As I write this, I’m sitting in a yurt on the shores of a Kyrgyzstan lake, with the peaks of the world’s sixth-highest mountain range crowding around me. The wide green valley is dotted with dozens of other yurts – the seasonal homes of the farmers who tend their livestock on these summer grazing grounds – and the slopes are busy with sheep, cows, horses, yaks and camels. Two days from now, I will be trekking through these strangely little-known Tian Shan mountains on a World Expeditions tour.
As my mind prepares itself for the challenge, I watch as a Kyrgyz woman milks her herd of cows by hand outside a yurt, her young children wrangling the animals into place. There are ancient petroglyphs on the slopes behind us, and snow starting to march in across the mountains. It feels like I’ve landed into the very essence of adventure.
A genuine adventure
For years I’ve turned the word ‘adventure’ around in my mind, feeling its shape and dimensions change. The concept once felt so defined and clear – you climbed, paddled, pedalled or hung off something big, challenging and at least a little bit scary – but today the travel industry speaks about the likes of food adventures and shopping adventures, and even coach trips bill themselves as adventures. It’s a word so overused and misrepresented as to have lost much of its meaning.
But genuine adventure isn’t dead. Instead, it has evolved, and the best adventure-travel operators have evolved with it. From its outset in 1975, World Expeditions was a pioneer and a leader in the field. It guided the first rafting trips down Tasmania’s mighty Franklin River and, among other groundbreaking ventures, led the first trekking and cycling groups into Mongolia and Vietnam respectively.
World Expeditions CEO Sue Badyari joined the company in 1986 and recalls a raw and almost wide-eyed world of adventure.
“The world felt much bigger back then,” she says. “It was relatively unconnected and unexplored for many. There was a real sense of mystery about what lay beyond our home country. Entire destinations like China, Vietnam, Bhutan, Cuba and Myanmar weren’t even open to tourists until the mid to late ’80s. So, when someone boarded a plane to Nepal, it wasn’t just travel, it felt like a journey into the unknown, almost akin to going to the moon.
“Back then, there was no online research. Our staff were the explorers, constantly charting new routes and figuring out logistics in places with little to no infrastructure. They relied on grit, paper maps and local knowledge. Those early trips were raw, and they helped lay the foundation for how we operate today: with purpose, resourcefulness and a deep respect for local communities.”
The care factor
Today, there are many more drivers of adventure travel than the pure pursuit of physical challenges. They have become as much about care as dare, with sustainability at their core. Responsibility to the environment and bringing benefit to local communities and cultures are now pillars of adventure travel.
“That responsibility has become central to how we operate,” Badyari says. “When we started, there was less conversation around sustainability. Now, it underpins everything, from our porter welfare standards in Nepal to our regenerative travel projects and low-impact campsites. We’ve always believed that adventure should benefit the places it touches. What’s different is that today, travellers expect it too.”
Cases in point are easy to find, such as through the Khumbu, the valley that leads so many trekkers towards Everest Base Camp in Nepal. A decade ago, World Expeditions began establishing permanent eco campsites through the valley – today they exist in the villages of Ghat, Monjo, Kyangjuma, Pangboche and Dingboche, as well as in villages through the adjoining Gokyo Valley – leasing land from locals and bringing lasting benefit.
In Ghat, for instance, the eco camp fills the yard of a trailside lodge. Just two hours’ walk from the airstrip in Lukla, where Everest Base Camp treks typically begin, it’s a spot many trekkers march directly past, but for lodge owner Gaga Maili, the presence of the camp has been life changing. Prior to its establishment, the elderly Maili relied on a trickle of trekkers who paused for the night, with most of her income derived from farming – long, hard hours carrying produce down the trail to and from market. Today, the camp provides such income to her family that she no longer takes in other trekkers and the produce she grows around the edges of the eco camp is used exclusively to feed World Expeditions guests.
A day’s walk further up the valley, near the entrance to Sagarmatha National Park in Monjo, there’s a similar tale. Here, the camp is at the edge of conifer forest set back from the trail. It peers over the crops of landowner Dali, who previously ran a basic teahouse for local porters. Through the funds earned by the eco camp on her land, Dali recently built the first real home she’s ever owned.
With growth comes positive change
Bir Singh Gurung, who has worked as a trek leader in Nepal for World Expeditions since 1999, has been well placed to observe the change.
