Welcome: Your Beautiful Adventure Starts Here
~ Words and image by Vickie Sam Paget, Sky Blue Content ~
Not ready to settle with the mundane? Fed up with the bland and the banal? And downright frustrated with the everyday blah-blah-blah? Then it could be time to open your eyes and set your soul free on a big, beautiful adventure…
I think that Jawaharlal Nehru summed it up perfectly when he said: ‘We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.’
So many people are happy to settle into a dull, adventure-less life, when, in reality, there are endless opportunities for adventure – for big, beautiful adventure – right in front of our noses. We just have to keep your ‘eyes open’ to new opportunities.
And it looks like more and more of us are looking for unique ways to combat that everyday grind. According to the Adventure Travel Trade Association’s (ATTA) Adventure Tourism Market Study 2013, between 2009 and 2012, the adventure travel market saw an average annual growth of a whopping 65 per cent.
The study also revealed that, contrary to popular belief, we adventure travellers are not all in our early-20s; we are 36 years of age on average. And we’re more likely to use the services of professional guides and instructors than our less adventurous counterparts – so research really is key when it comes to planning our adventurous escapes.
We’re a force to be reckoned with; a lucrative market that the industry’s operators and service providers are bending over backwards to please. After all, adventure is big business for them, so they are continually coming up with new ideas to please the adventure traveller – which means more choice for us than ever before!
The ATTA report also revealed that we adventurers just can’t get enough of a good thing. In North America, soft adventures make up 15.5 per cent of all travellers, and our average trip-spending has grown by nine per cent each year since 2009. And while hard adventure travellers may make up just 0.9 per cent of the overall travelling population, our trip-spending has grown by a massive 25 per cent each year since 2009.
We also take longer trips. The average length of a soft adventurer’s trip has increased from eight days in 2009 to 10 days in 2012; while hard adventure travellers who vacationed for an average of seven days in 2009, travelled for an average of nine days in 2012. And the numbers are constantly increasing, with soft adventure travellers planning to spend an average of 10.9 days on their next trip, and hard adventure travellers planning to spend an average of 12.3 days on their next trip.
We’re demanding a different kind of experience on vacation – one that involves tapping into local cultural experiences and environmental gems in order to actively participate in what makes the destination we are visiting truly distinct. We’re not content to just sit on a beach or spend the day shopping. We are pushing our physical and mental boundaries; stepping out of the humdrum of a boring old beach holiday to try something new and inspiring instead.
Like dog sledding in La Belle Provence with Aventure Écotourisme Québec; visiting the Walled City of Khiva in Uzbekistan with Eldertreks; riding the rapids of Fiji’s Upper Navua River; meeting Antarctica’s penguins with G Adventures; hiking back-country trails in Utah’s San Juan Country; roaming the hanging wildflower gardens of Zion National Park; waterskiing the Caribbean-blue waters of Idaho and Utah’s Bear Lake; fishing the ankle-deep flats of the Laguna Madre in Harlingen in Texas; kayaking in the desert oasis of Arizona’s Prescott; or rambling across the impressive sand dunes of Utah’s breathtaking Snow Canyon State Park.
Yes, adventure is exciting stuff and there’s a wonderful world out there to explore if we are open to it. It’s just as Jawaharlal Nehru said: ‘We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.’
Image: G Adventures/Leo Tamburri
This feature first appeared in A Canadian’s Guide to Adventure, a supplement to CT Magazine, a publication for Canadian travel agents.
