In love with my Cossack guide

When I first set eyes on Shamil Galimzyanov I wasn't at my best. I was suffering from amoebic dysentery and was distracted by the memory of Abbas, the dark, handsome guide who had just left us.

It was four weeks into an eight-month trek following the Silk Road, the 5,000-mile route across central Asia to China that I was doing with three friends - Sophia (known as Mouse), Victoria (Wic) and Lucy - to raise money for Merlin, a charity that provides emergency relief for disaster zones.

It was April 1999 and our horses - and I - had collapsed in a city called Bukhara in Uzbekistan. Shamil was our new guide.

I was far too ill to pay him any attention but the other girls kept saying how good-looking he was. After a week back on the road, I realised they were right.

Unlike the members of the back-up team who were following us in a truck, carrying our equipment and supplies, and who all wore tracksuits, Shamil rode his horse bare-chested, wearing faded jodhpurs and leather chaps. He had light hair, boyish, bright blue eyes and his chest was a deep shade of chestnut. He was everything I imagined a Cossack to be: a free spirit, accountable to nobody and valuing pride and honour more than life itself. He exuded a masculine self-confidence, as if there were no situation he couldn't control.

At first he seemed serious, riding silently ahead, but soon his sense of humour shone through. I was the only one who could speak Russian, and his English was very limited - we talked, joked and flirted.

One evening, two weeks after we set off from Bukhara, Shamil told me he had to leave to go to the nearby town, Tashkent. I didn't know it at the time, but he was joking. He claims now that I started crying. That was the night our romance began.

The other girls were worried that it would cause a split in the group. I don't think they were jealous, but they were concerned that if any conflicts arose, I would take his side against them. They told me not to tell anyone in England. Mouse said people would think it was trivial and it would distract from the seriousness of the trip. I didn't want anyone to find out, either. Shamil is kind, intelligent and well read, but I was worried that people would think he was an uncivilised barbarian. I felt very protective of him.

The five of us were together constantly so Shamil and I couldn't be alone much, but because the others didn't speak Russian, at least our conversations were private. We talked mostly about his life as I didn't think he could really envisage what my life in Oxfordshire was like.

I go to parties and have dinner with friends in London, whereas his life was his horses in a country that was impoverished and corrupt by Western standards. He told me that his brother had been murdered, there was in a fight on a train and his body was thrown onto the track.

We became close so quickly that it didn't seem strange that he was telling me something so personal. If you go out with someone in London, you only see each other after work and at weekends, we spent all day and night together. In the beginning it was easy, but one day Wic and Shamil had an argument about Wic’s horse, which had a bad sore. The girls accused me of bias and they had a point — I did side with Shamil. He knew everything about horses and it felt ridiculous for us to tell him how to look after them.

I felt homesick and dreaded reaching China, where Shamil would leave us. He was beginning to talk about living in England and working with horses. When he was 11, he enrolled at a riding school and later became a showjumping champion in Uzbekistan. He said he could teach riding in England.

After three months and 1,700 miles together we reached the border. Shamil and I went for a final ride along the banks of a lake, but I couldn’t enjoy it.

When I saw the truck that would take him to Uzbekistan, I sobbed uncontrollably. We promised to write and phone whenever we could.

During the four-month trek across China all I could think about was Shamil. By the time I arrived home — in November 1999 — I had convinced myself our relationship couldn’t work.

We lived so far apart, he is 10 years older than me and our backgrounds were completely different. I was brought up in a very middle-class family in Oxfordshire. My father is the historian Nikolai Tolstoy and my mother stayed at home to look after me, my brother and two sisters. I went to boarding school, but his life has been hard.

He was born in Kazan, Russia, but his family moved to Tashkent when he was two because there was a terrible famine. Then, four years later, an earthquake hit the city and their house collapsed. His father died when he was young and his mother has had to work hard to bring up her children.

Although I wrote, saying I didn’t think we could be together, we kept in touch and in 2000 I went to Uzbekistan with some friends for a three-week riding trip. Nothing happened between us, but I did meet his mother.

I went back the next year, too, and this time I took my then boyfriend. It was a bit awkward because even though it had been a couple of years since we were together, I realised that Shamil still wanted to be with me.

Even after my boyfriend and I broke up a few months later, I still didn’t realise I wanted to be with Shamil. I went back again later that year with a friend, and we spent six months with Shamil riding between Mongolia and Siberia. After a month, he asked: "Why don’t you love me?" I went over my fears about how our lives were too different, but by the end of the trip we were together again.

In April this year I took my parents — and my brother and sisters, cousin, aunt and uncle — to meet him. They instantly adored him. After two days my parents said: "You have to marry him." We went for dinner at his mother’s house and she said that Shamil had been unhappy for a couple of years — partly because of me and partly because he had problems finding work.

Shamil had talked about getting married but that night, in front of everyone, he asked my father’s permission.

Many houses in Tashkent have a sauna and it’s customary to beat each other with birch-tree branches. All the women went to the sauna, stripped and Shamil’s mother beat us all. It was certainly an ice-breaker and, luckily, my mother found it hilarious.

Shamil came to visit me in May and he went back just a few days ago. It was the first time he’s been to England and I wondered if having him here would take the romance out of our relationship, but the opposite happened. He fitted in so well and my friends love him. I bought him clothes — he has good dress sense, but the choice in Uzbekistan is terrible.

We went to a black-tie ball and he looked very different from the barechested man sitting astride his horse, but he was just as attractive.

We are getting married in September in the Russian Orthodox church in Chiswick. It will be a small affair and we’re having the reception at my parents’ house. Unfortunately, his mother can’t come, but his aunt and a friend, who will be best man, will be there. Shamil has also met and become close to many of my Russian friends living here.

We shall live with my parents and spend about a third of our time in Uzbekistan, taking clients on treks. We are planning to have children but I have told Shamil that I want them to be brought up here.

There are so many things that brought us together — my father sent me to Russia in my gap year, I studied Russian at Edinburgh University and, of course, the Silk Road trip — that I feel it was meant to be.

I know that wherever we are — riding horses across central Asia or making a living in rural Oxfordshire — we’ll be happy. Even though we are from completely different cultures, I feel that we’re made for each other.