“World Expeditions has had a positive impact on people’s lives in Nepal,” he says. “There are so many people who rely on World Expeditions work to look after family and children. There are people working on the management team in the office, field workers like trek guides, foremen, sherpas and cooks.
“Another example is me. I’ve been working more than 26 years for the company. I have never worked with another company, and I have family that I look after, and I’ve educated my son by working with World Expeditions.”
It’s a level of care that extends across the board, including to porters. Watching a porter at work in Nepal, Tanzania or Kyrgyzstan is to sense something almost heroic but also, in many cases, potentially damaging as they haul herculean loads through the mountains, often while poorly clothed and shod. World Expeditions was among the first companies to actively take steps to prioritise the welfare of porters, becoming a founding member of the International Porter Protection Group (IPPG) in 2000. In doing so, World Expeditions ensures that its porters receive clothing suitable to the conditions and limits the weights that they carry.
“World Expeditions was the first company to take the initiative on social welfare and contributions on health and education, etc.,” Gurung says.
Payback to the wild world
My own travels with World Expeditions have taken me through so many places, experiences and adventures. One moment it’s wandering into the Namche Bazaar lodge where Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay camped on their way to Everest in 1953, the next it’s stopping at a home in the Gokyo Valley with a villager showing me a sketch he drew of a yeti he says he encountered as a boy. Somewhere in between I was woken at midnight to begin the long summit push on Mt Kilimanjaro and, closer to home, found life imitating art as I stood at the remote scene of arguably Australia’s most famous landscape photograph: Rock Island Bend on Tasmania’s Franklin River.
No place in Australia embodies adventure so much as the Franklin River. From the time you launch from beside the Lyell Highway until the time your rafts spit out into the Gordon River more than a week later, there’s not a home, field or human structure to be seen, and phone signal might as well be a rumour from another planet.
In 1978, World Expeditions was the first company to run rafting trips on the river, and it remains at the forefront of these extended white-water adventures that Outside magazine once declared the world’s greatest rafting trips. On the 40th anniversary of that first trip, I set off down the river myself with World Expeditions in the company of a guest guide, Geoff Law, one of the campaign leaders in the fight to save the Franklin River from being dammed in the early 1980s.
In the earliest days of travel on the Franklin, Law and the likes of future Australian Greens leader Bob Brown were running the river in small inflatable rafts, relying on luck as much as ability. What Law recalled before the arrival of World Expeditions’ guided trips was a river that was slowly filling with litter, human waste and associated illness. It was through a voluntary commitment from World Expeditions and other operators to remove all human waste that the river environment was cleaned and improved. The Franklin remains one of the most committing and rewarding adventures in Australia – a river that demands total care – but it’s been made a better place by those who come.
It’s indicative of another great change in adventure travel: the commitment to environmental sustainability. Adventure travellers are embracing the idea of themselves as temporary custodians of the lands, rivers and seas on which they travel. It’s a role that World Expeditions has long championed. In 2014, for example, the company was a founding partner of 10 Pieces, encouraging trekkers to pick up 10 bits of litter each day on the trail. It’s a small individual gesture that, cumulatively, has had a telling impact.
“Since the ’70s, we’ve been committed to doing things differently,” Badyari says. “We were among the first to run fully catered camping treks in Nepal, avoiding the environmental strain of lodges. We’ve consistently set benchmarks that others have followed, not because it’s trendy, but because it’s right. We believe in creating better outcomes for everyone, including travellers, hosts and the land.”
Never-ending reconnection
It’s an evolution that continues, redefining adventure travel while carefully retaining its foundations of risk and reward, curiosity and connection. What’s certain is that the thrill of adventure travel is alive and well.
“Adventure today still holds the thrill of physical exploration, but it’s evolved to become much more layered,” Badyari says. “It’s now as much about cultural immersion, connection with nature, and travelling with a lighter footprint. That sense of discovery hasn’t changed, it’s just deepened.
“In a world that’s increasingly fast-paced and digital, the chance to switch off, walk through a remote valley, or share a meal in an African village feels more powerful now than it did 50 years ago. We have a list a mile long of new places we’d like to share with our travellers, and we look forward to doing so in the coming years.”
For more info, see World Expeditions.