The Cambridge Dictionary describes an adventure as “an exciting, unusual, and potentially risky undertaking. It often involves stepping outside your comfort zone, embracing unpredictability”, and mentions the “psychological thrill of a daring journey”.
My hubby and I began our adventures before we even embarked on our honeymoon. We’d just gotten engaged, and had taken what was my first trip involving flights to Santa Monica, CA to visit family friends. My first time on an airplane, first time out of the country, first sight of the ocean and palm trees – the entire thing was exhilarating for me. And then came the earthquake on New Year’s Day. Oh, that was an intense experience that we’ve never forgotten.
Several months later, when we did go on our honeymoon, we had a category 5 hurricane, a tornado, and just escaped the Caribbean before a category 4 hurricane hit.
You might say we got used to the unpredictable, even developed a sense of humour about it. Largely in self-defense, as the jokes really began to fly. We became the couple most people DIDN’T want to travel with.
I’ve been reading of a trend to sign up for an out-there experience like a Survival experience. You’re given a knife and a fishing line. One group wrote S.O.S. on the sand within 24 hours.
But even closer to home, ‘adventure’ travellers have been known to whinge about being woken up by bird calls in the jungle, or the sound of waves around an over-water bungalow. I think we can agree that perhaps those weren’t the best fit in the way of vacations.
Scientists have found an actual ‘adventure’ or ‘wanderlust’ gene: DRD4-7R. They believe it enabled early civilizations to send out explorers to find new land. In our times, it merely provides less-sensitive dopamine receptors in our brains that crave more thrilling experiences that those who don’t have it.
I’m guessing that Mike and I do. If we didn’t, we’d have been pretty silly to get ourselves tangled in travel craziness so, so many times.
Our trip to Egypt for our 10th anniversary was fairly tame – just a hotel fire of note – but the adventure of the exotic dug its hooks into us and never left. Our family and friends were flabbergasted by our decision to go, and we became the near-mythical ‘Indy and Marion’ icons of everyone we knew. I believe there was general relief when we got home safely, but it was short-lived after regular ‘quirks’ began to add themselves to our vacations. We’re now up to six hurricanes, three volcanic eruptions, a bush fire, and too many more to list here.
I’ll tell you one thing, though: we learned how to be resilient and make the best of things.
When friends recommended years ago that I become a travel agent, I thought that might be cool, and I looked into it. I took courses, attended conferences, looked into certification.
And I began to notice two things: that most people now expect things to run perfectly, and they want to be able to contact their agent 24/7. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in the event of an emergency, but otherwise, hell no.
I had no interest at all in booking trips to lie on a beach. The voyages that interested me were the kind that hubby and I took: adventures to exotic places where you learned things about other cultures, and about yourself as well.
Adventure travel isn’t soft or easy. It’s wild, exhilarating – a ‘you never know what’s around the next corner’ experience.
These trips require:
– an open mind
– a good sense of humour
– the understanding that very little of the trip will go smoothly
– a willingness to make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in, i.e. resilience
– you must be comfortable with a certain amount of risk
The heroines in my books possess a lot of these qualities. In the adventures I put them through, they’d be eaten alive otherwise. But that’s the nature of novels – they take us on virtual adventures for the thrill without the risk.
Conditions on real adventure trips are usually very different than what you’re used to – THAT’S WHY YOU GO! (Sorry, we’ve just seen too many people abroad whine when they can’t find a hamburger joint or a beer that they’re used to drinking.)
When we went on our first safari in Africa, I did a lot of research about the conditions. It was to be a mobile camping trip, deep in the bush of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. No electricity = no plug-in shavers or flat-irons (rechargeable all the way, baby), and we found portable solar panels to recharge my camera batteries with. I found out what we should be wearing, what pre-trip medications we’d need (the usual foreign-travel inoculations, plus antimalarial medication for the duration), all the different flights we’d be on (bush planes will only soft-sided luggage below a certain weight).
A lot of prep? Loved it. And here’s how the trip gifted us back. Our first night camping in thin 9×9 dome tents in the middle of the bush, under the African stars, was the most exhilarating thing we’ve ever done. It was such a visceral experience, tucked under our duvets against the night chill, listening to the chiming of the tree frogs and fruit bats all around us as we fall asleep and the insistent wake-up call of the noisy francolin birds. On the game drives we saw every type of animal imaginable, and I remember looking directly into the golden eyes of a lion as it lay in the shade, and watching an elephant spray itself with muddy water on a hot day. As dusk fell, we returned to camp to have a hot-bucket shower and eat dinner around a campfire as the sky turned blue-violet.
In the Amazon jungle, our lodge was a thoroughfare for lizards and stick insects and agoutis and parrots and you-name-it. We hiked through the jungle for several hours in the company of an Indigenous guide, who coaxed tarantulas out of their ground holes with a stick, showed us how to swing on lianas, and how to send messages with the trunks of trees that can boom through the thick jungle for miles. It wasn’t a fancy lodge, but the surroundings were spectacular, the food was authentic and the cocktails were fun.
But not all of adventure travel is Instagram-worthy, and that’s the point. To get into the Amazonian jungle, you typically fly into a muddy frontier town called Puerto Maldonado. You buy supplies for fun – any kind of clothing, fruit and dried weird stuff you can think of – then walk down a rickety wooden plank to board a rickety boat that transfers you to a motorized canoe for a 1.5-hour journey along the Madre de Dios River to your lodge. It’s fantastic to zip along with the wind in your hair, watching wild papaya trees and gold dredgers go by.
My hubby and I are middle-of-the-road adventurers: far beyond most of the people we know, but far behind the people who do things like climb Mt. Everest. We’re comfortable with that status, and have no issue with the many people we know who prefer to travel closer to home or stay in luxury hotels. Nothing the matter with that at all.
We didn’t become intrepid adventurers overnight. It took us several…challenging…trips to get grounded and confident. Each small step outside our comfort zone stretched it, until now we’re comfortable just about anywhere.
To us, the best things happen when you’re not expecting them. Magical moments, like having tea under an active volcano in New Zealand as it rumbled, or helping an entire class of schoolgirls in Bangkok practice their English. In that Amazon jungle, a friendly spider monkey climbed down and sat on my head for a while, playing with my water bottle.
Those are the kinds of experiences we love, and that turn up in all my novels in one form or another. But unless I can set up those kinds of trips (and I have run a few), where my travellers want to really ‘see what’s out there’, being a travel agent just isn’t for me. I can’t set up a trip that will run perfectly, and I don’t want to. And I’d want to run trips where you learn to take care of yourself – no 24-hr hotline needed.
So that’s it in a nutshell. If you want to embark on a real adventure, do your homework so you understand what you’re getting into. If you think better of it, that’s fine too – vacations are meant to be enjoyed.
You can take an armchair adventure any time, though, by reading my novels 😊 There’s a new one coming out this fall, a horror adventure that takes my heroine into some very dark and erotic, but dangerous, places. Will you be up for that? The payoff, as with all great adventures, will be remarkable.