Adventure Tour

Exploring ‘The Tibet of South America’

CNN has released its 10 best trips for every type of traveler in 2011–described as Foodie? Adventurer? Beach bum? No matter what type of traveler you are, here’s the perfect vacation for 2011–and one of our hot new treks is on it.

Exploring the Andes through the mountains and people of the High Antiplano and Lake Titicaca along the border of Peru and Bolivia, we enjoy the city life of some of the highest cities in the western hemisphere and trek deep into the mountains, where the stars have a dazzling quality and angle unique to the region. We even devote a few days to grade 5 climbing deep into our trek, but this it optional, and there are routes for any level, including first-timers and experts alike.

Interested in this trip? Have any questions? Send us your thoughts through our contact page.

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Cameras of Kilimanjaro: See the mountain from the porters’ perspective

Kilimanjaro has a few dirty little secrets. We’ve talked before about one of them—that the most popular routes can be absurdly crowded.

A far darker secret no on likes to talk about is that many porters aren’t paid livable wages, often have to pay for their own food on the way up and therefore barely eat anything while hauling backbreaking loads, and refuse to turn back down the mountain when they experience altitude sickness because they cannot afford to.

So it is with great pride that we at Embark are a part of the great Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project, the nonprofit that focuses on ensuring that porters make livable wages, are treated fairly, and that they actually receive the tips climbers try to give them.

We sat down this week to Skype with Australia-based photographer Helen Osler, who became involved with the porters project when she climbed the mountain back in 2008. She tells us one thing that really struck her about the porters that helped her reach the summit was how interested they were in her camera, and how skilled so many of them were as photographers.

She began to wonder how she could get porters on the mountain to take photos, given they couldn’t afford the equipment. So she launched the Porters of Kilimanjaro Photographic Project, through which she had people all around the world who were traveling to Tanzania bring disposable cameras and then get them back to her weeks later.

Out of the 75 cameras delivered to Mt. Kilimanjaro, 55 came back, giving Helen more than 1,000 photos to sift through. She says she was struck by how thoughtful so many of the images are, and was inspired to develop a book, even though the resolution isn’t large enough for a truly large, coffee-table, glossy book.

Called Cameras of Kilimanjaro, the 104-page color book costs roughly $48, but money raised through the photographic project will be used to improve the porters’ working conditions. Helen’s drive to help the porters is truly admirable. Among her observations:

“There are incredible risks, the same as everyone who climbs there, yet they can’t afford to go down. Their families won’t be eating if they lose their job that day, so they keep going. When I climbed, we gave medication to two or three of the porters, but they refused to go down. And there was nothing we could do about that; it was their choice.”

Helen says the average wage each porter earns per day should be 8,000 Tanzanian shillings, but the porters association has found it goes as low as 6,000. This converts to $4 a day instead of $5, “which is well under what they should be paid,” Helen says. “Which in our terms is just nothing.”

Check out the book, and if you can’t afford it, spread the word about it and about the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project, too. But the best thing you can do if you’re going to climb Kilimanjaro is to make sure that you find an outfit that works with the project and to do what you can to deliver tips to porters yourself. And remember: When you pay as little as possible to climb, the porters are the first to take that hit.

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Save the Serengeti: Scientists chime in

The Serengeti National Park is arguably the most beautiful national park in the world, one we do our best to tread through lightly when we embark on safaris after climbing Kilimanjaro. If the proposed road through it is constructed, that protected landscape will no longer be a place of refuge but a superhighway of vehicles that will greatly disrupt the wildlife that still heavily populated the region.

This week, scientists are now chiming in, with 290 of them from 32 countries petitioning for an alternate route that will better preserve the region’s wildlife and botany.

This signing comes on the heels of the group Save the Serengeti‘s call to action in June (pdf here), as well as warnings by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in July about various impacts, including: “The proposed road cuts through a critical wilderness area that is essential to the migration. The type of road surface matters little. The migration itself could easily collapse, with a devastating effect on all wildlife, the grasslands, and the entire ecosystem.”

Dr. Anne Pusey, an evolutionary anthropology professor at Duke University who studied lions in the Serengeti for 10 years, writes: “The Serengeti is a unique and precious ecosystem–one of the very few large-scale migratory systems of large animals remaining on the planet…. A road across the migratory routes will devastate the system for all the reasons listed in this [petition] letter and survey.”

Check out more detailed responses here.

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Priority: Keeping it real on the road

Anyone who read Elizabeth Gilbert‘s travel memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” (and let’s face it, a lot of people did) knows the hunger for not just visiting a place, but experiencing it. Those with the luxury of time can actually carve out months at a time actually living in their dream destinations, but for those with only a week or two at their disposal, getting off the beaten path and finding what is real about a place is practically an oxymoron.

Which is why we at Embark were so excited to come across the travel piece, When ‘Real’ Is the Traveling Priority, in The New York Times this week. Because this is exactly the kind of travel we believe in–the kind that lets you try a place on and wear it for a while, test its pulse. Simply put, we are not in it for the T-shirt.

