Guidebook (Kind of) Digression

Destination: The Amazon River Basin, Columbia and Venezuela

Book: Along the River That Flows Uphill: From the Orinoco to the Amazon (2009), by Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt

Adventure travel competes with luxury travel in a daily race to stuff my mail box and Google Reader.  An occasional luxury adventure trip–to Manchuria in a luxury yurt or the Arctic in a build-it-yourself igloo–hits both the popular themes at once.

What makes it luxurious? More comfort. Less risk.  What makes for adventure? Facing a totally new experience which y the very fact of being unknown holds the promise of risk. But as Starks and Murcut point out in Along the River That Flows Uphill, most risk is foreseeable and therefore preventable.  Or as the precisely scientific Starks puts it, ‘Risk = Probability of an Event x Time Exposed to the Event x Adverse Consequences.’

I could not help wondering if a risk that is foreseen and prepared for is risk at all.  And therefore, by preparing, have you removed the adventure from adventure travel? Continue reading Must Adventure Equal Risk? →