with the feedbacks from travellers, from our professional guides and drivers and all the families we visit.
In other fields also we work hand by hand: we together opened last summer 2007 the three first rock climbing sites and two of them on Ger to Ger’s routes, to combine travelling and climbing!. After this, we naturally created the Mongolian Federation of rock climbing with other partners, to enlarge the practice of this new sport.
We will keep working with Ger to Ger, our main partner here in Mongolia, to encourage our public to travel smart.
The team of Wind of Mongolia
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United States Agency of International Development 
