OTR Talks to Eagle Creek’s Stasia Raines

Ever wonder about the people making the great gear you use when you're hiking the Annapurna Circuit or cycling through Moab's Canyonlands?  They're people like Stasia Raines of Eagle Creek, who just returned from a mixed adventure-volunteering trip through Thailand and Cambodia. In addition to its efforts at creating more sustainable fabrics and equipment, Eagle Creek supports a number of philanthropic projects around the world, often discovered through the traveling adventures of their staff.   Stasia visited a couple of projects when she mixed her recent dive holiday with a stint volunteering in a North Thailand orphanage and short visit to ...

Can Poetry Save the World?

We truly believe that Adventure Travel will save the World, but not without a little poetry.  Stanford professor John Felstiner has a new book, Can Poetry Save the Earth? , a collection of poems from writers who have written about the natural world.  NPR asked the author to select one poem he believes can save the world, he picked "The Well Rising," by William Stafford.    The Well Rising The well rising without sound, the spring on a hillside, the plowshare brimming through deep ground everywhere in the field-   The sharp swallows in their swerve flaring and hesitating hunting for ...

The Ayahuasca Ceremony

by Guillermo Quintana Courtesy of livinginperu.com In order to begin to write about this traditional native ceremony it is essential to know about the plant that is used for this ritual: ¨Ayahuasca.¨ Its meaning comes from two ethnic Quechua words ¨Aya¨ and ¨Huasca,¨ which mean rope and death, or the rope of death. The other meaning of the word Ayahuasca is ¨Vine of the Soul." The plant grows in the Peruvian Amazon. It is a climbing skinny plant that grows around the trees. That is why they call it rope. The Ayahuasca ceremony ...

OTR’s Top Ten Tips for Making Adventure Travel Easier

Always pack a shawl or sarong and keep it handy in your pack. It's good for covering up your legs or your head; good for sitting on; great for wrapping around your waist while you change out of a swimsuit and back into your jeans; excellent for warming up, shading yourself, or replacing a towel. Scan your credit cards, passport, and vaccination certificates and keep them in your email in case you lose them while traveling. Don't bring anything you don't mind losing. Bring one bag. Only. Pack a jar of Iodine tablets for water purification.  Carry a a simple but thorough first aid kit ...

Amber Moyle: Travcoa’s Adventure Designer & Sustainable Development Champion

Being a fashion designer may have its perks - free couture and nights out with celebrities - but in our book the perks of Amber Moyle's gig at Travcoa wins hands down. Scouting your next holiday or dreaming about future career moves? Read on. In a recent conversation with Amber she shared stories of managing the logistics for escorted Travcoa groups through Jordan, Syria and Israel, as well as escorting herself tours to Albania, Macedonia and Greece.  And when she was asked to design a specialized trip focused ...

Lucknow be 2 Ladies: Taking on the Rickshaw Run

Last year, Pippa Daniels, a financial analyst from Wales (but Dubai livin'), observed her boyfriend's participation in the  Rickshaw Run with interest.  This year, she and her friend Helen Ahern, a lawyer also working in Dubai, have entered themselves as the  Lucknow Be 2 Ladies team to compete in the Run. Asked about their motivation, sure, competition with the boys was one, but Pippa also mentioned that it had been a while since she’d felt challenged or put herself totally out of her comfort zone. Racing through an unfamiliar country ...

Interview with Eric M. and Pokin Y. of GeckoGo

Whether they are quickly scaling up walls or scampering around wicker furniture, we seem to see the friendly gecko lizards a lot in our travels.  The gecko's friendly, inquisitive nature was the inspiration behind Eric M. and Pokin Y.'s travel website, GeckoGo.  In 2006, when Eric and Pokin broke free from the cosmetics industry,  they wanted to build a website to make planning a trip easy and fun.  Frustrated online planners themselves, they knew their friends  were also opening tab after tab ...

