Silk Roads and Salt Flats: Riding Traditions of the Global South and Central Asia
The Riding Collective — Research Study 009
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026
Introduction: The Archive's Blind Spots
In Study 001, I wrote about the grammar that connects riding disciplines — the shared roots that surfers and skaters and snowboarders recognize in each other. In Study 005, I wrote about whose knowledge came first. In Study 008, I promised that the research program would expand beyond its foundational series. This is the first expansion.
It begins with a confession.
The first eight studies are Western-centric. Not accidentally, not because I was unaware, but because I followed the documentary record where it was densest and my access where it was strongest. I said so explicitly in Study 001's methodology notes. That honesty does not excuse the gap. It only names it.
The riding traditions documented in Studies 001 through 008 — surfing in California, skateboarding in Dogtown, snowboarding in Vermont, mountain biking in Marin — are real and important. They are also a fraction of the world's riding culture. While I was interviewing Z-Boys alumni in Venice Beach, Kazakh hunters were riding with golden eagles on the Altai steppe. While I was documenting the economic barriers to surfing in Study 007, teenagers in Senegal were building boards from construction foam and riding waves that no surf magazine has ever photographed. While I was writing about vanishing traditions in Study 002, Mongolian children as young as five were racing horses across forty kilometers of open grassland in a tradition that predates every discipline in the Collective's archive by two thousand years.
The archive cannot claim to represent riding culture while ignoring the majority of the world's riders. This study does not fix that problem. One study cannot. But it opens the door — or more accurately, it acknowledges that the door was always open and we were looking the wrong way.
What follows is not a survey. It is a series of focused investigations into riding traditions that the action sports media ecosystem has systematically ignored: the horsemen of the Central Asian steppe, the camel riders of the Arabian and Saharan deserts, the surfers and skaters of sub-Saharan Africa, the wave riders and road riders of South and Southeast Asia, and the cyclists and skaters of Latin America's interior. Each chapter documents specific people, places, and practices. Each one reveals a riding culture that is older, deeper, or more inventive than anything the Western action sports world has acknowledged.
I traveled to Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Colombia for this study. I conducted thirty-one interviews through translators and twelve without. I made mistakes of cultural understanding that my interviewees corrected with more patience than I deserved. The limitations here are greater than in any previous study — my linguistic access was thinner, my cultural fluency shallower, my time in each location shorter than the subject demanded. These are not chapters that close a conversation. They are chapters that open one.
The Collective's archive currently holds 198 seed records. Fewer than twenty reference any tradition documented in this study. That ratio is the problem this research program exists to correct.
Chapter 1: The Horsemen of the Steppe
Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan
The oldest riding culture on Earth is not in California. It is on the Eurasian steppe, where humans first domesticated horses approximately 5,500 years ago on the Pontic-Caspian grassland, and where the bond between rider and horse has never been broken by industrialization, urbanization, or the invention of the internal combustion engine.
In Mongolia, there are more horses than people. The 2024 national livestock census recorded approximately 4.2 million horses for a human population of 3.4 million. This is not a statistic about agriculture. It is a statement about identity. The Mongolian word for horse, mori, appears in the language's oldest surviving texts. Chinggis Khaan's empire was built from the saddle. The nomadic herding culture that still defines rural Mongolia — families living in gers, moving seasonally across grassland — is organized around horses the way coastal cultures are organized around boats.
The Naadam Festival, held every July in Ulaanbaatar and in smaller regional gatherings across the countryside, is the living center of this culture. Naadam's "three manly games" are wrestling, archery, and horse racing — and the horse racing is unlike anything in the Western equestrian world. The races cover distances of fifteen to thirty kilometers across open steppe. The jockeys are children, typically between five and twelve years old. They ride bareback or with minimal tack, at full gallop, across terrain with no fencing, no track, and no medics stationed at intervals.
I watched the 2025 Tuv Province Naadam from the finish line. The horses came in scattered across a kilometer-wide front, children's faces caked in dust, some of them singing to their horses — a tradition believed to encourage the animal in the final stretch. The winning rider was seven. Her name was Nominerdene. She told me, through a translator, that she had been riding since she was three.
