Walking with the Wind - Tamara Lunger's 3000km solo trek across Mongolia

Tamara Lunger's - Letter of Intent

There comes a moment when the road you’ve followed for years no longer feels like
 the way forward - even if it brought you far.
 For most of my life, I was driven by the pursuit of faster, higher, further. Mountains,
 summits, records - they gave me focus, they gave me purpose. Until the winter of
 2021 on K2, when everything changed.
 That tragedy shook me to the core. I lost five friends. I lost someone I deeply loved.
 And something inside me broke open.
 What came to the surface wasn’t ambition - but vulnerability. I was forced to face a
 part of myself I had never truly welcomed: my feminine, emotional, deeply intuitive
 side.
 From that place of rawness, something new began to grow.

 Now, I find myself needing a different kind of expedition. Not one to conquer
 something - but to meet something within me. To explore not the highest point, but
 the deepest.
 This journey across Mongolia - 3,000 kilometres on foot, with only a camel beside me- is  exactly that. A beginning. A quiet rebellion against speed. A space for balance.
 Because this is not a performance. It’s a question I’m walking with.
 It’s an attempt to unite both worlds I carry:
 The power of achievement - walking through harsh and wild terrain, for ten weeks, in
 often extreme solitude - and the trust in letting go - with only a rough path ahead,
 not tightly planned, and ready to be gently guided by instinct, weather, and the
 rhythm of the land.

This is an invitation to myself to live in balance:
 between ambition and surrender,
 between strength and softness,
 between control and trust.
 I’m no longer interested in chasing milestones.
 Only what brings me joy, peace, and meaning can truly endure.
 And this feels like a fresh start - not rooted in noise, but in silence.
 Out there, in the vastness of the Mongolian steppe, silence becomes deafening, and
 loneliness becomes presence.

 I don’t know what I’ll find.  But I believe this is the heart of real adventure - not conquest, but calling.  Not to chase a goal - but because something in me needs to move.
 And maybe that’s the fire at the center of all exploration:
 the urge to listen, to follow, to become.
 So I go.
 With respect.
 With openness.
 With every step, closer to the unknown.

Tamara Lunger, August 2025