Sarah Tucker experiments with adventure travel specialists, exploring Ecuador and the Galapagos, to see if she can, truly, venture into the unknown.
Canoeing on the Burro Burro River
Roll back those vaporous years: I’ve just seen Romancing the Stone on Sky. It may be over three decades since the action-adventure comedy first hit the big screen, but the antics of fictional novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) – who flies to Colombia to save her sister from kidnappers and returns with exotic bird smuggler Jack T Colton (Michael Douglas) too – still seem as beguiling as ever.
Adventure travel – as readers of this column will have long since discerned – has always been my kind of brew. That heady mix of danger and romance; the sense of newness and desertion of the comfort zone; the tingling suspicion that even the guide has only recently uncovered these tracks: such is the travel writer’s nectar; by far the most exhilarating assignments of my 21 years in the trade.
Tour operators struggle to create this kind of experience: heath and safety is no friend of riding the rapids or crossing the Sinai by camel. As a result, many tours are little more than goldfish bowl experiences offering clouded views of reality through insulated glass.
How refreshing, therefore, to find that an operator called Explore has just launched a series of ‘guinea pig’ tours, whisking clients away to places with which even its own guides are scarcely on nodding terms.
The idea itself is not new. Often I have been lured into a trip by the promise of going where no tourist has gone before, only to find that the operator has led me up the garden – or the jungle – path. One mile into the supposedly untraversed forest and I bump into a dozen lads from Wimbledon on a stag weekend in the Congo.
But this is different. Explore is an adventure travel specialist; and, having been on two of its tours – to South Africa’s Garden Route and to Ecuador and Galapagos – I can vouch for the quality of both the trips themselves and the guides. The latter are highly intelligent, motivated and funny and could easily work as counsellors, while always displaying great knowledge of, and passion for, the region concerned. They are the baby porridge of the travel industry – just right.
Typically the tours are for 8-12 people, and the firm has just launched a set of eight ‘Explore Beyond’ trips, about which it can state that there are no other tour groups in the area – least of all from Wimbledon. Most of these are for 12 – 13 days and will have you visiting indigenous tribes, hunting with the locals and so forth. They are the sort of trips that Michael Palin would go in for, but which you wouldn’t even attempt because you don’t have a guide. Except that now you do.
The full menu includes such destinations as the Amazonian backwaters of Guyana, where you canoe with the local tribesmen down the Burro Burro river; the rainforest and active volcanoes of Comoros, an archipelago off Africa’s East Coast; and the Sulawesi provinces of Indonesia, with the eerie tau tau statues of Tana Toraja – wooden or bamboo effigies of the dead.
In (literally) stark contrast is the Chernobyl Photography Short Break. The shortest tour, at five days, it’s led jointly by the guide and a professional photographer who takes you into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to visit the ghost town of Pripyat and the infamous Reactor No 4, three decades on from the worst disaster in nuclear history. The trip also includes a guided tour of Kiev, nearby capital of Ukraine, with its stunning UNESCO World Heritage Site Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the Kiev Monastery of the Caves. Plenty to discuss over dinner if asked what you did at the weekend.
Chinese festivals feature in three tours. Romantics will love the Sanyuesan and Sisters Rice Festivals trip to the mountainous south. The Sanyuesan shindig features fireworks, dancing and a ‘dragon feast’, while the Rice Festival sees girls from the Miao villages prepare coloured rice to offer potential suitors. Hold up two chopsticks and you are interested in their offer; hold up one and you are not. If you come bearing pinecones, you are again interested, but they need to bring gifts to the table. So much easier than match.com. You also explore the picturesque Jiabang rice terraces and visit Liping Village to learn about the celebrated Long March of the Chinese Red Army in 1934-5.
Alternatively, spend 16 days visiting the ancient and spiritual region of Kham on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. Here you’ll find the Sertar Buddhist Institute – the largest centre of Buddhist learning in the world – and enjoy tea, sweets and yak meat at the Litang Nomadic Festival, where nomads of the region converge for teaching from lamas and monks.
Or wonder at the longest waterfall in the world on the 14-day Naxi and Miao Festivals of Southern China tour. Experience the Eryueba Festival, as the Naxi people worship their nature gods, and visit the Baishuitai white water terraces with views of Tiger Leaping Gorge.
And if none of that grabs you, try the Nordkapp Adventure to Russia and Norway which takes you to the northernmost point of Europe. On the way, you get to revel in the glories of
St Petersburg and cross the White Sea to Solovetsky Island, home to a political prisoner camp in Tsarist days.
Me, I’ll be trying out several trips next year, hoping to find more incredible adventures and even bring back a Jack T Colton. Or at least a few chopsticks.
