Tours R Us

You may have noticed that I had some nifty maps for my trip to Borneo and Japan showing the route. No, I didn't create them, I took tours and stole the maps from the tour companies. Since a lot of people ask me about traveling with tour groups or how I pick them, I figured I'd tell you all about it.

 

It happens to be really hard for me to find people to travel with. For one thing, I want to go weird places that not many of my friends want to go to (Turkmenistan anyone?). For another, most of my friends either don't have money to travel or don't have time off work to travel. And finally, as we grow older, more and more of my friends are settling down and choosing to travel with their significant others rather than with friends. So a long time ago I realized that if I wanted to see the world I'd either have to go by myself or go with a tour group.

I don't actually mind traveling alone, but here's the problem - I could go the entire week/two weeks/vacation without speaking to another person since I'm just not sociable enough to strike up conversations with strangers. I recently had a day to myself in Tokyo and I didn't speak to a single other person who wasn't a waiter or a salesperson. I enjoyed the freedom to get lost in the city and go where I wanted and nap on a bench when I was tired...but I also was pretty bored after a few hours. And, unless I'm willing to take some hated selfies, it also means that I won't be in a single picture. It's also a lot of work to plan the itinerary - where to go, where to stay, how long to stay in each place, what to see, what to eat, how to get from place to place, etc. Traveling independently (even if you're traveling with a friend) is exhausting and requires a lot of planning.

 

So over the past 10 years, about 90% of my travel has been with tour groups. When I was younger I did mostly Contiki trips, which are designed for 18-35 year olds. The perk of a Contiki trip is that you're with similarly aged people and if you're traveling as a single person they will pair you up with a roommate. You also have to do zero planning or research, other than figuring out your plane flights to the country. I did 5 trips overall with Contiki: New Zealand, Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos and Cambodia), Vietnam, Eastern Europe (Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest) and Croatia Sailing. The problem with Contiki is that it gets a bit of a well-deserved reputation for being party tours. And I have always been too old of a soul to enjoy being with a bunch of drunken 20-somethings partying all night and puking all day. I loved my Southeast Asia and my Eastern European trips, but I think that's partially because I had really good groups of people for those two tours. I pretty much hated my Vietnam trip (people were literally vomiting on the bus every day from their hangovers) and Croatia Sailing was underwhelming (despite how awesome it was to sail around Croatia). Finally, while the idea is that you're with similarly aged people, there is nothing similar between a 19 year old and a 34 year old. That age gap is just waaaay too big. And creepy when you factor in the number of drunken hook-ups that occur on a Contiki trip.

 

Not the classiest way to see Europe

 

Last year, after a tremendous amount of research, I found two other tour companies that are designed like a Contiki, but perhaps for an older crowd. Both G Adventures and Intrepid are good for singles since you can get your own room without paying a huge single supplement or get a random roommate. They also offer tours in a ton of weird and random places and range in price all the way up to some ridiculously expensive tours to the North Pole or Antarctica (one of my complaints with Contiki is that all the trips felt like budget travel and sometimes you just want to stay in a decent hotel).

 

So last year I took a trip to Peru with G Adventures (Machu Picchu and the Amazon) and went gorilla trekking in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda) on an overland trip with Intrepid. This year I did Borneo with Intrepid and Japan with G Adventures. With the exception of my Africa trip, I have been underwhelmed by both tour companies.

 

First, Contiki trips had better organization pre-trip. Prior to joining a tour, Contiki would send you via snail mail a package with your tour itinerary (and your specific dates of travel), a trip-specific packing list and a few other relevant documents. G and Intrepid just have general packing lists for all their trips, but the gear you'd need on an overland Africa trip is completely different from what you might need in Japan, so you wind up with people being ill-prepared for the trip they're on. The detailed itinerary that G and Intrepid give are just on their website and don't necessary have your dates (just say Day 1, and so on). I was absolutely panicked in the airport on the way to Africa because, based on what the internet itinerary was saying about my trip, I was going to be a day late for the tour start (turns out it was an internet glitch). Not fun at all.

