An old friend of ours here at Steppe recently launched Travel Local  – a site set up to allow travellers from anywhere in the world to book their trip through a locally owned company in their destination, and to do so with complete confidence (payments are 100% protected). For the traveller it means cheaper, high quality trips and for local companies it allows a greater share in the tourism revenue and, I suspect, a more heightened interest in ensuring that everything goes completely to plan. The site is initally focussing on Asia, and within that Central Asia gets a star billing. Huw Owen, the mastermind behind the company, is a long-time Central Asia-phile and cut his travel teeth working for Audley. Back at Steppe HQ, we get a lot of enquiries from people who want to travel independently in Central Asia and backed by Huw’s confidence I’ll be sending them in Travel Local’s direction in the future. The beauty of working at the local level is that if you want to ride a horse from Samarkand to Bukhara then travel to Chust by bus then cross the border to Kyrgyzstan – they have the flexibility and the know how to help you do it, as well as lots of thoughtfully put together itineraries if you want to travel ‘off the shelf’…