Kirsten found five gal-pal travel partners to go caving, kayaking, and volcano-ing with in Guatemala.

Related articles:

The Guardian: Top 10 Local Travel Guides, with photos by Kirsten Koza

The Guatemala Times: Guatemalan Guide Wins Global Tourism Competition, by Kirsten Koza

 Is it possible to have an adventure on a guided tour? (first appeared in News for Travellers published by Leap Local, a responsible tourism organization funded by Cambridge, UK)

By Kirsten Koza

This adventure-travel snob tests 3 self-propelled ‘local’ tours to see if they provide the ‘adventure’ they promise.

An ad for an ‘adventure spa’ caught my eye, but before mocking them, I opened their website to see if they offered treatments involving bee venom and uric acid. They didn’t—it was typical spa-fare, not a leech to be seen.

A Google-search for ‘adventure travel’ results in over 16-million companies and individuals promising adventure. Estimates on adventure travel industry-sizes vary massively between $40-billion and $245-billion US. But do any of these operators truly offer the adventure they claim in their name? I’ve parachuted in Russia, was held at gunpoint in Honduras and have a fairly good idea of what an adventure entails, but just to be certain, I looked ‘adventure’ up in several dictionaries and found these key words: exciting, danger, hazard, risk, uncertain outcome, peril, and mercenary soldier. Armed with this definition and fellow adventure seekers, I tested 3 ‘local’ tour-companies from the Internet…. (Kirsten has removed the remainder of this article as the information was out of date).