Western observers often frame child jockeys as a human rights concern, and the physical risks are real — falls at speed on open ground are not uncommon. The Mongolian government introduced helmet requirements in 2016 and minimum age rules that are inconsistently enforced outside Ulaanbaatar. But the Mongolian families I spoke with did not frame riding as a risk imposed on children. They framed it as the foundational skill of their culture, taught the way language is taught: early, immersively, and without the presumption that childhood should be separated from the culture's core activities. The parallel to Study 005's documentation of Indigenous riding knowledge is direct. Who decides what is appropriate for a child is, in part, a question about who holds cultural authority.
West of Mongolia, in the Altai Mountains that straddle Kazakhstan and western Mongolia, the Kazakh eagle hunters — berkutchi — practice a riding tradition that has no equivalent anywhere on Earth. A hunter rides a horse across mountainous terrain with a trained golden eagle perched on his arm. The eagle can weigh up to seven kilograms. The rider must control the horse with legs alone while managing a raptor whose wingspan exceeds two meters. The hunt targets foxes and hares across rocky, snow-covered slopes at altitudes above 2,000 meters.
The tradition was nearly destroyed by Soviet collectivization in the 1930s and 1940s, which forced Kazakh nomads onto state farms, confiscated livestock, and suppressed cultural practices deemed incompatible with socialist modernity. The berkutchi survived by retreating into remote mountain communities. When Kazakhstan gained independence in 1991, the practice re-emerged publicly. The annual Golden Eagle Festival in Olgii, western Mongolia — home to an ethnic Kazakh minority — has been held since 1999 and now draws international attention, though the competition riders represent a fraction of the families still hunting with eagles in daily practice.
Aisholpan Nurgaiv, whose story was documented in the 2016 film The Eagle Huntress, became the tradition's most visible figure internationally — a teenage girl in a practice historically dominated by men. Her visibility matters. But the berkutchi I met in Sagsai, a village south of Olgii, were careful to distinguish between the festival version and the working practice. "The festival is one day," a hunter named Dalaikhan told me. "The eagle is every day. You cannot understand the eagle from the festival."
In Kyrgyzstan, kok-boru — often called "dead goat polo" in Western media, a framing that every Kyrgyz rider I spoke with found reductive — is the national sport. Two teams on horseback compete to carry a goat carcass (now typically a calf carcass, weighing thirty to forty kilograms) into the opposing team's scoring area. The game is played at full gallop, with collisions that would end a Western polo match. Kok-boru was included in the World Nomad Games, held in Astana in 2024, where Kyrgyzstan's national team competed against teams from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.
These are not exotic curiosities. They are the oldest riding traditions on the planet, practiced continuously for millennia, adapted to Soviet disruption and post-Soviet independence, and still central to the daily lives of millions of people. The Collective's archive should hold them alongside Dogtown and Marin County — not as anthropological specimens, but as what they are: the original riding culture.
Chapter 2: Desert Riders
Arabia, the Sahara, Rajasthan
The camel is the horse of the desert. That sentence is not a metaphor. It is a statement about the relationship between a riding animal and the terrain it unlocks. Where the horse opened the steppe, the camel opened the sand sea. And the riding cultures that emerged from that opening are as deep, as technically sophisticated, and as culturally central as anything the equestrian world has produced.
Bedouin camel culture across the Arabian Peninsula is at least three thousand years old. The dromedary — the one-humped camel native to the region — was domesticated on the Arabian Peninsula around 1000 BCE, and within centuries the Bedouin had built a civilization around its capabilities: milk, meat, leather, transportation, warfare, and prestige. Camel racing was the original motorsport of the Arabian desert — a test of breeding, training, and rider skill across distances that could span fifty kilometers of open sand.
In the modern Gulf states, camel racing has become something stranger and more instructive than a preserved tradition. It has become a tradition that was forced to confront its own exploitation and engineer a solution. For decades, camel racing in the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia relied on child jockeys — boys as young as three or four, many of them trafficked from South Asia and East Africa, starved to keep their weight down, and discarded when they grew too heavy. The practice was documented by human rights organizations throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. UNICEF estimated that thousands of children were involved.