Trekking through Sinai

Trekking through Sinai: Roads Less Traveled by Emily Eros Each year, over 3 million travelers take refuge from the cold in the Land of the Pharaohs, soaking up the sun along Egypt’s Red Sea coast. A night-long excursion to Mount Sinai is part of many organized tours based in Sharm El Sheikh and other coastal resorts. In the darkness of twilight, a fleet of Pullman buses arrives at the base of Mount Sinai, carrying between 300 and 1500 tourists on any given night. The groups spill out of the buses, rub sleep from their ...

Sustainable Travel International

Get to know Sustainable Travel International; we encourage you to sign up for their newsletter – Responsible Travel Report to learn about how all our travels can be conducted more responsibly. STI’s mission statement says they’re dedicated to “promoting sustainable development and responsible travel with programs that allow consumers, businesses and travel-related organizations to contribute to the environmental, socio-cultural and economic values of the places they visit, and the planet at large.” For travelers, what this means is they offer a great range of resources from green travel directories to information and research on everything from carbon neutral travel to ...

Off the Radar Interview with Roger Chao and Megan Kerr

Taking their Custom-built Quike Vehicle as They Embark on a Year-long Journey Across Asia and Russion In April, 2009, Roger Chao and Megan Kerr will embark on a year-long journey across Asia and Russia to pursue cultural and educational exchange with the native peoples. Off the Radar editors will be capturing their exploits before, during, and after the trip with interviews, video, and photographs. We recently caught up with the duo in between their custom-built Quike test drives for the following interview. Check out some videos of the Quike. Read more ...

WOW! CURACAO!!

The Difficult To Pronounce, Pearl of the Caribbean by Cornelius O. Myers The first order of business is a quick course in pronunciation. Curacao is pronounced - COO-RA-SOW (as in WOW!). There are some who feel that because tourists can't correctly pronounce the name of the island, they choose to go somewhere else rather than be embarrassed. This could well explain the popularity of St. John and St. Kitts. No matter what the reason, Curacao is below many tourists radar. Granted that the island hasn't really sought tourism until recently; when the off-shore banking operations moved elsewhere and Shell Oil ...

Japan’s Festival Frenzy

by Matthew Schwartzman-Stubbs Visit OTR’s Photography page to see some great pictures of Matt’s Aomori experience. Before there is movement, there is music. From in front of towering samurai warriors, dragons and demons, the throng of dancers cannot see the armada of drums behind them. The deep bass notes bang through the crowd. They come in pairs. They jostle the people. Then the blows come on in rapid bursts and the tones throw the dancers to their feet, jumping, kicking, roaring: "Ra, Se, Ra! Ra, Se, Ra! Ra, Se, Ra, Se, Ra, Se, Ra!" This is Aomori Nebuta Matsuri. For one week starting ...

Notes from Shanghai

By Frank McMains What's In a Name? One of the more remarked upon traits of the Chinese is their proclivity for atypical English names. A server hustled past me in a restaurant, carrying a stack of plates and wearing a nametag that declared him "Potato." I bought a bottle of wine from a girl named Charles and one morning the manager at the Howard Johnson called himself Alpha. Clearly not to be messed with. In this spirit, I endeavored to select a ...

Guiding Myself: Kruger National Park

By Janet Bumpas This past weekend I went for the classic African experience: a weekend in Kruger. Six of us leapt at the chance to go back to the days of pointy spears and hard rocks on a trek into the bush of Africa. We thrilled to see massive lions snarling out at us from behind bushes, fled their hot breath steaming up our backsides as we ran for the safety of cover. Seeing herds of elephants stampeding across the plains, we stood there, holding our ground, ready with our spears, looking to get our dinner. ...

Onions and Spare Tires: Overland from Vietnam to Laos

By Erin Kollings 26 hours on a bus. And we made good time- only two flat tires, eight sick people and twenty-four stops to pick up goods which would share our journey across the border. From Hoi An, Vietnam to Vientiane, Laos overland. Green sweeping hills, limestone mountains, spanning coastlines, decaying French colonial houses in bright pastels. Inside the bus it smells like onions and sweat. Next to me I see boxes of lightbulbs, bags of clothes, crates of food and crammed between it all - the passengers. My fellow seatmate is a youngish Vietnamese woman crossing into Laos ...

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