When John Labouchere rode 5,000 miles through the Andes mountains, he cited one man as his inspiration. When Tim Severin rode from Paris to Jerusalem on a two-year trip, he credited the same equestrian explorer as his hero. When I rode more than 1,000 continuous miles through the Karakoram mountains of Pakistan, I offered him my silent thanks. Margaret Leigh rode the length of England and fondly remembered this man as her guiding light. Robin Hanbury-Tenison rode along the Great Wall of China. Jacqui Knight rode across New Zealand. And Louis Bruhnke rode from Patagonia to Alaska.

All because of one man - Aimé Tschiffely - the world's most improbable equestrian hero!

Seventy years ago a quiet unassuming Swiss man with no previous equestrian experience set the high water mark against which all 20th century equestrian explorations are still compared.

And he did it on descendants of the horses of the Conquistadors.

The story of Tschiffely, Mancha and Gato, the heroes of the pampas, is the unlikely tale of a man and two horses who the world mocked. Decried as a suicidal Don Quixote with two old horses, their Cinderella story has passed down into modern legend as the most important equestrian travel tale of the 20th century.

Yet it was a legend that almost never came to be.

Perhaps it was in fact because he had no prior equestrian knowledge to fall back on that 29-year-old Tschiffely ignored the legion of critics who told him his quest to ride 10,000 miles from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Washington D.C. in 1925 was "impossible" and "absurd."

Not only did this brash neophyte propose to attempt this equestrian suttee, he said he was going to do it on two elderly horses, ages 15 and 16, owned by a Patagonian Indian, who were currently unbroken and running free on the Argentine pampas. In his own words, "they were the wildest of the wild."

It was no wonder he had more skeptics than supporters.