Adventure Life Reviews In The News
Travel made your way ™
Want to find out a bit more about Adventure Life? Check out some of these great publications that have written articles about our tours. Browse through these brief summaries or click on the links below to read the full articles!
"...Oscar, one of the legions of bellmen uniformed in gray wool, flashes his million-dollar smile and signals to me. Reuben from the aptly named Adventure-Life tour is here. It’s a short ride in his van to the Wanchaq Station, a brief preamble to the journey of a lifetime...
...Adventure-Life: This U.S.-based tour company specializes in small tours (six to eight people) in Latin America and Antarctica. Guides are local experts. Hotel choices range from basic to luxury. Itineraries can be customized.
Pastel-colored homes, cobblestone streets, bougainvillea-covered walls and looming volcanoes offer the first glimpses of Antigua. The UNESCO World Heritage site embraces thousands of travelers wanting to experience this world-famed Catholic celebration commemorating the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Antigua, Guatemala comes alive with its annual "Semana Santa" Holy Week, held sometime between March 22 and April 23. The entire city participates in the solemn activities during the week with a joyous celebration on Easter. Spanish missionaries from Seville initiated this religious occasion during colonial times.
...Adventure Life Journeys is one of a few tour groups for this Easter Festival. It has a nine-day trip with a local bilingual guide, small groups, and sustainable tourism practices. It includes the Easter Festival, ChiChicastenango and Solola Markets, as well as Lake Atitlan.
Adventure Life attracts those seeking to push the limit of their thrill-seeking endurance up a north or two. This 12-day adventure offers participants the chance to experience native culture via an overnight stay with local families. The Manco adventure begins with your arrival in Lima where you soak up a bit of civilization before flying off to Cusco the next morning to immerse yourself into the mysteries of the witches' market, or explore the capital city of Inca's many plazas, ancient ruins and museums...
...A well-planned itinerary for those unaccustomed to extreme heights, such as the 14,403-foot La Raya pass, gives adventurers the opportunity to become acclimated before exploring the region's many ancient temples and archeological sites...
Machu Picchu, the mystical Lost City of the Inca, which seems to hang in midair between the clouds above and a rushing river below, is the reason most travelers, myself included, head to Peru...
...Our Adventure Life tour leader, Boris Bonnett, is a Cusco native who earned a college degree more than a decade ago in tourism. He is extremely well versed in the region that is his home and its rich history...
...WHEN YOU GO: Adventure Life, based in Montana. The company specializes in small groups and eco friendly travel in Latin America and Antarctica.
Usually independent travelers, they toured with Montana-based Adventure Life Journeys, joining seven other travelers to experience the nine-day Easter Festival and much more.
After a 45-minute ride from Guatemala City, my husband and I passed through an intricate wrought-iron door into Hotel Aurora. Its plain façade belied the lovely courtyard brimming with aromatic roses, chrysanthemums and bougainvillea circling a stone fountain.
Usually independent travelers, we decided to tour with Montana-based Adventure Life Journeys. Joining seven other travelers, we experienced the nine-day "Easter Festival," ChiChicastenango and Solola Markets, Lake Atitlan, a macademia plantation, indigenous markets, villages and Maximon (a Mayan deity). We journeyed on tuk tuks (open air taxis), a flatbed truck, lancha (motorboat), van and chicken bus...
As the audience for adventure travel becomes more sophisticated, the call for trips that truly abandon the beaten path or explore popular destinations in new ways is growing louder. Each year, many adventure providers introduce new trips to help meet this demand. After checking in with hundreds of outfitters from around the world and getting a sneak peek at what's cooking in their trip laboratories, here are my picks for the best new adventure trips of 2008.
The forgotten kingdoms of Peru
When most travelers think of Peru, the Incan ruin of Machu Picchu is often the first—and only—destination that comes to mind. But what most never realize, even after visiting Machu Picchu and other well-known Incan ruins, is that Peru is home to countless other fascinating sites, including those built by other civilizations that pre-date the Incas by a thousand years. That's why Latin American specialists Adventure Life is launching a new trip that covers the full spectrum of Peruvian ruins, including those in the seldom-visited northern part of the country.
'The Inca were only the last in a long line of sophisticated pre-Columbian cultures in Peru,' says Adventure Life founder Brian Morgan. 'From the 1st to the 15th-century A.D., [northern Peru] was home to some of South America's most prominent cultures—the Moche, Lambayeque, Chimu, and Chachapaoyas. Like the Inca, they were exquisite craftsmen and excelled in the skills of ceramics, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, and warfare, but their temples and arts were completely unique from the Inca...'
