Want something new? Try an adventure vacation

Tired of the same old trip to the beach for a sunburn and another bag of broken seashell souvenirs? More and more fun-seekers are leaving the boredom of the beach behind and signing on for something with more activity and maybe just a hint of danger.

Travel agents and vacation planners call it an adventure vacation, and there are any number of possibilities — from “heli-hiking” in the Canadian Rockies to whitewater rafting on the Poudre River right here in our own backyard.

Jim Chudd, owner of American Dream Travel in Fort Collins, said adventure vacations probably started in the 1980s. Younger couples who were looking for something different popularized them, Chudd said, and now that those couples are older, the adventure vacation has become “a lot more mainstream now.”

Chudd divides adventure vacations into two groups: the soft adventure that includes snorkeling or moderate hiking and the hard adventure, which could mean hiking off the beaten path in the jungles of Belize or scuba diving below 90 feet.

The latter requires being physically fit, and the former means that you have softer curves “like me,” Chudd said.

But sometimes it’s misleading to try to fit activities into one adventure category or another. Chudd said he once was on a 38-mile bike ride down Haleakala, a volcano on Maui in the Hawaiian islands. While sounding like something in the hard adventure category, the continuous downward slope made the ride easy and more of a soft adventure.

Part of the appeal of adventure vacations is that they sound glamorous and different. Sylvia Mucklow, owner of Rocky Mountain Travel King in Fort Collins, is planning her own adventure vacation in 2005 when she will take her grandchildren hiking across the Grand Canyon.

Plug in adventure

Mucklow said adventures are getting to be more and more module-like. “You can just plug them into your vacation,” she said. “So you can go to Hawaii and have your sightseeing, too. Mom and Dad can take the kids along with them.”

David Costlow, owner of Rocky Mountain Adventures in Fort Collins, said most people who call him are tourists looking for excitement and — as whitewater rafting has moved more and more into the mainstream — they look to a mountain river as one of the places to get it.

If someone is looking for pure wildness, he’ll recommend some sections of the upper Poudre River. If it’s someone with kids, he’ll recommend the upper Colorado or sections of the lower Poudre. “All of this depends on the time of year and how much time they have,” he said.

Many adventure vacations take place outside of the United States. Costa Rica is a favorite destination, along with Peru and the southern island of New Zealand.

Costa Rica is a big destination because of the cloud forest ecosystem that dominates most of the country. Aida Raider, a travel consultant with Ambassador Travel in Fort Collins, said hiking through the cloud forest jungle is one of the most popular things about the country. In Peru, Mucklow said, Machu Picchu, a fortress city of the Incas that remained hidden until 1911, is a popular hiking destination. And the southern island of New Zealand features sky diving, a big thermal area and blackwater rafting — which doesn’t involve a raft at all but rather a scuba suit and an inner tube.

New Zealand next big thing?

In fact, New Zealand may be the next big thing in adventure vacations. What gives the country a certain amount of gravitas in this area is that New Zealand is the birthplace of bungee jumping. “I don’t know how jumping off a bridge turned into a big fad,” Chudd said, “but it did.” Chudd thinks there are all kinds of things happening along the same line in New Zealand.

“You ever hear of ?zorbing?'” he said. “That started down there. You’ve seen those clear plastic balls that hamsters run around the floor in? Well, in zorbing, they make big plastic balls. They put you in a protective suit and a helmet. You get in the ball and then they push you down a hill. You’re bouncing around inside this thing and that’s supposed to be fun.

“Then they have a thing where they hook you up to guy wires and stuff and you jump off a building and you have a controlled fall to the ground. They were doing that off skyscrapers in Auckland,´ said Chudd in a voice that reeked of ?Hey, to each his own.’

“My conclusion is that Kiwis are living in this beautiful place, and they don’t have enough to do. They started bungee jumping.”

Possibly the most unusual has got to be blackwater rafting, which Chudd said he tried for the first time last year.

“They suit you up in this scuba gear and give you this little inner tube and have you float down this river,” Chudd said. “Only this river runs through a cave. And when I say it’s dark, man, this is pitch dark. You can’t see a thing. We stopped at this one spot and I could hear the river roaring ahead of us and I heard the guide say, ?Ok, you’re standing at the top of a waterfall. It’s only about four or five feet high, but when you jump I want you to jump way out into the room so you can clear the rocks at the bottom of the falls.’ I still can’t believe I did it.”

The end of blackwater rafting has a destination, however. In Chudd’s case, the destination was a grotto with a ceiling lit by the odd green shine coming from glowworms. The attraction of it was the aura of danger surrounding it and the fact that it fit nicely into his schedule.

“You can combine this with a regular vacation,” he said. “You can go blackwater rafting and be back at the hotel pool that night.”

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