Screenwriter and filmmaker John Fusco on Mongolia

I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the east as a young man and you can’t really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn. So I’d always wanted to explore the Silk Road myself.

My son, Gio, wanted to do a horseback trip in Mongolia, but he didn’t want to do an Abercrombie & Fitch-type tour, where they show you around while you sleep in B&Bs. I was in Beijing shooting the Forbidden Kingdom – just a one-hour flight from Ulaanbaatar – and I just felt it was now or never. I sought out a guide to take us on a father-and-son adventure.

I named a fictional character in Marco Polo after our guide, Byambaa. I was very impressed by him and we became really tight. Then, when we started shooting, we needed a Mongolian cultural adviser on set, so I tracked down Byambaa for the role.

I do like roughing it, but things started to get rugged from the start. We drove for 10 hours on rocky trails out into the central part of Mongolia in a Russian utility vehicle with no shock absorbers. Then we arrived at a remote area where we stayed in a yurt and waited to meet a horse wrangler who was scheduled to bring our rides. He never showed. It was our first day and Byambaa had to leave us alone at the camp to go looking for him.

I started thinking a lot about Marco Polo out there. I was with my son, this western kid and I thought about how Marco was just 17 when he travelled with his father on the Silk Road. In Ulaanbatar, there’s a statue of him in the square.

“OK, I’ve got good news and bad news,” Byambaa told us on his return. The bad news was that the horse wrangler had gone to his daughter’s wedding, celebrated a bit too much and his horses had got away. I said: “So we wait for him to sober up and get the horses?” And he said: “No … this celebration will go on all summer.” The good news was our guide had met a nomad out on the steppe, who agreed to bring some replacement horses the next day.

“Horse thunder” is what I call the sound of galloping hooves. When our horses finally arrived they were pretty wild, and we woke up to their thunder as they approached. We stayed up through the night riding the half-tamed horses in the desert to break them. I was thinking: “I’ve got a 13-year-old son. His mother’s gonna kill me ...”

It felt very ceremonial when we set off. But my horse took three or four steps and then went rodeo. I’m no stranger to gentling wild horses, but Mongolian saddles are made of wood and have really short stirrups and it was my first time in one. I was completely thrown from the horse. I wouldn’t know this until the end of the trip, but I actually broke a rib.

Lunch in Mongolia consists of urum, which is sweet cream and yak meat. And you drink airag, which is fermented mare’s milk. In the evening, there’s a tradition among the men to sit around at night and drink vodka together. They fill a little copper receptacle and pass it around. I would look forward to those vodka ceremonies because it was the only painkiller I had.

I was really proud of Gio. It was a coming-of-age adventure for him. I never imagined that we’d experience things like broken ribs and running out of water but the impact of that trip was wonderful. He and I relive it all the time.

The idea for the Marco Polo series was borne of that trip. We would camp at night in the gers and I’d ask about the history of Mongolia and they would say: “Well, as Marco Polo said …”