The Samburu hated the very park that bore their name.
They threatened park rangers and they killed wildlife.
They were so angry that they even set fire to the park
in an effort to burn the tourism lodge down!

One day, I was waiting for a bus on the side of the road 40 miles outside of Nairobi, Kenya. The bus was late and I bided my time paging through a travel book by Wilfred Thesiger, considered the last of the great explorers of the past century. Arabian Sands was Thesiger’s account of crossing the Empty Quarter of Arabia on camel and becoming friends with the Bedu people who lived in the desert. As I sat there reading by the side of the road, a beat-up Landrover

pulled over, and the front door was flung open. A rugged old man, scarred and sun burnt, leaned out and offered me a lift. As I jumped into the passenger’s seat and we drove away, he asked, without looking at me, “You off on an adventure?” I replied matter-of-factly, “I wish I was, but real adventure ended with explorers like Thesiger.” I held up the book to show him. Suddenly he hit the brakes and turned towards me with a startled expression. As I held my breath, fear-

ing I had offended him somehow, the old man looked me right in the eyes and said with authority, “Real adventure never ends!” Then he smiled, and added, “But I am honored. I am Wilfred Thesiger.”

As I reeled in disbelief, he stuck out his gnarled hand for me to shake. That handshake and our ensuing conversation started a dialogue about adventure travel that spanned several years, ended up leading me to almost every corner of the

globe, and completely reoriented the way I look at travel.

SLEEPING WITH
THE LIONS

In these modern times, we have at our very fingertips more places to explore and more ways to explore them than any people who came before us. From my chance meeting with Thesiger onward, my adventures have convinced me that 25, 50 or 100 years from now, future travelers will look back and say, “Can you

imagine what it must have been like to travel in 2007, when the world was filled with so many new and incredible adventures to be had?” Believe it or not, we are living in a new age of adventure travel. And this modern opportunity carries with it a modern responsibility.

To understand this, travel back with me a quarter century, when I was a researcher doing a study of Vervet monkeys in Kenya’s remote and beautiful Samburu Game Reserve. This was the same place where in the 1960s George and Joy Adamson found a lion cub and named her Elsa, creating a new fascination with lions and with Africa through their book and subsequent movie Born Free.

Everyday in Samburu, I would see groups of tourists coming and going from the park on wildlife safaris, a business that

was generating millions of dollars. I watched this spectacle as I followed monkeys around in the bush and lived out of a small tent. While the tourists ate lavish cuisine in their park lodge dining room, I fished for my meals from the nearby Uaso Nyro River and cooked barbel (a small African fish with a funny looking beard) over my