Whither Adventure Travel

Tonight Julia and I went to see a presentation by a guy from Trek adventures supposedly discussing the benefits of these "Adventure Travel" excursions. So adventure travel, what is it? Well, basically it means you travel to a specific city then hook up with a tour group. These groups are general about 10 to 15 people and within this group you supposedly go "off the beaten track" in your country or countries of choice. They take care of all the planning for you, but most of the tour utilizes local transportation and local accommodation so you keep your tourist dollars in local communities instead of hotel chains with head offices somewhere in the U.S. or other wealthy countries. We've been sort of leaning towards this experience for some time, virtually since we became aware of them, but we did manage to get around Thailand quite well on our own after I did some deft research and haunted the travel forums for several months. Do we really need this sort of thing?

There was one rather obvious characteristic of this presentation last night: virtually everyone there was a senior. The presenter even said their average age was in the 50s, so it appears as though these adventure tours are geared towards blue hairs. Of course, this could be deceiving because seniors may opt for specific tours to specific places and may choose a comfort tour over a more rugged tour, but one cannot make that assumption. Given that the baby boomers--the wealthiest demographic ever-- are now seniors and retired, it would make sense that tour operators covet this vast market. The baby boomers themselves also seem more adventurous that many people our age (let's say late '30s) and I cannot forget that most of the people we hung out with in the Cook Islands were seniors and we had a blast.


On the downside, there were a lot of really annoying people there. You know the people, the ones who sit at the front of the class and monopolize the teacher's attention--you know who you are Mr. Zaidman (3rd year World History--ooo, I'm still mad). It reminded me of the Ian Wright lecture we attended while I worked at the University of Winnipeg. Many people, fans of his Lonely Planet television show, were more obsessed with HIM than his travels. One woman at the presentation last night kept saying "Wow" at every damn slide! It was like someone saying "Mmmm" after every bite of food at a cheap Chinese buffet. God forbid we end up with annoying woman on our tour--sorry for bumping you off the boat. The presenter also had this way of deflating anything interesting he had to say about these amazing places he'd been. None of his anecdotes were funny, though clearly they were funny situations. He couldn't string together a punchline then finished each sentence with... "well anyway." (Silence) We were wholly underwhelmed by the evening and left there less sure about the Adventure Travel option. So what to do?

I think it's going to depend on where we decide to go. A trip to Central America, when you don't speak a lick of Spanish, may be somewhat challenging. Likewise, a trip in the back roads of China could prove more frustrating than enlightening. But I think for our next trip, we may do a combined tour and individual experience. First we'll do a tour of no more than eight days, to get a lay of the land and feel comfortable, then strike out on our own for the next ten days and see where we end up. That way we can try this travel experience but still leave an element of surprise to the trip. If you'd read my blog post "Bamboozled" you'd know I get my jollies planning travel excursions and to this day, I think I've been fairly successful doing so. I got many other itineraries ready to go: Turkey, Costa Rica, Belize, Dominica and even Gabon. At this point we're thinking Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam or Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Guatemala (maybe Panama) so I have a lot of research ahead and about six months to put it all together. No problem.