DreamTours makes your cycling adventures a reality

by Kraig Becker on

Have you ever wanted to go on an epic cycling expedition? Perhaps explore the Serengeti by mountain bike or maybe ride the Silk Road? Perhaps you’ve always wanted to go on a cycling adventure to some remote place, but just weren’t sure how to prepare or handle the logistics. If so, you’re luck, as DreamTours is here to help!

DreamTours comes to us from the same team that organizes the annual Tour d’Afrique, an annual ride from Cairo to Cape Town, crossing 7500 miles of African wilderness in the process. The concept behind DreamTours is simple, come up with a great idea for your cycling adventure, post it on the DreamTour website and invite friends, family, and cycling buddies to vote on the concept and weigh in on the idea. If you get enough people to join your tour, the DreamTeam will handle all the logistics and make the adventure a reality. The best part, you’ll get to ride for free!

The DreamTour website acts like an online forum for adventure cyclists. Once you create your account, you’ll be able to post your ideas for cycling adventures, vote on the tours posted by others, and leave comments or questions about those trips. If you see one that looks interesting, you can elect to join the tour, or recruit riders to join your adventure, and you’ll soon be off and riding. If your tour sells out, you’ll get to go along for nothing, or you can choose to apply your discount to the entire team, saving everyone money in the process.

With the DreamTour team taking over the planning process, there will be nothing left for you to do but train for your cycling adventure. Once they have everything organized, and the logistics in place, you’ll simply hop a flight to your destination, and hit the trail.

Write a blog, go to Antarctica!

by Kraig Becker on

Ever had the urge to visit the Antarctic? Do you have a knack for writing interesting, inspiring, blog posts? Then check out the latest contest from Quark Expeditions, an adventure travel company that specializes in journeys to both polar icecaps.

Quark has launched the aptly named BlogYourWayToAntarctica.com and has invited adventurous travelers to register to the site and write a 300 word blog post on why they should be the Official Quark Blogger. Writers are encouraged to be creative and use their imaginations, as others will be reading, and voting, on the best entry. The blog post with the most votes at the end of September will win an all expense paid trip for two to Antarctica.

The Antarctic cruise is scheduled for Feb. 20 to March 3 of 2010 and includes airfare from the U.S. to Ushuaia, Argentina, as well as one nights stay in that city. The next 11 days are spent aboard the cruise ship Lyubov Orlova exploring the Southern Sea and making day trips to the Antarctic Penninsula.

The contest just got underway a few days ago, and it runs until September 30th, but the sooner you get your entry in, the more time you’ll have to lobby your friends, family, and complete strangers, to vote for you. Head over to the website now and get blogging!

Epic round-the-world cruise follows in the wake of famous explorers

by Kraig Becker on

In March of 2010, an adventure cruise of epic proportions will get underway from Singapore that will send travelers on a round the world expedition, following in the footsteps of some of history’s most revered explorers.

Cruise West’s Voyages of the Great Explorers will send 120 luck passengers on a 335 day cruise aboard the Spirit of Oceanus, the flagship of the Cruise West fleet. Departing from Singapore on March 6, 2010, the ship will sail west, and eventually return to its starting destination on February 3, 2011. In between, passengers will be treated to 24 individual voyages, encompassed by six defined “chapters”.

Each of these six chapters correspond to a historical figure who explored the world by sea. The first chapter follows the path of Marco Polo, while the second takes the route of Odysseus and the Phoenicians merchants. Subsequent chapters follow the adventures of Lief Eriksson, Christopher Columbus, James Cook, and Ferdinand Magellan. Each cruise within each chapter will follow historical routes and offer insights into what the explorers experienced as they went about their own voyages.

Through the course of the cruise, travelers will experience 242 ports of call spread across 59 countries. They’ll aslo visit 85 UNESCO World Heritage sites, cross 14 seas and oceans, and traverse the Suez, Corinth, and Panama Canals.

So how much will this epic cruise set you back? Good question! You can book any single cruise or combination of cruises starting at $4995. But if you want to do the whole thing, spending all 335 days circumnavigating the globe, it’ll set you back a cool $233,995. I wonder what Marco Polo would think of that.

For more information on the cruise read the press release here.

American summits Everest for record 11th time

by Kraig Becker on

Last week we mentioned that Apa Sherpa, the legendary mountain guide, reached the summit of Mt. Everest, extending his record to an impressive 19th time on top of the world. A few days later, we noted that British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes also reached the summit, on his third attempt, at the age of 65.

Over the weekend, American mountaineer Dave Hahn, climbing with the First Ascent Team, also successfully topped out on the mountain, reaching the 29,035 foot summit, which is the highest point on the planet. For Hahn, this is his 11th trip up the mountain, a record for a non-Sherpa.

Hahn is a professional mountain guide who has scaled big mountains all over the world, and his resume includes 26 ascents of Mt. Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica, and 18 summits of Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. He’s also been to the top of Mt. Rainier nearly 250 times in his illustrous career.

Congratulations to Dave, and the rest of the First Ascent Team for an amazing effort this year on Everest. With the entire team now down safely off the mountain, they are preparing for the trek back to Lukla, where they’ll catch a flight to Kathmandu, and finally, after nearly two months in Nepal, they’ll head home.

How global warming could change travel

by Brenda Yun on

We heard it from Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth,” and we’re hearing it again — this time from the World Ocean Conference 2009 that is in its third of a five-day conference, taking place in Manado, Indonesia: rising sea levels will likely displace millions of island dwellers in the next twenty years. According to two recent articles in the Conde Nast Portfolio and AFP, the the polar ice caps are melting, causing ocean levels to rise, thereby shrinking some very populated and travel-worthy islands.

Places like the Maldives, Kiribati, and Tuvalu are literally shrinking and could be completely submerged by 2050. Mount Kilimanjaro and the Swiss Alps could lose over 40% of their snow within 20 years. Perhaps most importantly, an estimated 150 million people could be displaced from their lowland homes because of significant sea level rises.

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So, what does this mean for travelers? Well, the implications are quite clear. Those of us interested in visiting the polar destinations like Greenland and Antarctica or even glacial regions threatened by shrinking glaciers should enjoy them while they’re still cold. The same goes for the shrinking islands, such as the Phillipines, and the warming waters of the Great Barrier Reef, which could lose over 90% of its live coral within 50 years.

The five-day World Ocean Conference has drawn hundreds of officials and ocean experts from 80 countries and is the prelude to December talks on a successor to the expiring Kyoto Protocol, whose aim was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2%, compared to data drawn in 1990. It has been twenty years since this Protocol and other climate initiatives have been evaluated, so it’s about time we think about being as green as possible.

The Alliance of Small Island States, the European Union, and the U.S. are all proposing greenhouse gas emission cuts of over 80% by 2050, but important developing nations such as China (who faces a very real threat to sea level rises in its overpopulated urban cities of Beijing and Shanghai) have yet to determine how much they can do in this global effort.