5 mins with: Adventure Alternative

I am mountaineer and I wanted a business that would allow me to indulge my hobby of climbing and travelling. I didn’t want a conventional career and I’m very opportunistic, and I liked the idea of managing my own affairs. I remember saying to myself that nobody would ever tell me what time to get up in the morning  (the irony is that having my own business has meant working longer hours than ever!) I felt I had the skills to run a business and was inspired by the challenge of pushing my business idea forward (except during seven years of recession!) I was inspired to apply my own ethics and principles, based on life experiences, to my own business and I like the feeling of responsibility that being a company owner means.

I travelled extensively for about ten years after university, most of it in developing countries, volunteering in the aid industry in east Africa, driving trucks full of clients across that continent and also working on scrap oil tankers and beaching them in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China. I travelled mostly overland, on trains and buses and on foot. I walked across the Sahara Desert on my own when I was 21, and climbed in all the great mountain ranges. Most of my friends came from Nepal, Kenya, Tanzania, Russia and elsewhere. I wanted the money from my business to give them a decent income and I wanted my business to create prosperity and social mobility in the areas where I took tourists. This was all many years before ‘responsible tourism’ became a phrase, but I was there at the start of pro-poor tourism, and I really identified with that cause. Basically I didn’t want my business to be exploitative because I’d spent so long seeing the effects of commercial monopoly and inequality. I just wanted my business to have some integrity and to reflect my values.

Don’t travel so fast, take your time travelling and you’ll find that the very act of travelling is in itself transformative. Travel overland and meet people, talk to people, empathise with people and be curious about people. Don’t just say “I want to go there” and expect to be delivered an experience just because you paid for an air ticket. Take the slow train and accept every experience and meeting along the way as a privilege, not a right.

It’s been much more fun trying to develop a business model that is more than just about making money. Making a profit is a mechanical process achieved through the manipulation of figures, and selling something for more than it costs. But seeing your philosophy of travel change communities and improve their quality of life is very rewarding. I like the friendships that the business has given me, the privilege of sharing a life with all these people who have helped make it work.