 

Second, with the exception of my Africa trip, the Contiki tour guides overall were more impressive (of the 5 Contiki tours, I had two phenomenally excellent guides, two shitty ones and one so-so one). For starters, before one can become a Contiki tour guide you have to spend about six months in training learning about the countries, the cultures and following other tour guides around to learn the ropes. The Contiki tour guides are also generally from the UK, New Zealand or Australia, so they understand the perspective and concerns of many of the travelers (Contiki is also often criticized for this since they're not using local guides, but everywhere outside of Europe we had local guides when I traveled with Contiki in addition to the Contiki guide). G and Intrepid pride themselves on using local tour guides - while it's great that they support the local economy, there are language barriers and cultural issues with having a local. The range of experience of the tour guides also varies a lot - on my Japan trip we had a retired engineer as a tour guide who had never led a tour before and spoke very little English. Not only was he frustrating, but I didn't learn nearly as much about Japan as I would have if I'd had a Western tour guide who'd spent the last 6 months learning about Japanese culture and history.

 

And look, no matter how well traveled you are, sometimes you need to be babied. In Laos we all got really swollen ankles and our Kiwi guide told us we were dehydrated because we weren't getting enough salt (we're used to consuming so much salt that when our food doesn't contain salt, we get dehydrated no matter how much water we drink). We immediately started adding salt to our food or buying salt tablets at pharmacies and we felt better quickly. A Laotian tour guide might not have realized why we were so dehydrated. In Peru I was absolutely appalled at the idea that I couldn't flush any toilet paper in the toilets (something I didn't realize until about Day 3 of the trip and I'd been flushing TP prior to that). I had a lot of questions/concerns about it ("You mean to tell me even the fancy hotels don't let you flush TP?!?!?") and it was awkward asking my Peruvian tour guide about it since that's all he's used to.

 

The groups on all tours also is completely hit or miss. While my favorite Contiki trips were solely because of the awesome group of people (and while I disliked Vietnam because we had a shitty group of people), overall you kind of knew what you were getting. Young people who wanted to party. The crazier the country you went to, the greater the likelihood that there'd also be some people on your trip who wanted to experience the local culture. The four non-Contiki trips I've done recently have had all completely different groups. The group in Africa was fantastic and everything I'd hope for when traveling with people - well traveled, interested in learning about the local cultures, interested in experiencing everything and not big partiers. The group in Borneo was frankly the worst group I've ever traveled with - too many complainers, very few people were prepared for the trip (no cameras, no pants, no hiking boots, no malaria medicine, no apparent realization that we were traveling to a jungly Muslim country) and many seemed not at all interested in the country we were visiting and just wanted to sit on a beach (even though we weren't on a "beach" trip).

 

The sole exception to all these criticisms was my Africa trip. It was an overland camping trip, which means you basically live on this big truck, which pulls off to the side of the road to cook meals and you camp in tents at night. The tour guide, driver and cook were all fantastic and the group was largely amazing (except for a few weirdos). Because all of my other tours lately have been so disappointing in comparison, my conclusion is that Africa is one of the last few places that most people don't feel safe traveling alone. So seasoned adventure travelers will travel to most of the rest of the world on their own, but Africa they still feel the need to go with a tour company. That's why the only people that show up for tours to non-African places are either weirdos with no friends (like me) or inexperienced travelers.

 

I'm also running out of itineraries that I really want to do. I can't even count the number of hours I've spent trolling the G Adventures and Intrepid websites looking for tours to do on all my leaves and I'm seriously running out of tours that I can get excited about. For example, I've been seriously considering Nepal and Tibet for my leave in March/April, but the only tours available aren't that appealing - I don't want to spend 8 hours traveling on a bumpy bus everyday just to see 240 different temples. I'd be templed-out almost immediately.

 

So I have one more tour this year (Transylvania for Halloween - totally going to be full of [hopefully] the good kind of weirdos!) and then next year the only tour I'm thinking of at the moment is an overland camping trip through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which I assume would only attract seasoned adventurers (since that trip is even crazier and less popular than going to Africa). And I am so excited about that trip that I managed to convince my dad to come, so at least if the group sucks we'll have each other.

 

But the problem is, if I eliminate tours, then what? Where do I go alone for my two week leaves?