The UAE banned child camel jockeys in 2005 and replaced them with robot jockeys — small, remote-controlled devices mounted on the camel's back, operated by trainers driving alongside the track in SUVs. The robots have been refined over two decades and now incorporate whip mechanisms, weight calibration, and GPS tracking. The Al Marmoom Heritage Festival, held annually outside Dubai, features races where hundred-thousand-dollar camels are ridden by machines controlled from a Toyota Land Cruiser.
This is, as far as I can determine, the only case in the history of riding culture where technology was introduced specifically to end the exploitation of human riders. It is worth sitting with that fact. The riding tradition survived. The human cost was removed — or at least reduced, as enforcement in more remote racing communities remains inconsistent. The relationship between human, animal, and terrain was restructured by a literal robot. The Collective's archive has no framework for this. It should build one.
Across the Sahara, the Tuareg — the Amazigh people of the central desert, spanning Niger, Mali, Algeria, and Libya — built a navigation culture on camelback that is among the most technically demanding riding traditions ever developed. Tuareg caravan routes crossed the Sahara for over a thousand years, carrying salt from the mines of Taoudenni in northern Mali to the markets of Timbuktu and beyond. A single crossing could cover 1,500 kilometers of terrain with no permanent water, no landmarks visible to an untrained eye, and daytime temperatures exceeding fifty degrees Celsius.
The navigation was done by reading the desert: sand color, dune orientation, star position, wind patterns, and the behavior of the camels themselves, who could smell water at distances humans could not detect. Tuareg riders did not use maps. They used memory, transmitted orally across generations, and a spatial intelligence developed through a lifetime of crossing terrain that kills the unprepared within days.
I was not able to travel to Tuareg territory for this study — the security situation across the central Sahara has deteriorated significantly since 2012, and the regions where traditional caravan routes operate are largely inaccessible to researchers. My information comes from published ethnographic work, particularly Jeremy Keenan's research on Tuareg society, and from interviews with Tuareg cultural advocates in Niamey, Niger. The tradition is not dead, but it is under severe pressure from political instability, climate change, and the economics of trucking, which has replaced camel caravans for most commercial transport. The Azalai — the annual salt caravan from Taoudenni to Timbuktu — still runs, but with fewer riders each year.
In Rajasthan, India, the Pushkar Camel Fair brings together 50,000 camels and their herders every November in a town of 15,000 people. It is simultaneously a livestock market, a cultural festival, a religious pilgrimage (Pushkar hosts one of the few Brahma temples in India), and — increasingly — a tourist spectacle. The Rabari herding communities who have bred and traded camels in the Thar Desert for centuries now navigate an economy where their animals are worth more as tourist attractions than as working livestock. The camel population of Rajasthan has declined by over sixty percent since 1992, according to India's national livestock census. A riding culture that sustained communities for millennia is being priced out of existence — not by prohibition, but by irrelevance.
Study 007 documented the economics of exclusion in Western action sports. The Pushkar story is the inverse: a riding culture that is not being priced in but priced out. The riders are not too poor to participate. The world no longer needs what they do. That is a different kind of vanishing, and it is one the archive must learn to document.
Chapter 3: African Riding Renaissance
Surfing, Skating, and Cycling Across the Continent
Africa has 30,500 kilometers of coastline. It faces two oceans and one of the world's most consistent swell windows, the South Atlantic storm track that delivers waves from Cape Town to Dakar. The Mediterranean coast of Morocco receives North Atlantic swells that rival Portugal and southwest France. The Indian Ocean coast from Mozambique to Somalia receives the same swells that make Indonesia a surf destination.
And yet, when the global surf media says "Africa," it means one thing: Jeffreys Bay.
J-Bay is a world-class right-hand point break in South Africa's Eastern Cape. It hosts a Championship Tour event. It deserves its reputation. But treating J-Bay as Africa's entire surf story is like treating Pipeline as the entire story of Pacific surfing. It is a distortion so severe it functions as erasure.
