Want Serious Bragging Rights? Do a Road Trip Across Borneo

Most people can’t pinpoint Borneo on a map, and even well-traveled friends who learned about my trip didn’t realize it’s divided between three different nations. Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia all share the island, one of the world’s largest, which bridges the South China Sea and the South Pacific and sits between the Philippines and Indonesia’s Java and Sumatra. The name Borneo itself is as evocative as Papua New Guinea or São Tomé and Príncipe, places that you’ve maybe seen in an old National Geographic and figured you’d never visit.

To be honest, it was never on my list either, until I met the founder of Nomadic Road, a travel company that intends to open up the most remote corners of the world with obsessively planned driving expeditions. He’s been leading guests across Mongolia, through the Icelandic countryside, and to Mount Everest base camp in convoys of 4x4s like Land Rover Defenders and Ford Rangers. “The vehicle is part of the experience, but it isn’t the experience,” Venky says. “Every destination has a different set of wheels.”

Paul was the articles editor of Condé Nast Traveler. We met him at Pure Life Experiences, a global marketplace for the high-end experiential travel. Ever since he came to know about Nomadic Road, he was excited to be part of our expedition and finally made it to Borneo with us. He was accompanied by Tom Parker, an official photographer from Conde Nast.

You can read about the complete adventure what Paul had with us out here.