When Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, along with Sarah Shourd, were arrested by Iranian border guards in July 2009 while apparently just out for a hike, I'm probably not the only one who thought, "Why didn't they have a guide?"
Sure, GPS is a nice traveling companion when you're just knocking about, but maybe along a high-tension border between two antagonistic countries in a war zone it would be a good time to check with the experts, not the read-out.
Thankfully, Bauer and Fattal have now been released, fully two years after their misguided ramble, and a year after their companion Shourd was returned to the US. And it has to be noted that travel guides in war zones are not as readily available as they are in most tourist spots. But traveling anywhere is not without risk, a realization that was brought home to me not long ago, when planning for my trip to one of the world's most popular destinations: Machu Picchu.
A couple weeks ago, I received an unexpected email from my airline mileage account. "We see that your Mileage Plan account has not had any activity posted for quite some time!" it read. "Our Mileage Plan Conditions of Membership specify that accounts with no ... redemption activity for the previous two years will be closed."
The prospect of losing your miles concentrates the mind wonderfully, as Samuel Johnson might have said. (He actually said "the prospect of being hanged," but times were different then.) So I consulted my Bucket List and found amid the unchecked few this very specific, travel-related desire: "Visit Machu Picchu."
I was well-traveled, I was an adventurer. Former river guide, travel writer, bird-watcher and photographer: that's me. I knew my way around the world, and around the World Wide Web. In the Internet age, I thought it would be a simple matter to cobble together a quick trip to Peru, one lasting no more than a work week, affordable, adventurous yet... not too adventurous.
It would simply be a matter of Googling "Machu Picchu," scrolling through the Trip Advisor listings, looking for a hotel on Expedia and finding a flight on Kayak. I'd pay with PayPal. Surely, I thought, there's an app for that.
So I got started. Entering "Machu Picchu" in Google got me, let's see, 27,700,000 hits, give or take. Ah, I thought, I should be more exact. "Machu Picchu travel" narrowed it down to just over 8 million, "Machu Picchu trek" got it to a manageable 2 million.
Clearly this wasn't very productive. Even if there were two million ways to see Machu Picchu, I only needed one.
I had been resisting calling a travel agent to do what search engines and online transactions should be able to do, but I was beginning to think that maybe talking to someone with some actual, as opposed to virtual, knowledge is not always a bad thing.
I remembered Alicia Zablocki from almost 20 long years ago, when I worked on a web project called Terraquest that was co-sponsored by the adventure travel company Mountain Travel Sobek. She'd helped out then with an Ecuador itinerary in preparation for our Virtual Galapagos production. If she still worked there...
She did. "I've been at here for 23 years," she said, "since before we were MTS!" (Mountain Travel had been among the first international trekking companies based in the US; Sobek was the pioneering international river adventures company, where I had worked in the 1980s. The two companies merged in the early 1990s.)
So I asked her straight out: "I'm looking for a quick trip to Machu Picchu, maybe with some hiking, river rafting if you have it, but primarily it's the Andean culture I'm interested in."
When she asked for a time frame, I told her it had to be before March 1, or I'd lose my airline miles.
"Then you'd better go in December, we don't have Machu Picchu trips in January or February," she said. "You heard about the flooding last year, didn't you?"
Perhaps I had, vaguely. What happened?
She recounted that in January, 2010, the Urubamba river below Machu Picchu was flooded by heavy rainfall, and the railroad tracks were damaged by landslides though the canyon. Train travel was impossible for several days, stranding over 2,000 tourists, either up the mountain unable to get out or in the valley unable to get up.
News reports at the time made it sound like a tourist's worst nightmare. People with money on hand bribed their way onto evacuation helicopters sent for the elderly, some people slept in the street and others were literally fighting for hotel rooms (several of which had doubled their prices), some were faking illness to get medical evacuation. And the ruins of Machu Picchu were closed for several weeks.
"It would never have happened to one of our clients," Alicia said. "First of all, we didn't have any trips at Machu Picchu then. We don't book trips there in the rainy season."
But it isn't the anticipated dangers that are truly dangerous, it's the unexpected, like hiking in Iraq or flying on 9/11. I had been flying into JFK on a Jet Blue flight at the time, and I felt weirdly vulnerable on a jet aircraft headed for New York while the on-board TV screens showed the news of the burning twin towers. The dislocation and apprehension of that day had come back to me on the recent tenth anniversary.
"I don't think I had any clients in the field then, but a similar thing maybe was the 2009 earthquake in Chile. We did our best to get everyone out of the country who wanted to leave right away, and offered them refunds and credits, in addition to vouchers for the services they missed," Alicia said.
Isn't this part of any travelers insurance? "Oh, you should definitely get travelers insurance for cancelled flights, delays and unexpected cancellations. But that won't help you with an in-country operator, so that's what we provide -- local staff to look after you, lots of experience in the area, even full evacuation insurance if you think you need it.
"Whatever has to be done, we always opt to be sure that everyone is safe and back."
"Wait a minute," I said. "I'm not looking for a crisis; I'm looking for a vacation. I mean, it's nice that you have those kinds of connections and whatnot, but - well, can't I just relax?"
"Of course!" she laughed. "It's your vacation, forget about worrying. Let me tell you, we've been working with most of our guides in Peru almost 20 years, they know the country, what works and how to get the best experience. That's part of our job, to curate our itineraries based on changing conditions and travelers' feedback -- avoiding culture shock but still getting the flavor of the country."
"And you know," she added, "I think people now are looking more for comfort. We used to have very active camping trips, but now most people want to be pampered." She hesitated. "I've noticed that even younger people are looking for less camping and more comfort," she confided.
Over the next couple days, I thought about our conversation and made a few attempts to beat the price online. Once I started down the Google path, however, I was facing the same wide-open results and choices that had frustrated me before.
The thought kept coming back to me. I'd found a trip that matched my criteria: only one week away from work, with active days and comfortable nights, without hassles and with maximum opportunities to capture several gigabytes of digital images. True, it was a Peru package they already had in their catalog, but really, what was so wrong about that?
Mountain Travel Sobek is far from the only domestic company to have trips to South America, or Machu Picchu, and I probably could have kept searching to come up with a few more alternatives. But I called her back. "This is easier than I thought, Alicia. So tell me: What's the latest up-and-coming adventure destination?"
"Colombia. We feel now is the right time for Colombia."
Colombia? After years, decades, of anti-drug wars and guerrilla activity, Colombia? Were we back in the danger zone, like a hike along a war-torn border?
"It's a beautiful destination, with more hiking, birding and other activities in the area that haven't been available for quite awhile. And it's a beautiful destination.."
On the other hand, I was missing the white-tipped quetzal on my birding life list.
"When's the rainy season in Colombia?" I asked.
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_1764.html