Not your typical port: Passengers aboard and Adventure Life cruise can spend the night ice-camping on the Antarctic Peninsula's Paradise Bay.
It's not secret that taking a cruise has never been the vacation for serious adrenaline addicts. Granted, it can be exhilarating to snag an unclaimed lounge chair on the pool deck after 10 a.m., but for most thrill-seekers, traditional cruises seem unbearably tame. Well, times are changing. In the past few years, ships of all sizes have launched itineraries designed to appeal to even the most adventurous travelers. Far-flung ports, challenging wilderness excursions and heart-revving life-list experiences that have replaced duty-free shopping and drive-by bus tours. The payoff? Incredible memories, a deep sense of accomplishment and -- after a full-day of calorie-burning -- guilt free returns visits to the buffet table...
...A 12-day Adventure Life voyage carries 49-passengers from the mountain-rigged city of Ushuaia in southern Argentina across the Drake Passage to the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula -- where summer highs top out at 50 degrees and the sun can shine for 20 hours a day. Guests board inflatable boats to see Gentoo penguins, ocras and the Wendell seals; paddle sea kayaks through a maze of ice floes; and scale glaciers using crampons and ice-axes. They can also ski the white wilderness or do the full Shackleton: and overnight ice-camping excursion.
...I'm on a nine-day, action-packed tour of Costa Rica with a fittingly named outfitter: Adventure Life. There's a lot packed into those that phrase, "Adventure Life." If we already lived an adventure life, would we need to pay a tour company to give us more of the same somewhere else? The phrase certainly sounds more interesting than our actual life: sleep, eat, work, sleep. Somehow "Treadmill Life" just doesn't have the same cachet. We sign on with Adventure Life so we can stop being softies for a while and remember what it is to get a natural rush...
...One of the newest entrants into the South Pacific cruise market is Adventure Life VOYAGES, a Missoula, Montana-based company that is among the leaders in land based tours to Central and South America. The experts at Adventure Life have selected a few choice expedition cruise vessels and paired them with enticing itineraries to some of the far-flung corners of the globe..."
Adventure Life specializes in family adventures and custom tours throughout Latin America. It adheres to small group travel not only as a benefit to travelers, but also on principle as a way to minimize its "footprint" on the places and cultures they visit. Optional homestays expand cross-cultural awareness, and partnerships with local guides and family-owned ecolodges contribute to local economies. 
Connected with such organizations as the International Ecotourism Society and Leave No Trace, Adventure Life is further committed to environmental protection. Indeed, guests of the Pure Patagonia Base Camp Trek stay in Torres del Paine National Park's eco-camp, equipped with composting toilets and igloo-shaped tents that are built to minimize environmental impact. Led by a Patagonian guide and crew, the 8-day hike to glaciers, lakes and rainforests starts and ends in Punta Arenas, Chile.
Sailing the historic Northwest Passage in a polar-class icebreaker
Since the Age of Discovery began in the sixteenth century, explorers have been braving the frigid weather and powerful sea ice of Canada’s northern reaches in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean...
...Adventure Life of Missoula, Montana organizes expedition cruises to places almost no one else can get to, and one of them is the Canadian Arctic. Icebreakers and shallow-draft vessels can take you through the very waterways which explorers searched for centuries....
...Adventure Life’s Canadian Arctic cruise aboard the polar-class icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov offers you the opportunity to be one of the very few intrepid souls who have navigated the Northwest Passage. Like AL’s other expedition cruises, the voyage includes presentations on the wildlife, geology, glaciers and human history of the High Arctic from naturalists, historians and scientists....
Smaller cruise ships can deliver an unforgettable experience.
When Steve Brown wanted to thank his employees for buying into his company, he decided to forego a standard cruise, instead choosing a ship and ports less traveled. "I wanted something unique, an incentive experience that gave us the chance to relax, celebrate, get outdoors and do some team-building," says Brown, who operates the Trout Lodge fish hatchery in Washington State. So he hit the Internet and landed at Adventure Life, a Montana-based company that specializes in off-the-beaten-path tours for small groups.
"He came to us about our Patagonia trip for his group – seven owners and spouses who were going to Chile on business anyway," says Johnathan Brunger, Adventure Life’s adventure coordinator. The big draw, adds Brunger, was the four-day cruise’s mix of adventure and spectacular sightseeing with posh digs and gourmet food, a combination Brown felt would prove a good fit for his group. Did it work? In his post-trip evaluation, Brown was ecstatic: "It spoiled my wife and me to an extent that we would never go on a big-ship cruise again." ...
