5 Years of ATC Expeditions: How it all started
This week, more specifically Thursday, May 21st, 2026, marks 5 years since we ran our very first group expedition.
I still can’t believe it’s already been five years.
When I sit down and think about it, it feels like yesterday that we ran that first expedition.
But at the same time, when I really reflect on everything that has happened since then, I realize it’s actually been a long and crazy journey, with so much happening in between.
Today, I wanted to honestly tell you how it all started.
Against the Compass was originally a travel blog launched in October 2016 by a humble, budget backpacker.
By the way, this year will also mark the 10th anniversary of that launch, and I’ll share a separate story about how the blog itself began.
When I try to picture who I was back then, all I can see now is how naive and inexperienced I was at the time, but I was also incredibly ambitious, probably much more ambitious than I am today.
Anyway, from 2016 until 2020, I traveled 100% full time, living out of a backpack while also blogging full time and trying to build a solid readership.
Traveling during the day and blogging at night every single day, that was my life, and somehow, I made it work.
Then COVID came
To be honest, regardless of the pandemic, after years of full-time traveling, living out of a backpack, and sleeping in dorms, I did need to take an actual physical break from traveling.
Moreover, even though I never stopped blogging, the pandemic made me realize that blogging alone might not be a sustainable way of making a living in the long run.
Therefore, it was time to diversify, try something new and different, and the most logical step for me seemed to be creating a YouTube channel and getting into vlogging.
I did try to get into that, unsuccessfully.
Filming while traveling simply wasn’t for me, not to mention how exhausting it was trying to constantly record yourself while genuinely experiencing a destination.
I wrote about my YouTube experience here.
The one email that probably changed my life
Summer 2020. Still in the middle of the pandemic.
One day, I received an email from a reputable tour operator offering me the opportunity to become a tour leader for one of their trips.
However, the offer involved much more than simply being a tour guide. They also wanted me to take care of the promotion, bring in a group of clients, and build the itinerary.
COVID had hit travel companies pretty badly, so the company was trying to find alternative ways to sell their tours, and hiring someone who already had a decent base of readers and followers seemed like a solid plan.
A legitimate plan, I believe, don’t get me wrong, and that’s why we started the conversation and began working on the project.
Life-changing trip to Mexico
October 2020. I traveled to Mexico.
Few people know that my trip to Mexico in October 2020 was the most life-changing trip of my life.
It was in Mexico where I designed the foundations of Against the Compass Expeditions, created the brand-new logo, and sent the very first email announcing our first-ever tour.
Moreover, I traveled there to visit my Mexican girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen since the beginning of the pandemic.
During the first week of December, the day before flying back home, we found out that she was pregnant.
Little James was born in August 2021. One day, I’ll tell you how unbelievably complicated it was to manage all the paperwork to bring my unmarried, pregnant girlfriend to Spain during the pandemic. She wasn’t able to come until she was already five months pregnant.
Meanwhile, I started working on ATC Expeditions. That little project gave me far more work than I had ever imagined, and the more I worked on it, the more I realized that I was being used by that tour company.
Still, I kept working on it, scheduling the very first expedition to Iraqi Kurdistan for March 2021.
I will always remember the morning I was sitting in my in-laws’ kitchen when I wrote that newsletter and clicked “Send” with a shaking finger.
To my surprise, however, the tour sold out in less than 24 hours.
ATC Expeditions had been born.
The fear when it suddenly became real
To many people, it may sound like something insignificant, just a tour being launched.
But on a personal level, it felt like a giant step for me.
For years, I had been working quietly behind a screen, writing articles, posting photos, replying to comments, and sharing stories from off-the-beaten-track destinations.
But this was very different.
For the first time, there would be a group of real people flying in from different parts of the world with expectations entirely placed on me. Some had spent years reading my content and trusting my tips, and now they were trusting me with their time, money, and overall experience.