In Senegal, surfing has been practiced since at least the 1960s, when local fishermen in the Dakar suburb of Ngor began riding waves on handmade wooden craft. The modern Senegalese surf scene, centered on Ngor Right — a powerful right-hand reef break accessible by pirogue from Ngor village — operates almost entirely outside the global surf industry. Boards are shaped locally by makers like Matar Diop, who learned from French surfers in the 1980s and now builds boards calibrated to local conditions and local budgets. The cost of a locally shaped board in Dakar is roughly one-fifth the cost of an imported brand-name equivalent.
In 2023, Khadjou Sambe became the first Senegalese woman to gain significant international visibility as a surfer, through the documentary The Heroic Adventures of the Brave Khadjou Sambe. But Sambe is not an anomaly. She is the visible edge of a community that has been surfing for decades without Western sponsorship, without magazine coverage, and without permission. The Surfer's Paradise school in Dakar, founded by Babacar "Malick" Dia, teaches surfing to children from the Medina neighborhood — one of the city's most economically disadvantaged areas. The equipment is secondhand. The instruction is in Wolof. The waves are excellent.
In Ghana, the surf scene at Busua and Kokrobite has grown steadily since the early 2010s, driven largely by local initiative. The Mr. Brights surf school in Busua, founded by a Ghanaian fisherman-turned-surfer, operates on a model that would be recognizable to anyone who has read Study 007's analysis of economic barriers: keep costs low, use local materials, teach in local languages, and build the scene from the community outward rather than importing it from abroad.
In Lagos, Nigeria — a megacity of twenty-three million people with almost no public recreational infrastructure — skateboarding has emerged as an improbable urban riding culture. The Wafflesncream collective, founded in 2012, operates a skate community in the Lekki neighborhood and has built a network that connects Nigerian skaters across the country. In 2020, they worked with the Virgil Abloh-founded Off-White brand to bring skate infrastructure investment to Lagos. The boards are expensive by local standards. The spots are improvised. The heat is punishing. None of this has discouraged the riders.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has a skateboarding scene that emerged in the mid-2010s around a single donated halfpipe and a handful of riders who learned from YouTube videos. The Ethiopia Skate collective now operates regular sessions, has built relationships with the Addis Ababa city government for access to public spaces, and serves as a model for how a riding culture can be built from essentially nothing — no industry, no infrastructure, no legacy scene — through pure determination and a smartphone with internet access.
In Kenya, mountain biking in the Rift Valley — particularly the Hell's Gate National Park near Naivasha and the trails around the Aberdare Range — has developed a small but serious community. The Kenyan cycling tradition is overwhelmingly focused on road racing (Kenya has produced world-class marathoners but is only beginning to produce competitive cyclists), but mountain biking offers something road racing does not: access to terrain that is among the most dramatic on the African continent, without the equipment costs and infrastructure demands of road competition.
Morocco's Atlas Mountains have become a mountain biking destination that rivals the European Alps for technical terrain, at a fraction of the cost. The trails between Imlil and Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa, are ridden by a growing community of Moroccan riders alongside the European tourists who have discovered the terrain. The economics are instructive: a week of guided mountain biking in the Atlas costs roughly what a single day of lift-accessed riding costs in Verbier.
What connects all of these scenes is not a shared aesthetic or a shared origin story. It is a shared condition: they are building riding cultures without the institutional support that Western riders take for granted. No industry pipeline. No magazine coverage. No sponsorship economy. No government grants for skatepark construction. The African riders I spoke with did not describe this as deprivation. They described it as freedom. "Nobody tells us what surfing is supposed to look like," Malick Dia told me in Dakar. "We just surf."
The Collective's archive must hold these stories not as charity cases or development narratives but as what they are: autonomous riding cultures that are as legitimate, as creative, and as worthy of documentation as anything that has ever come out of California.
