Great: just when we thought we were striking out on the road untraveled, we find we’re merely another niche market. But being part of a trend instead of pioneering it has advantages. Should you want to scale the Himalayas with female Sherpas, there’s now a women’s tour company in Nepal to arrange it. There are all-female trips to walk the Arctic, to visit healers in Ecuador and to watch camels in Rajasthan. “[Women] have all the money, all the time and all the information,” says the Adventure Travel Society’s Jerry Mallett. “Marketers have known this for a while.”
Although travel-magazine covers tend to feature taut young things scaling peaks and fording streams, women of all ages can be adventure travelers. Today, even grandmothers are elder-hosteling their way across Europe. When travel agent Debra Asberry, 41, decided that she was going to fulfill a lifelong dream of white-water rafting in Utah, she assumed she’d be the oldest woman on the expedition. As it happens, Asberry was the youngest woman on the trip; three women in their 70s also signed up for it.
Women, it turns out, travel with different expectations than men. For us–50 percent of the solo-traveler market–travel has become as much about the self as it is about the world. “Men are action-oriented. A woman’s journey is much more spiritual,” says Evelyn Hannon, founder of Journeywoman, a Web site for independent women travelers. “They have to have an inner journey and an outer journey.”
Hannon also notes that “cultural correctness is a huge difference between men and women travelers. A man can go around the world and still be wearing his shirt and pants. A woman is going to have to change constantly to suit the culture she’s in.” In parts of the South Pacific, women don’t have to cover their breasts, but a flash of thigh is taboo. In Muslim countries, travelers shouldn’t wear tight or revealing clothes. There is a wisdom to fitting in, notes Kira Scherer, a 26-year-old sales director who travels “constantly” for her job. In Latin America, she’s careful not to carry a laptop, stay in five-star hotels or look too obviously like a businesswoman. “You don’t want to be a walking target,” she says. “I’m more careful in developing countries, just because there’s such a disparity in wealth.”
The qualities that help women succeed in the new information economy–flexibility and communication skills–help on the road. “We really have a philosophy of trying to connect when we’re out there,” says Carol Rivendell, of Wild Women Adventures, a California-based women’s travel company. Rivendell always tells her tour groups the word for “beautiful” in the language of their destinations. “If you know that, then you can compliment women on their clothing or children–something women do all over the world,” she says. Rivendell thinks women are more interested than men in aspects of everyday life: where people shop, what they talk about, what they wear.
After hitchhiking through Europe in her early 20s, New York City writer Tara Bahrampour said she started to feel as though her trips were too much about just passing through. “I’d go by the windows of a beautiful apartment and hear people having dinner, and I’d wonder what they were saying, what they were eating,” she says. “I wondered, ‘What am I doing here?’ " Since then, she’s never traveled without a project for the road–a book or article to research, photographs to take, a childhood memory to pursue. “With a purpose, I can connect,” she says.
For women on their own, connecting has never been easier. The Web has bulletin boards where single women can find traveling partners. There are now women-only hostels from Delhi to North Devon. And in countries with strict separation of the sexes, there are often women-only cars on trains. Of course, there are times when things aren’t exactly as advertised. I once rode in what was billed as a women’s car on an overnight train in India–and spent much of the night with a group of male railroad workers who were smoking cheroots and playing cards. The women tried to get them out, shouting: “This is a women’s car! Memsahibs! Ladies! We need to sleep!” The men just smiled and dealt another hand. Nice guys, as it turned out, but not women. You could tell by the way they traveled.