I was terrified, with a level of pressure I had never experienced before, almost like the feeling right before speaking in public, except even worse.
What if they hated the trip?
That fear stayed with me right until the expedition actually began.
Second COVID wave
Shortly after announcing and selling that tour, the second COVID wave arrived, which made Iraqi Kurdistan shut down its borders.
I told you…
Everyone thought I was crazy for trying to launch a travel company during COVID.
To be fair, they had a point, but I didn’t want to give up. Selling that very first tour had been relatively simple, and I knew for certain that travelers were desperate to travel again, and I wanted to be 100% ready for that day to come.
Against all odds, I decided to postpone the trip to May 2021, two months later.
Most people from the original group had canceled, so I had to look for new travelers to join our adventure amid all the uncertainty that was still going on.
It was only at that stage that I thought:
Why not do it myself?
I was building a proper itinerary, promoting the tour across my platforms, and taking care of all the bookings.
It was a huge amount of valuable work, for which I was being paid peanuts.
I already had good contacts in Kurdistan, including my friend and local guide Karwan, so once the original March group had been canceled, there was no real reason for me to keep working with that tour company.
I called my friend Karwan, told him about bringing a group in May, and the rest is history.
May 2021, the best ATC group ever
May 21st, 2021. We ran the very first Against the Compass Expedition, bringing together a group of 8 people from different parts of the world.
It was the best and most fun group ever.
To this day, I still keep in touch with all the participants from that expedition, and 6 out of the 8 have joined multiple trips with us since then, including Nick White, who has been on 11 expeditions and counting, Kevin Martinico, who has joined 7, and Monica Cossio, who has traveled with us 6 times.
The years after
After that trip, I flew back home with my mind and heart filled with all sorts of emotions.
I was incredibly happy, not only because we had successfully run our very first expedition, but because I genuinely loved being there with the group.
For the first time, I realized the true potential of what we were building, and how it could eventually grow into an actual community.
Turning down a dream job
At the same time, when I got back home, I received an offer to write the new edition of Lonely Planet Barcelona, which I genuinely accepted without hesitation.
It took me a few months of very intense work to finish that little project, and it was only after completing it that they offered me the opportunity to write the new main edition of Lonely Planet Spain.
I honestly didn’t know what to do.
Writing the Barcelona guide had already consumed all of my time and energy.
The Lonely Planet Spain assignment would have been on a completely different level.
Becoming a professional travel writer or starting a travel company?
I definitely couldn’t do both.
The Lonely Planet project involved several months of intense work and would almost certainly have led to many more opportunities afterward.
But ATC Expeditions also required my full attention, and now that I could finally see its true potential, it wasn’t something I wanted to postpone.
That’s why, very painfully, I turned down the new Lonely Planet writing assignment and instead scheduled two more tours to Kurdistan for November 2021.
The community is the most powerful thing
And the story was pretty much the same: two beautiful and incredibly fun groups of people, many of whom I still keep in touch with today, while others have since joined multiple expeditions with us.
In 2022, we expanded into several new destinations, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Federal Iraq, and Mauritania. That same year, I also created a separate website for our expeditions: expeditions.againstthecompass.com, a subdomain of the original site.
In 2022, both Leti and Rhenzy joined the team. Oriol joined in 2023, Tamara and Pau in 2024, and Jessa in 2026.
All these years have felt like a marathon: working every single day, constantly trying to grow the project, but most importantly, trying to build a community of travelers who somehow all feel identified with the spirit of Against the Compass.
There have been many ups and downs along the way.
At times, I’ve felt, and I still sometimes feel, like quitting and dedicating my time to something else.
Also, remember that while building all this, I was also learning how to be a father, so these past few years have felt like building two things at the same time: a travel company and James, with whom I have already been to 24 countries.
But the ATC community, and all the travelers I’ve met throughout these years, are the one and only reason why I keep going and why I still feel motivated to make Against the Compass bigger.
Thank you for being part of it.
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