This is why we take people to more than just the mountain when we climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and even on Kilimanjaro, we prefer the route less traveled (Lemosho), so that your path up what will arguably the best climb of your life will not be littered with tourist traffic. We’ve also taken several side trips to visit with the Masai, as seen here. We don’t just stare at and photograph the locals; we interact, share food and stories and laughter.

This is what real travel is all about.

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Trekking far off the beaten path in Nepal

Of the 120,000 or so trekkers who visit Nepal every year, only 5 percent go beyond the Annapurna, Langtang, and Everest regions. That’s just 6,000 trekkers actually trekking off the beaten path.

Since we at Embark are always seeking out the path less traveled (i.e. we climb the least-traveled Lemosho Route up Mt. Kilimanjaro), we are thrilled to announce that Nepal is about to open both the world’s longest and highest alpine trekking route as part of their Nepal Tourism Year 2011 initiative.

Called the Great Himalayan Trail, this route–officially opening in January 2011–will spread out across 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers), allowing adventurers to explore the far reaches of the Himalayan region. Eventually, this trail will connect several countries:

“The long-term aim is to connect the six Asian countries of Pakistan, China (Tibet Autonomous Region), India, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar via a route covering more than 4,500 km of the Great Himalaya range,” said Lisa Choegyal, consultant to the project and Honorary Consul designate for New Zealand in Nepal.

Highlights of the route include views of the world’s 14 highest peaks, winding along the sacred headwaters of the Ganges in India, traversing the entire length of Nepal in the shadows of Annapurna, Everest, and Kanchenjunga, and dabbling in Myanmar and Tibet as well.

Technically the GHT, as it is being called, already exists in the form of several old and new routes. This recent unveiling and naming is the result of better connecting and mapping these routes for the world’s most ambitious trekkers.

See pics and stories from various portions of the trail here, and learn more about the Nepal section through trekker Robin Boustead’s stunning documentation of his journey in 2008, when he covered an upper section of 1,000 miles, a high-altitude portion that mixes high passes with alpine valleys. His guidebook is set for a 15 November 2010 release.

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The Oregonian features Embark

Over the weekend, travel writer Shawn Donley featured Embark Adventures in The Oregonian as the best way for Portlanders to find a local guide up Mt. Kilimanjaro. He has this to say of Embark founder Donovan Pacholl:

The Tanzanian government requires all climbs to be guided and supported. If you’re looking for a local option, I doubt you’ll find anyone in Oregon who knows Kilimanjaro as well as Donovan Pacholl. He spent several years living at the base of the mountain and in 2003 helped establish the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project. He now runs Embark Adventures (www.embarkadventures.com), which specializes in climbs up the beautiful Lemosho route.

Props also to Donley’s second local pick, Nicole Apelian’s Trackers International. She leads nature lovers on trips to Botswana’s Okavango Delta.

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On safari in the Serengeti National Park

At Embark we’re not shy about picking favorites–that’s how we decide where to go and what to do in the world–and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro sits high at the top of our list. But while in Tanzania, we consider foregoing a safari through the Serengeti truly lamentable. You just have to try to make the time for this unforgettable post-climb event.

The Serengeti National Park is Tanzania’s first and most famous park and a major portion of the entire Serengeti region, which makes up 14 percent of Tanzania’s land area and comprises not only the park but also the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Maswa Game Reserve, the Loliondo, Grumeti and Ikorongo Controlled Areas and the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.

More than six million hooves pound the legendary plains of the Serengeti, which is renowned for its wealth of leopard and lion. The vast reaches of the park also help the black rhino fight extinction and provide a protected breeding ground for the vulnerable cheetah. Every year, triggered by the rains, nearly two million wildebeest, 200,000 zebra, and 300,000 Thomson’s gazelle gather to undertake the long trek to new grazing lands.

At least 2,000 years before Europeans first explored what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Maasai lived off this fertile, wild land that was eventually established as a protected park in 1951 and covers 5,700 square miles (14,763 square km) of some of the best grassland range in Africa. One of our favorite parts of the safari is spending time with Maasai–an honor few tourists have.

Serengeti’s ecosystem is also known as one of the oldest on earth, whose climate and vegetation have barely changed in the past million years. With plants that range from dry scrub and grasslands to towering baobabs, this park goes from burnt yellows in the hot, dry summers to a rainbow of flowerbeds that streak across green fields during the springtime rains.

You may have heard of the Big Five–lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, and buffalo–and the Serengeti is one of the world’s only parks that boasts them all. Our guides are so passionate about their work they have been known to get a bit emotional if and when they are able to track down and show all five. But these impressive beasts aren’t the only wildlife to get excited about. Cheetahs, gazelles, hyenas, baboons, impalas, giraffes, and wild dogs populate the rugged terrain, not to mention more than 500 species of birds and 100 types of dung beetle, trees so beautiful and strange they’ll distract you from the animals, and a night sky so full of starlight you might not need your head lamp.

Check out our Serengeti Safari itinerary, our audio slideshow with John Leary on his recent trip, and details on the tents and lodges we prefer on what is arguably the greatest safari in the world.

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