Mike Sowden
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New Travel Startup Unadventure Caters To The Whelmed
When she was 16, Londoner Jennifer Olive went on holiday with her parents to the British seaside resort of Blackpool. The weather was lousy, their hotel was bland and she can't remember where they went or what they did. A disappointment? Not so."A year later I went backpacking round India, walking one of the spice trails near Kerala. When you got up in the morning you had no idea what would happen that day, or what was 'round the next corner. Plans fell apart; we had to take detours and at one point we got lost and ended up staying with some total strangers. There was this constant sense that anything was possible. I hated it. The following year I went back to Blackpool and I've been every year since."
Like many Britons, Olive believes that good travel is about exploring your comfort zone. A 2012 survey by Rough Guides found that more than three-quarters of Brits have been to the same destination more than once, and one in ten have returned to the same destination more than 10 times. The chief reason? The satisfaction of familiarity. Olive believes this kind of travel meets a basic human need to put down roots wherever you go, making a travel destination feel like a second home.
"It's obviously important to see the world - but life is just too short to have a string of experiences that fail to meet your expectations. In the 32 years I've been spending my summers at Blackpool, I've got to know the place in a really deep and lasting way. I know every rundown cafe; I see the same people getting older - it feels familiar in a way India never did. I've rented out the same cottage for the last two decades, and at the end of every stay I carve a notch in the wainscoting. There's a little line of notches there now. It helps me keep track of where the years went."
Now she's putting that guiding ethos to work with a startup she hopes will revolutionize 21st century travel. Set to launch in early 2014, Unadventure.com is a luxury tour operator that seeks to present its clients with the ultimate tailored travel experience - down to the very last detail. New customers fill out a 60-page application form and attend a series of interviews in order to build a detailed personality profile, and it's this profile that determines the kind of holiday they'll be given. Fond of the British cooked breakfast? That's how you'll start your days on your Unadventure holiday. No second language? Unadventure will find the perfect English expat enclave for you, or even ensure you don't have to leave the country at all. From your favorite reading material to a sightseeing itinerary that guarantees no surprises, the aim is a bespoken holiday that will make you feel you've barely left home.
"They say that adventures happen when plans fall apart, and that's exactly what we'll seek to avoid at Unadventure.com. Tourism statistics show that most people don't want to be overwhelmed by their travel experiences - and obviously they don't want to be underwhelmed. What they want is to be whelmed. We're going to whelm our customers. As part of the concept trial I anonymously put myself through the profiling process, and at the end, my team built the perfect holiday for me ... in Blackpool. I feel that says a lot about the service we're offering."
Unadventure.com launches in early 2014.
[Photo Credit: Flickr user Яick Harris]
All Change At Berlin Tempelhof Airport
It's only when you're walking down the airport runway that you realize how big it really is. Runways are designed on an inhuman scale. If you're an aircraft, they're just long enough to claw yourself into the air. This one, Tempelhof runway 9L/27R, is 2,094 meters long. It takes you 20 minutes of brisk walking to cover the distance a Pan Am Boeing 747 would accelerate through in 60 seconds. This is clearly not a landscape built for feet.
Except, scratch that. You look around and there are people everywhere. Some, like you, are walking down the asphalt. Many more have taken to the grass, occasionally forming sociable huddles around a guitar, or the Berlin equivalent of a picnic basket. It's four years after Tempelhof closed for the last time and after the last aircraft departed – an Antonov AN-2 delayed by bad weather. Now this is a place being reworked for a different scale of existence. Before, everything needed to be colossal. This place is still vast – 100 acres larger than Manhattan's Central Park – and in satellite photos it looks like a 400-hectare divot has been whacked out of Berlin by some continent-sized golf club. On the ground, it's so big that there's little sense of being in a city park at all. You're not in Berlin anymore - you're in Tempelhof.
You've been told that the terminal building, once one of the 20 largest buildings in the world, is well worth seeing. From this end of 27R it's unimposing, a low dark silhouette perhaps a quarter-hour's stroll away. Half an hour later you still haven't reached it, and it has eaten the horizon. This 4,000-foot-long semicircle of hallways and hangers was designed to be the ultimate symbol of National Socialism – an eagle, stooping for a kill. Its roof was a mile long. Today the terminal building is a mass of private offices and rental space, and it's frequently used for events that require a stage of epic proportions.
Gallery: Berlin's Abandoned Tempelhof Airport
Lost And Found: How Uncertainty Makes Travel Memorable
As the bus begins to pull away from the bus stop in Chania, I catch the old man's eye again, giving him a thumbs-up through the window. He stares back blankly – then leaps to his feet, waving his arms, pointing, shouting. I raise my hands in an uncomprehending shrug, keeping the palms turned inward to avoid flipping him a mountza, the traditional Greek insult. He shouts louder, as if volume alone could break through the language barrier that had us miming to each other a few minutes ago. Then his body slumps into a pose recognizable the world over – "Oh, you bloody fool" – and that's when it hits me in the stomach.
I'm on the wrong bus.
I have an hour before my ferry leaves the port of Souda, taking me away from Crete and back to mainland Greece. If I don't hit that ferry, my carefully engineered schedule slithers through my fingers and I'm left untethered, without local knowledge, a decent enough grasp of spoken Greek or the money for new tickets. Without that ferry, I'm lost.
