When think of adventure travel, we come up with the typical images of African plains, exotic animals, jungles with multi-colored birds looking scornfully, of lions side-stepping across our paths, and serpents hanging from trees. We think of boats plowing through tempestuous waters, the wind spraying ocean mist in our face, the smell of the salty sea. Adventure seems to require something hazardous, something that just barely puts our life at stake. We don't mean to actually put our lives at stake. We are talking about something that is meant to be entertaining as well as, ultimately, safe. What we are seeking is something stimulating, new, something we do not find in our city streets. Such adventures are motivated by our need to experience a new environment, one so foreign to our own, that we should remember it the rest of our life.
What is adventure travel if not an essaying out into some place strange and mysterious, some place that will bring up in us a wonder and awe that we have lost in the repetitious cycle of our daily lives? When the common and every recurring events of our lives begin to weigh like a cloudy sky and the same smells, sounds, the same sights, the same voices, faces we've seen year in an year out, become as if wrapped in a gray mist, we look longing across the sea and remember those stories we read in high school of ships with masts and buccaneers. We remember tales of exploration that those hearty discovers of new worlds brought home to amaze both common and royalty, tales of conflict, strange people dressed in animal skins and sporting spears. Adventure travel from this vantage means danger and victory.
The common conception of adventure might be thought, as we say, common. We all know the adventure will not pose the same tensions as it did to those earlier explorers of the unknown. If we're looking for danger, we can find it right here in our streets when we attempt to cross them a rush hour. We can venture out to the seedy side of town if we want that danger to involve other men, and put something real at risk into our travel, like our pocket books. There are certainly strangely dressed people on the east side, tattooed and wearing outrageous costumes, and many of them are concealing weapons that will surely chill the bones. Perhaps adventure is not the correct word for what we call adventure travel. What do we really mean to say?
In all adventure travel, are not looking for new experience? For some, art and culture lovers for instance, going to Greece to view the architecture of the ancients, going to Europe to gaze at aspiring Gothic steeples of ancient cathedrals, to cross stone bridges that have been walked by kings, artists, poets, to tour great castles and palaces overlaid with gold, while not suggesting danger at all, are still adventures. These offer something different, something mysterious, something that will bring us to wonder and awe. Not all adventures are dangerous at all.
So if you're looking for that adventure this year that will give you the experience of a lifetime, remember, adventure is only in the eye of the beholder. Bon voyage!
