Tea Horse Road Pilgrimage
The Tea Horse Road — A Pilgrimage with Ivy Hermit × Eastern Leaves
Nov 22 – Dec 5, 2026
For a thousand years, tea walked from Yunnan to Tibet on the backs of horses. This November, we’re following it — Chengdu to Yiwu, four provinces, roughly 3,000 km, and not a single flight.
This isn’t a tour with a guide who read the brochure. Both founders are on the road with you the whole way — Solomon of Ivy Hermit, and Vivian of Eastern Leaves, who has spent years walking these mountains and knows the farmers, villages, and teas by name. You’re traveling with the two people who built this, in the places they care about most.
And you don’t need to know tea to come. This is as much an education as a journey — before we leave, we hold two seminars in New York on the history of the road and the teas we’ll drink, so you arrive understanding what’s in your cup. On the ground, everything is taught as we go: how Pu’er is pressed, what to look for when you taste, why a tea grown here tastes nothing like the same leaf grown one valley over. If you’ve been curious about tea and never had a real way in, this is one. Beginners are genuinely welcome.
High-speed rail between cities, private van everywhere else — including backroads to villages most tours never reach. On the long rail legs we run a cold brew competition: bring a bottle, fill it when you board, and see what your tea became by the next city. No rules on what to pick. That’s most of the fun.
Some of what we’ll do together: sit with the two-thousand-year-old mother trees at Mengding, open seventy years of sealed teas with a collector in Yingjing, watch Pu’er pressed by hand on a stone mill in Menghai, and walk the original stone road through the Yiwu forest.
Solomon flies out of New York (JFK/EWR) if you want to travel together, or meet us in Chengdu.
This is a trip dedicated to tea so this trip is extremely intimate — if it’s calling you, reach out and we’ll talk it through honestly: cost, who’s coming, whether it’s a fit.
Email solomon@ivyhermit.com to join or ask anything.