Exploring adventure travel

When it comes to adventure travel, cyberspace is the final frontier.

That, to borrow an overused TV clich̩, is the premise of the Online Adventurist, a biweekly feature that begins today on this site. The Internet is the last unexplored realm Рa place with few guides, maps or navigational tools to help illuminate the way.

Sure, you can logon to the likes of Gorp.com or Away.com and read about whitewater rafting in Nepal’s Tsangpo river or a Tanzanian Safari. You can page through National Geographic and Outside magazine, watch the Discovery Channel, or read any of Paul Theroux’s travelogues.

But they won’t do you much good online.

These media treat the Internet as if it’s nothing more than a tool. Away.com uses the Web as a booking device. National Geographic employs the Internet as a medium to disseminate information. The Discovery channel and Theroux’s publisher think of the Internet as a place to peddle programs or books, respectively.

The Online Adventurist thinks beyond these conventions. It assumes that since the commercialization of the Internet, cyberspace has quietly developed into a destination in and of itself. It believes that users come to the Web for more than data on an adventure trip – that they click on a URL not as a prelude to a journey, but as a place where an adventure can be experienced virtually.

Don’t bother looking for surveys on this subject. You won’t find any. Measuring that kind of behavior online could prove difficult, perhaps even impossible. Certainly impractical.

But this much we do know: one-half of the U.S. adult population has taken an adventure trip in the last four years, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. Adventure travel is a $200 billion-a-year industry, according to the likes of the Adventure Travel Society. By most counts, it’s also one of the fastest-growing segments in the travel business.

So why hasn’t anyone tried to address the “virtual” side of adventure travel? It might have something to do with the widespread misconception that every adventure must be physical and that the adventures of the mind are best left to authors like Timothy Leary to describe. It may also have something to do with the fact that, for all the changes that the Internet has engendered, we “content” providers still largely think inside that proverbial box.

The Online Adventurist will do its best to ignore the box. Every other week, we’ll explore the dynamic relationship between the Internet and adventure travel – the place where clicks-and-mortar converge.

And we’ll have fun.

This column will bring you both sides of adventure travel as you’ve never seen them. We’ll go whitewater rafting and then we’ll surf over to the destination’s Web site. We’ll go Scuba diving and contrast that experience with the diving industry’s Internet presences. We’ll go rock climbing, skiing, bungee jumping and skydiving – virtually and for real.

By documenting this intersection of the electronic and the actual, my hope is to provide you, the traveler, with a more satisfying adventure. By critiquing the Web sites and destinations simultaneously, I hope to enable Web publishers to build the kind of sites where virtual adventures can take place.

I think successful virtual adventures will eventually translate into real ones.

Why am I writing this column? I’ve been covering online travel since the very beginning. One of my other columns, which appears fortnightly on this Web site, has offered analysis of the interactive travel space since 1996. The Internet is my favorite of the mass media – nothing comes close to its immediacy and interactivity – which may explain why I’ve made career writing about travel online.

I’m also an adventurer at heart. I’m a Scuba diving instructor, I’ve skied since the age of three, I’ve climbed rocks, whitewater rafted, kayaked and gone after big game fish as any travel writer worthy of the title would. I am constantly searching for new adventures, thanks to the inspiration of friends, relatives and editors.

Finally, I’d like to thank Robert Young Pelton, author of “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” for being one of the catalysts that made this feature happen. His latest book, “The Adventurist: My Life in Dangerous Places” not only helped me come up with a great title for this column, but it also made me want to write a regular feature about adventure travel. I’m very grateful for that.

So I invite you to join the Online Adventurist for a completely new perspective on adventure travel. I hope you’ll click here every other week as I search for excitement – both online and offline.

The final frontier is waiting.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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