Help
adventure tourism — English
Deliberately and voluntarily visiting a place or taking a trip that entails a certain amount of danger or risk. The level of risk that the tourist is prepared to take, varies from low to high. Mountaineering serves as a good example of the development of this type of tourism. A small number of people have always climbed mountains because it presented them with a challenge. There was no real need to climb the mountain, its mere “being there” served as motivation enough, and the more difficult it was to climb, the greater the allure. Over the years, mountaineering has gained more and more adherents. Technological advances produced better equipment and more difficult climbs could be attempted with greater safety. This “safety” is, of course, purely relative, but as the so-called safety increased the activity grew in popularity. The ultimate challenge, of course, was climbing Mount Everest. The first serious attempt to scale Everest, ended in the tragic deaths of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine in 1924. But attempts to reach the summit continued and more deaths followed. Once Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay planted a flag on the summit in 1953 – and lived to tell the tale – climbing Everest became an irresistible challenge to increasing numbers of serious mountaineers. The fact that quite a number of those who attempted this died in the process, perversely made it more attractive. A whole tourism industry to support prospective climbers developed. Today it is a huge industry and extremely important for the economies of Tibet and especially Nepal. Nowadays people who could not by any stretch of the imagination be called “mountaineers” or “athletes”, but have enough money to pay enormous fees to join a guided and cosseted “expedition”, attempt to climb the mountain. They are more or less carried, dragged, pushed and nursed to the summit of Everest and back by well-paid teams of guides and Sherpas (the native people of the Himalayas) and an endless supply of oxygen canisters, but the risk of dying has not been removed entirely. If the weather suddenly changed a whole number of people on the mountain could die within a few hours as happened in May 1996 when 10 people died there in one night. In fact, the mortality statistics are soberingly high. Yet people want to do it and are prepared to pay an arm and a leg to do so – and in many cases a lost arm or leg becomes the harsh reality! In the 2013 climbing season 580 paying clients summited the mountain, but eight – including two Sherpas – died as a result of people-congestion along the climbing trail. Some climbers had to wait no less than six hours to ascend the technically difficult Hillary Step, and “traffic jams” formed on the fixed lines. The Nepalese tourism authorities have now decided to step in and install safety measures to lessen the death rate. A fixed ladder is to be secured on the Hillary Step and two separate fixed lines will be secured, one for the ascending and one for the descending “traffic”. One could simply change the details in the history written above and apply it to white water rafting, kayaking, canoeing, scuba diving, extreme skiing, solo navigation around the world, or hiking through wildlife areas such as the Kruger National Park. The increasing popularity of adventure tourism has already produced a sizeable industry. There is no predicting where this trend will end, but currently a multitude of people all around the world make a living out of tourists who want to take relatively risky trips and do relatively risky activities. (See “environmental business”, “carrying capacity”, “alternative tourism” and “accountability”.)