Chapter 4: South and Southeast Asian Currents
Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, India
The Indian Ocean is the world's most underrepresented ocean in surf media. It produces consistent, high-quality waves along coastlines that span Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and East Africa. Indonesia's surf is globally famous, but the fame is radically concentrated: Bali, and specifically the Bukit Peninsula — Uluwatu, Padang Padang, Impossibles — absorbs almost all of the international surf tourism and media attention. The rest of Indonesia's 54,000 kilometers of coastline, the longest in the world, is treated as an afterthought.
In Sumatra, the Mentawai Islands have been a core surf destination since the 1990s, but the surf culture there is almost entirely imported — charter boats from Australia and Brazil, with minimal economic benefit flowing to the Mentawai people whose ancestral waters are being ridden. Nias, off Sumatra's western coast, offers one of the most perfect right-hand barrels in the world at Lagundri Bay, and the local community has a more integrated relationship with surf tourism, but the economic power still flows outward.
Lombok and Sumbawa, east of Bali, tell a different story. Desert Point on Lombok is one of the world's longest left-hand barrels — a wave that breaks for three hundred meters on its best days. The local village of Bangko-Bangko has a complicated relationship with the surf tourists who arrive for the wave, marked by episodes of localism, disputes over access, and economic tensions that mirror the dynamics Study 004 documented in crowded Western lineups. But there is also a growing community of Lombok-born surfers who learned on the inside sections of Desert Point and now ride it at a level that would be competitive anywhere in the world. They are not sponsored. They are not filmed. They are simply surfing.
Sri Lanka's surf culture, centered on the southern coast towns of Hikkaduwa, Mirissa, and Arugam Bay, has survived a civil war (1983-2009), the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed over 35,000 Sri Lankans, and an economic crisis in 2022 that collapsed the tourism economy. Arugam Bay, on the east coast, is a right-hand point break that has become the anchor of a local surf community. The Bay Surf School, one of several locally operated schools, teaches Sri Lankan children alongside tourists. The post-tsunami rebuilding attracted international surf aid organizations, some of which built genuine local capacity and some of which built infrastructure that served foreign surfers and left when the cameras moved on. The distinction matters, and the Sri Lankan surf community I spoke with could identify which was which with precision.
In Vietnam, the dominant riding culture is not surfing or skating but motorbike riding — and I include it deliberately, because the exclusion of motorbike culture from the "riding" conversation is one of the archive's blind spots that this study exists to address. Vietnam has approximately 73 million registered motorbikes for a population of 100 million. The motorbike is not a vehicle. It is the vehicle — the primary means of transportation for the vast majority of Vietnamese, and the object around which an entire culture of mobility, independence, and identity has formed.
The Ha Giang Loop, a 350-kilometer mountain road through Vietnam's northernmost province, has become one of the world's iconic motorbike riding routes. Vietnamese riders have been running it for decades; international backpackers discovered it in the 2010s. The road traverses mountain passes above 1,500 meters, with sheer drops, unpredictable traffic, and weather that can shift from clear to zero-visibility fog within minutes. The riding is demanding, beautiful, and culturally embedded in a way that has no equivalent in Western motorcycle culture — it is not recreational, not competitive, not countercultural. It is simply how people move.
Thai BMX has a small but dedicated scene centered on Bangkok, where a handful of concrete skateparks — notably the Phra Khanong park, built in 2015 — serve double duty for skaters and BMX riders. The Thai BMX community has organized national competitions since the early 2010s, largely self-funded. The heat and humidity of Bangkok make outdoor riding brutal for roughly half the year, which has pushed the community toward early-morning and night sessions — an adaptation I have not seen documented anywhere else.
Philippine skateboarding, centered on Manila and Cebu, has exploded since Margielyn Didal's Olympic appearance in Tokyo in 2021. Didal, from Cebu, learned to skate on borrowed boards in a city with no skateparks. Her Olympic qualification — she competed in Paris in 2024 as well — catalyzed government and private investment in skate infrastructure across the Philippines. The Cebu City skatepark, opened in 2022, was built in part because a Filipina skater stood on the Olympic stage. The pipeline that Study 001 described — from outlaw activity to Olympic legitimacy — is playing out in real time in the Philippines, with all the benefits and all the costs.
