Travel: Adventure Tourism

I've recently been to the Gilf Kebir, an area the size of Switzerland in south-west Egypt with no water at all. Tourists travel with military escorts and it takes a week of desert travelling to get there, so very few do. However, imagine tourists going to Switzerland and only visiting Berne and Geneva and then scooting back home. That's what the Gilf is like – the tour groups visit two sites and then leave. We, however, stayed longer – on my last trip we discovered an ancient burial site and a new route on to a plateau unmarked with any tracks – we were the first Europeans here for sure, and possibly the first people since the rainy period in the Sahara of 7,000 years
ago. . . .

I knew there was huge groundswell of people eager to take part in real exploration when I wrote an article about searching for new examples of rock art in the desert – I was inundated with requests to join the expedition. But instead of just another touristic holiday, I had a vision of being able to give people the basic knowledge and experience, while on a real expedition, to be able to do it later by themselves. I had reported for magazines on adventure-tourist trips and I saw how the "clients" were made dependent on the tour leaders and their assistants. They were kept out of the
kitchen on spurious "insurance" grounds (really because they got in the way). They were denied the chance to help pack vehicles because that might slow things up. But people want to learn. On one trip I accompanied, an Italian woman showed me a lone GPS point that she'd copied into her notebook. Never mind that she'd never visit that spot again. For her it was a proof that she was involved in a real expedition.