Wild Expeditions
As many of you will be aware, Wild Frontiers is a company that has been set up by travellers for travellers and the company ethos has always been to help adventurous souls get to incredible places that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
For the most part this has meant offering trips on well-surveyed routes, in a structured setting, lasting a total of up to three weeks. Sometimes these tours would fall into the ‘soft’ adventure category and sometimes the ‘hard’, but all would loosely be termed as holidays.
What we also now offer is a series of real adventures, or expeditions, that will cross territories with little or no tourism, on a less ordered timetable, travelling as travellers of old, where the itinerary is dictated not so much through an office in London but by the events of the day.
With many members of the WF team cutting their teeth in real adventure travel – as travel writers, polar explorers, expedition leaders – we are keen to return to our roots, to get out there into the wilds of this incredible earth, and take some of you with us.
In August 2008, the first trip we offered called the High Plain Drifters was an epic horse trek from Southern Kyrgyzstan, over the High Pamirs of Tajikistan, into the untamed Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan. This mind-blowing 30 day expedition - which probably rates as the most extreme commercial piece of tourism ever undertaken - truly lived up to its billing and delivered an extraordinary adventure to the nine clients brave enough to take part.
If you would like to read edited extracts from their fascinating blog and see pictures of the tour please click here.
In 2009 we undertook two more Wild Expeditions: the first, following in the Drifters footsteps, was a trek along the Wakhan Corridor; while the second, in November, led by veteran desert explorer and WF director, Johnny Paterson, saw a small and highly intrepid group join the Tuareg for a 21 day camel caravan as they carried salt from the mines in Bilma to the markets of Agadez and Timbuktu, across the famous Ténéré Desert.
If you would like to see a short film about the WF group in Afganistan's Wakhan Corridor, please click here
And if you would like to watch a video blog, shot by Johnny, in the Sahara, please click here
In July 2010 we are running an epic month long Himalayan journey through the Tibet Autonomous Region from Lhasa to Kashgar, by way of Mount Kailash, and in September we take a new route down the Omo River, through Southern Ethiopia.
Plans are also a foot for a 27-day journey into the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2011, taking on one of the last great adventures left in Africa. Journey by boat along the great River Congo, explore the chaotic vibrancy of Kisangani and Kinshasa and travel into the forests of the Congo, to for a unique opportunity to visit some of the last surviving bands of pygmies left in the African interior. We will also be running a month long trek into the Dolpo region of Nepal, in search of the Crystal Mountain.
These trips take adventure tourism to a new dimension: uncharted, outlandish and totally beyond the pale.
