On May 21, 2021, Against the Compass Expeditions ran its first group trip—an 8-person journey to Iraqi Kurdistan that sold out in less than 24 hours after a life-changing email in summer 2020. Five years later, the story still starts with one trembling click o
This week—Thursday, May 21, 2026—marks five years since Against the Compass Expeditions ran its very first group expedition.
Joan Torres says she still can’t believe the date has arrived.. In her telling. it doesn’t feel like a distant milestone so much as a moment she can almost replay: the early days of a travel blog. the upheaval of the pandemic. and then the decision that turned a quiet behind-the-screen project into something real.
Against the Compass began as a travel blog launched in October 2016 by a budget backpacker.. Torres describes those first years as full-time travel and full-time blogging. from 2016 to 2020—traveling during the day. writing and posting at night. living out of a backpack and trying to build a readership.
Tajikistan was among her first trips, hitchhiking the Pamir Highway. Then COVID arrived. She says the pandemic forced her to take a physical break from travel after years of dorms, backpacks, and constant movement.
Even though she never stopped blogging, she realized blogging alone might not be sustainable as a long-term income.. That realization led to a new attempt: creating a YouTube channel and trying vlogging.. Torres says the effort didn’t work out.. Filming while traveling wasn’t for her. and she found it exhausting to constantly record herself while genuinely experiencing a destination.
COVID, she adds, caught her while she was in Ethiopia.
Then came an email that changed everything. In summer 2020, still in the middle of the pandemic, Torres received an offer from a reputable tour operator. The opportunity wasn’t just about being a tour guide; the company wanted her to handle promotion, bring in clients, and build the itinerary.
She says COVID had hit travel companies hard, and the operator’s logic was clear: hire someone who already had a decent base of readers and followers. Torres describes the plan as legitimate—and it’s why she agreed to begin working on the project.
Her trip to Mexico in October 2020 became the place where she says she designed the foundations of Against the Compass Expeditions. In Mexico, Torres created the brand-new logo and sent the very first email announcing her first-ever tour.
She also went there to visit a Mexican girlfriend she hadn’t seen since the beginning of the pandemic. During the first week of December, the day before flying back home, the couple learned she was pregnant.
A new chapter followed in 2021. Little James was born in August 2021. Torres says she would later explain how complicated it was to manage the paperwork to bring her unmarried, pregnant girlfriend to Spain during the pandemic—she couldn’t come until she was already five months pregnant.
While that was happening, Torres began working on ATC Expeditions. She says the project gave her far more work than she had imagined. As she worked more, she realized she was being used by that tour company.
Still, she kept going—scheduling the very first expedition to Iraqi Kurdistan for March 2021. Torres says she will always remember the morning she sat in her in-laws’ kitchen and wrote a newsletter, then clicked “Send” with a shaking finger.
To her surprise, the tour sold out in less than 24 hours. “ATC Expeditions had been born,” she writes.
For many people, Torres says, launching a tour might sound like a simple event.. For her, it didn’t feel small at all.. After years of writing articles. posting photos. replying to comments. and sharing stories from off-the-beaten-track destinations. she was now responsible for a group of real people flying in from different parts of the world—people trusting her with their time. money. and overall experience.
The fear arrived immediately. She worried the group might hate the trip, and she says that pressure stayed with her right up until the expedition began.
Then the second COVID wave hit. Shortly after the tour was announced and sold, Iraqi Kurdistan shut down its borders. Torres describes the shutdown as a crushing reversal—an outcome that made her earlier launch attempt look like the “crazy” idea people had warned against.
Everyone had thought she was wrong to try launching a travel company during COVID. She didn’t want to give up, partly because the first tour sold quickly. In her view, travelers were desperate to travel again, and she wanted to be ready for that moment.
Against the odds, she decided to postpone the March 2021 trip to May 2021, two months later. Most of the original group canceled, forcing her to find new travelers amid uncertainty.
At that stage, a different question took over: why not do it herself?
She was building a proper itinerary, promoting the tour across her platforms, and taking care of bookings. Torres describes it as a huge amount of valuable work, and says she was being paid “peanuts.” Once the March group was canceled, she saw less reason to keep working with the tour company.
Torres says she had good contacts in Kurdistan, including her friend and local guide Karwan. After the cancellation, there was no real reason to stay tied to the original arrangement. She called Karwan, told him about bringing a group in May, and—she says—the rest is history.
May 21, 2021 became the turning point. Torres ran the very first Against the Compass Expedition, bringing together a group of 8 people from different parts of the world. She calls it the best and most fun group ever.
To this day, Torres says she keeps in touch with all the participants from that expedition. She also says 6 of the 8 have since joined multiple trips. Nick White has been on 11 expeditions, Kevin Martinico has joined 7, and Monica Cossio has traveled with the group 6 times.
After the trip, Torres flew home with emotions that mixed relief and joy. For the first time, she says, she realized the true potential of what she was building—how it could grow into an actual community.
That’s where the story also turns toward trade-offs. When she returned home, she received an offer to write the new edition of Lonely Planet Barcelona, which she accepted without hesitation. She later received the chance to write the new main edition of Lonely Planet Spain.
She says she didn’t know what to do. Writing Barcelona had already consumed her time and energy, and the Spain assignment would have demanded even more. She couldn’t do both—professional travel writing would have opened many opportunities, but ATC Expeditions needed her full attention.
So, painfully, she turned down the Lonely Planet Spain writing assignment and instead scheduled two more tours to Kurdistan for November 2021.
The second expedition ran in November 2021, and she describes it as repeating the same feeling: two groups of people, fun and memorable, with many participants she still stays in touch with and others who would go on to join additional expeditions.
In 2022, the company expanded into several new destinations: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Federal Iraq, and Mauritania. Torres says she also created a separate website for the expeditions—expeditions.againstthecompass.com as a subdomain of the original site.
The team grew over time. In 2022, Leti and Rhenzy joined the team. Oriol joined in 2023, Tamara and Pau in 2024, and Jessa in 2026.
Looking back, Torres describes the years as a marathon: working every single day, trying to grow the project, and most importantly trying to build a community of travelers who feel identified with the spirit of Against the Compass.
There have been ups and downs. Torres says she’s sometimes felt like quitting and dedicating her time to something else. She also points to parenthood as another parallel challenge—learning how to be a father while building the travel company.
She says she has already been to 24 countries with James. Through it all, she credits the ATC community and the travelers she’s met over the years as the reason she keeps going—and the motivation to make Against the Compass bigger.
On Thursday, May 21, 2026, the date isn’t just an anniversary on a calendar.. It’s the day the first 8-person group took off to Iraqi Kurdistan—after a sellout in less than 24 hours. a shutdown that forced a restart. and a decision that moved her from promoting other people’s tours to building her own. one carefully planned trip at a time.
Against the Compass Expeditions ATC Expeditions travel blog Iraqi Kurdistan May 21 2021 COVID pandemic tour operator Lonely Planet Barcelona Lonely Planet Spain Saudi Arabia travel Syria travel Mauritania travel