Adventure travel

"Adventure means different things to different people. For the past 5 or 10 years the tern 'adventure', and images of adventure activities, have been used worldwide to advertise holidays, equipment, clothing, lifestyles, property and more. Adventure may also mean different things to different tourists. What fills one person with fear fills another with boredom, and vice versa. Adventure tourism products, however, form a relatively well-defined and recognizable sector of the tourism industry. Adventure tours are retail-level commercial tour products which clients purchase specifically to take part in an outdoor activity which is more exciting than contemplative, and where the outdoor environment is enjoyed more as a setting for the activity than for its scenery, plants or animals. These definitions are not clear-cut, and in practice many tour products focus on nature and/or culture at the same time as adventure. This has been recognized through terms such as ACE, adventure-culture-ecotourism (Fennell, 1999, 2001) and NEAT, nature-eco-adventure-tourism (Buckley, 2000)."

"Aim To review infections associated with adventure travel. Methods The , and s were searched combining the words infection with the following keywords: , , , surfer* or *), (caves or or ), ( or trekking) or ( or ), , , (* or ), , , trekking, and . Results Adventure travel is becoming much more common among travelers and it is associated with a subset of infectious diseases including: , , s, s and endemic mycosis. Caving and whitewater rafting places individuals at particular risk of leptospirosis, schistosomiasis and endemic mycosis, while adventure races also place individuals at high risk of a variety of infections including , and leptospirosis."

"Academic interest in adventure tourism has increased in recent years given the exponential growth of this sector. Physical outdoor activity-based conceptualisations of adventure tourism - from soft adventure (, , etc.) to hard adventure (, wilderness trekking, etc.) — are commonly employed, but are criticised as overly simplistic and failing to capture the essence of adventure tourism. A systematic review of the adventure tourism literature aimed to address these concerns and resulted in a new conceptualisation of adventure tourism and its dimensions that offers a more comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of this tourism activity. Of the 22 dimensions of adventure tourism identified, risk and danger, the , thrill and excitement, challenge, and physical activity are at its core. Consumer-based, product-based and hybrid pillars of adventure tourism are also evident."

"The spectrum of adventure activities ranging from non-hazardous to high risk has led to the concept where adventure tourism can be categorised as either 'Soft adventure' or 'Hard adventure'. Soft adventure would involve very low risk and may be undertaken by anybody and able, yet they would not necessarily need to have any previous experience in their chosen holiday. Accommodations would be provided and there would be little or no need for participation in anything other than the chosen holiday. Motivation for this would be more to the experience rather than an encounter with any risk. On the other hand, hard adventure would require previous experience, recognised levels of competence, ability to cope with the unexpected and skills associated with type of holiday. While this might imply some sense of risk seeking, Ewert and Hollenhorst (1994: 188) are at pains to suggest that 'although adventure recreators seek out increasingly difficult and challenging opportunities, they paradoxically do not nessarily seek higher levels of risk'."

"High-volume mass tourism imparts the obvious consequences that the critics fear. ... A less-known alternative type of tourism focuses on adventurous travel to the world's remote places. This is not large-scale tourism of the kind envisioned by the critics of conventional tourism; ."