What’s the Adventure Travel Porn Equivalent of Playboy?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 11.19.02 | 7:21 PM ET
As San Francisco Chronicle columnist John Flinn notes in a dead-on column, it’s any of the slick travel catalogs published this time of year by outfitters such as Geographic Expeditions and Mountain Travel Sobek that offer guided trips, enticing prospective clients with evocative photos and alluring prose.
“Every page offers a come-hither fantasy: a ringside seat at the wildebeest migration in the Serengeti, campfire visits with nomadic bedouins in the Empty Quarter of Oman, a trek to the lonely Kangshung Face of Everest, a chance to retrace Shackleton’s desperate march across South Georgia Island or make the first rafting descent of the Blue Nile,” he writes. “As a means of stoking an almost feverish level of wanderlust, these voluptuously alluring publications are every bit as effective as Playboy and Penthouse are at instigating lust of a different sort. They’re adventure-travel porn. And I mean that in only the best way.”
You’re not wrong to have these feelings, Mr. Flinn. I, too, have wanderlust in my heart. It happened when I peeked at page 20 of the new Mountain Travel Sobek catalog. It’s that photo of Mt. Salcantay in Peru’s Cordillera Vilcabamba, and the way the sunlight is breaking through the misty clouds and illuminating its snow-topped peak just so. It spoke to me.