Eduardo Nogueira

I have worked in tourism for fourteen years, building products for South America. One thing I'll say straight away, because somebody would find out sooner or later: I don't ride a motorcycle myself and I'm not behind a wheel either. My work starts long before the first stage and it only stops once the group is home again.

Whether it is motorcycle travel, a 4x4 expedition or a mountaineering expedition, none of it is made out on the track. It is made in months of preparation. I pick the partners on the ground, negotiate the terms, check the permits and put the stages together so that they actually work in the season they are sold for. If a route in April and the same route in October are two different tours, that belongs in the program and should not come as a surprise halfway through.

So I talk to the people a tour like this really depends on: the workshops, the drivers, the cooks, the places we sleep and the authorities. Spanish and Portuguese alongside German and English are not a line on my resume, they are the tool. One phone call in the local language settles in a few hours what an email takes three weeks to do.

I don't stay at my desk for that, though. I go along with groups on the ground and look after how the tour runs, the accommodation and the incidents that always come up out there. The guests do the riding. I'm the one making sure that in the evening everything is where it should be, and the one who knows who to call when it isn't.

At altitude one thing counts above all, the pace and the break. Above 4,000 meters it is not riding technique that decides how a day ends, it is the planning beforehand: when a group acclimatizes, how long a stage really takes and where the break belongs. That is my part of the work and I take it seriously.

South America is my main ground, but it is not the whole of my work. I also build products for Europe and I look after our mountaineering expeditions in Peru, in Bolivia and across the rest of the Andean region. In mountaineering there is even less room for guesswork at the planning stage: acclimatization, weather windows, hut capacity and the qualification of the mountain guides decide whether a group reaches the top or does not. What I have set myself for the coming years is simple: build tours that still deliver what the program promises when the wind has been in your face for three days.