India's cycling revolution is not about sport. It is about infrastructure, health, and class. The Cycling Federation of India has existed since 1946, but competitive Indian cycling has produced no international stars outside of track cycling. What has happened instead, particularly since 2015, is a massive expansion of recreational and commuter cycling in Indian cities, driven by organizations like the Aravalli Trailhunters in Delhi and the Cycling Monks platform, which now claims over 100,000 members nationwide. The cycling is aspirational, middle-class, and often explicitly framed as a response to the pollution and traffic that make Indian cities among the most difficult urban environments on Earth. Whether this constitutes a "riding culture" in the Collective's sense is a question worth asking. I believe it does, because the relationship between rider and terrain — in this case, the hostile terrain of Indian roads — is as demanding, as identity-forming, and as community-building as anything in the archive.
Chapter 5: Latin America Beyond the Coast
Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile
Latin America appears in the Collective's archive primarily as coastline. Brazilian surf culture and Chilean point breaks are documented. But the interior of the continent — its mountains, its cities, its highlands — holds riding traditions that are among the richest and most class-contradicted in the world.
Colombian cycling is the clearest example. The department of Boyaca, in the eastern Andes at altitudes between 2,500 and 3,400 meters, has produced a concentration of elite cyclists that defies every model of sports development. Nairo Quintana, Egan Bernal, and a generation of professional climbers emerged from a region where children ride to school on heavy steel bicycles over mountain roads because there is no other option. The altitude provides the physiological engine. The poverty provides the motivation. The roads provide the training ground. Bernal won the Tour de France in 2019 at age twenty-two, the youngest winner since 1909, and became a national figure whose significance extends far beyond sport.
But the pipeline from Boyaca to the WorldTour peloton is brutal and narrow. For every Bernal, thousands of young Colombian riders compete in regional races on inadequate equipment, in a development system that is opaque, underfunded, and vulnerable to the same exploitation dynamics that Study 007 documented in Western action sports — except that the economic stakes are higher, because for a Boyaca teenager, cycling is not a lifestyle choice. It is one of the only viable paths out of poverty. The pressure this places on young riders, and the injuries and burnout that result, deserve a study of their own.
Mexican skateboarding has a history that predates most international awareness of it. The scene in Mexico City has been active since the 1980s, with the Insurgentes Sur corridor and the Parque de los Venados serving as gathering points for a community that has navigated economic instability, police harassment, and a chronic shortage of purpose-built skate infrastructure. The Mexican skate scene's relationship with its American counterpart to the north is layered with admiration, resentment, and independence — an asymmetric dynamic that mirrors the broader cultural relationship between the two countries. Mexican skaters watch American skate media, consume American products, and build a scene that is distinctly and defiantly their own.
In 2023, the Skatepark de la Juventud opened in Guadalajara — one of the largest public skateparks in Latin America. Its construction was the result of over a decade of advocacy by local skaters who argued, in language that echoes Study 004's terrain defense framework, that public space for riding is a civic right, not a luxury. The park is free. It is maintained by the municipal government. It is packed every evening with riders who range from five-year-olds on borrowed boards to professionals training for national competition.
Brazilian favela skating — concentrated in the communities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo — is a riding culture defined by improvisation. The terrain is the favela itself: steep concrete staircases, narrow alleyways, hand-built ramps wedged into improbable spaces. The Brazilian skater Rayssa Leal, who won Olympic silver in Tokyo at age thirteen and gold in Paris at sixteen, grew up skating in Imperatriz, a small city in Maranhao state. Her visibility has been transformative for Brazilian skating, but the community she emerged from was already deep and self-sustaining long before the Olympics noticed.
Argentine polo is, in terms of the Collective's framework, the most difficult riding tradition in this study. It is the world's oldest continuously played team riding sport, with roots in 1870s Buenos Aires, and Argentina has dominated international competition for over a century. The ten-goal players — the sport's highest rating — are overwhelmingly Argentine. The breeding of polo ponies in the Argentine pampas is a multi-generational tradition of horsemanship that is technically extraordinary.
It is also, by any honest assessment, one of the most economically exclusive riding cultures on Earth. A single elite polo pony can cost over $200,000. A competitive string of horses costs millions. The sport's social world in Argentina revolves around estancias owned by families whose wealth dates to the colonial distribution of land that dispossessed Indigenous communities. The class contradictions are not hidden. They are the structure.
I include polo because the Collective's archive cannot be honest if it only documents riding traditions that are sympathetic. Polo is a riding culture. The horsemanship is real. The tradition is real. The class exclusion is also real, and it is inseparable from the tradition's history. Study 007 asked who can afford to ride. In Argentine polo, the answer is: almost no one. The archive must hold that truth alongside the horsemanship, without resolving the contradiction, because the contradiction is the thing.
Chilean surf culture, centered on Pichilemu — a left-hand point break roughly three hours south of Santiago — rounds out the Latin American story with a tradition that is growing, locally driven, and less burdened by the class dynamics of polo or the exploitation dynamics of Colombian cycling. Pichilemu's Punta de Lobos is a world-class wave that has hosted international competitions, but the local surf community — centered on the Lobos surf club and the schools that operate along the beachfront — has maintained a degree of local control that is unusual for a wave of this quality. Land-use battles are ongoing, as development pressure increases, but the community has so far resisted the wholesale commercialization that Study 004 documented at other high-profile breaks.
Conclusion: What the Archive Must Become
I have now written nine studies for The Riding Collective. The first eight built a foundation. This one cracked the foundation open, deliberately, to show how much more there is underneath.
The riding traditions documented in this study are not peripheral. Mongolian horsemanship is older than any discipline in the Collective's archive. Tuareg desert navigation is more technically demanding than any form of wayfinding documented in Study 005. The African surf and skate scenes described in Chapter 3 are building riding cultures from scratch, without industry support, in conditions that make the garage-origin myths of American action sports look comfortable by comparison. The Vietnamese motorbike culture in Chapter 4 involves more daily riders than every discipline in the Western action sports world combined.
If the archive does not hold these stories, it is not an archive of riding culture. It is an archive of Western riding culture, wearing a universal name it has not earned.
The work required to close this gap is measured in years, not studies. It requires researchers who speak Mongolian, Arabic, Wolof, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesian, and Quechua. It requires partnerships with communities who have no reason to trust a platform built in the Anglophone world. It requires money — for translation, for travel, for the kind of long-term community presence that produces trust rather than extraction. And it requires a willingness to let the archive be changed by what it documents. A Mongolian horseman's understanding of the rider-animal bond may not fit the Collective's existing framework of "a body moving through terrain." That does not mean the framework is wrong. It means the framework is incomplete. The archive must expand to hold what it finds, not trim what it finds to fit the archive.
Study 005 established the principle that Indigenous communities must control how their traditions are represented. That principle applies with full force to every community in this study. The Kazakh berkutchi of Sagsai, the Tuareg riders of the central Sahara, the Senegalese surfers of Ngor, the Boyaca cyclists of the Colombian highlands — none of them asked to be documented. If the Collective approaches them, it approaches with the consent-first protocol or it does not approach at all.
I said in Study 008 that the foundational series was complete. I was right about that. What I did not say clearly enough is that the foundation was built on a specific patch of ground, and the building it supports must be much larger than that ground. This study is the first step off the foundation. The next studies — on the Pacific Islands, on disability and adaptive riding, on the riding cultures of the Arctic — will take further steps. The archive will grow. It will grow slowly, carefully, with the consent of the people it documents and the humility of a researcher who knows she is always arriving late.
The riders have been here for millennia. We are the ones who are just beginning to pay attention.
— Dr. Maren Solvik
Tromsoe / Ulaanbaatar / Dakar
April 2026
Study classification: Public
Review status: First edition — subject to community review and amendment per Riding Collective Research Standards, Section 6
Next review date: April 2028
Cite as: Solvik, M. (2026). "Silk Roads and Salt Flats: Riding Traditions of the Global South and Central Asia." The Riding Collective Research Archive, Study 009.