Welcome to this edition of Footnotes, the Footloose Adventure E- Newsletter,
full of important, interesting
and newsworthy items.
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Tailor made holidays
Footloose Adventure Travel is a leading UK specialist for independent travel world wide. We can tailor-make all your holiday, trekking, activity, hotel, transport and tour requirements. | |
Group Trips
Footloose is a preferred agent for many adventure companies including Exodus, Explore and the Adventure Company. If you want to join a group we can help find the right one for you and book it for no extra cost.
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Footloose Travel Blog
Here's our occasional blog with thoughts from the world of travel. If you would like to know more, or add your comments, please read here travel blog | |
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Footloose Travel
Footloose offers a full range of travel services such as hotels, bookings, car hire, airport transfers, parking, anything you like. So please go to our travel page
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Footloose is fully bonded and insured, so you can book with confidence. We hold an ATOL, are members of the Travel Trust Association, and we have insurance cover for each booking - no other travel company offers better protection! |
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Contact us on
info@footlooose.co.uk
or
01943 604030
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Christmas Edition
- Celestial Happenings
- Life after Kilimanjaro
- Polar Journey
- Our partner in Costa Rica
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Quick Links
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....doesn't time just fly! Our first FootNotes came out in June and we hoped to send out the autumn edition in September. But with Roger and Susanne away at different times in September and October, we decided on a Christmas edition of FootNotes instead.
So here it is a double and festive edition with more news, colourful pictures and interesting stories.
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You have climbed to the top of Kilimanjaro and it is the most rewarding and hardest thing you have done in your life (so far), but you don't ever want to do anything at altitude again, since you can stand the nausea, the headache and maybe even the vomitting. Ok, this is a very understandable conclusion that you may draw from the whole experience. Other people however have tasted the 'high life' and want to do more, but what else is there.
If you're going for the seven continental summits, Aconcagua (in Argentina) is most likely next on the list, but this is a huge step up. You can climb Kilimanjaro within a week, but Aconcagua is a different undertaking. It's more an expedition which requires days of acclimatisation and a higher level of fitness and experience.
There are plenty of other peaks that you can climb and even though these aren't higher than Kilimanjaro, they can still be challenging. As anything over 4000m will be. Like for example Mt Kinabalu (4095m) in Borneo, Mt Toubkal (4167m) in Morocco or Mt Blanc (4810m) in France.
If you insist on going higher than Kili, you could consider Stok Kangri (6141m) in India, or Island Peak (6189m) or Mera Peak (6476m) in Nepal.
There are many possiblities, so read about them here
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Where we've been - where we're going | |
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Kay visited a different continent at the end of August and was invited on a familiarisation trip offered by our agent in Laos. She travelled via Bangkok and Chiang Rai across the border to the Luang Say Riverboat. There will be more about this in the next newsletter.
Pauline has been taking a break from her long-haul trips and has enjoyed exploring the UK with her husband in their caravan this summer. She did go to Mallorca with her whole family and is looking forward to her trips to Morocco in February and Canada in June.
In August Richard and his wife took their twin grandsons to Bridlington again. They stayed in a rustic log cabin and braved the rain with long walks on the beach and outings in the area. Lesley stayed in Yorkshire and moved home, but will be ready for a holiday when she has finished decorating her new place.
Even though Roger has already been to Peru and trekked the Inca Trail many moons ago, it is always good to refresh our knowledge of a country, every now and then. This is why Susanne went on an Explore familiarisation trip to Peru. Footloose also offers tailor-made trips to Peru, so this was a good opportunity to pay our agent, based in Cuzco a quick visit as well. Susanne's trip was exactly the same as Explore's PQ trip. Read more.
Two weeks after her Peru Trip, Susanne went to Costa Rica and you can read more about this next time. She will also be climbing Mount Kenya in January.
The Arctic is a destination no one in the Footloose team had been to before and Roger was lucky enough to visit Svalbard on one of the last voyages of the Akademik Sergei Vavilov - . There's a £100 discount from Exodus waiting for the first Footloose client to book a Polar trip - so be quick!
Roger is hoping to visit the Kingdom of Bhutan some time next year, especially since our tailor-made trips to this elusive country have become very popular in the past few months.
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Winter has officially arrived today, and most people long for those long Summer days again. However don't rule out these wintery days though. The sky at night, as Patrick Moore will tell you, is generally very clear at this time of the year. Also this year the Aurora Borealis has entered the most spectacular phase of its 11 year cycle in 2011, so the next three years will be a perfect time to see these great swirls of green light dance across the sky.
You can go and see the Northern Lights with the Adventure Company. They are collaborating with Explorers Astronomy Tours and offer Astronomy trips all over the world. You could, for example, see the Aurora Borealis in the company of acclaimed astronomer Dr John Mason, whose knowledge and reputation will make this an unforgettable experience.
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Knowledge in any job is important, but in our case to have the personal experience and in-depth knowledge of a country or trip is invaluable.
Most people outside the travel industry think that familiarisation or educational trips are just free holidays for travel agents, with lots of booze, fun and not much work. This is (partly) true, but if you're camping and you have to get up very early each morning and trek for a few hours, then you definitely won't be drinking alcohol, especially when the trek is at altitude.
Or if you have to get up early, because the agent wants to show you as much as possible within a short period and they want you to get to know every single hotel in the area. Then it can all be quite tiring and not always that relaxing, but true, it's still fun.
The familiarisation trips we go on are organised by the companies for whom we act as preferred agents like Explore, Exodus and the Adventure Company. However our ground agents (see colleagues abroad) can also put an itinerary together for us. Last July Roger visited the Polar Regions with Exodus, Kay visited our ground agent in Laos (more about her trip in the next edition) and Susanne hiked the Inca Trail with Explore.
Think of all the knowledge we acquire on these trips and how useful this personal in-depth experience will be for our clients. One of our unique selling points is that we can honestly tell our clients that we 'have been there and done that'. |
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Remember those warm days (with bare legs and shades) - here we are enjoying the sun at our annual BBQ in North Yorkshire. From left to right Seb, Susanne, Roger, Lesley, Pauline, Kay and Richard.
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This time we would like to put our Costa Rican agent in the spotlight. Originally from The Netherlands, Jan Centen settled in Costa Rica years ago. He and his Costa Rican wife Lorena run their own incoming tour operator company and have been working with Footloose for quite a few years now.
The husband and wife team and their highly efficient staff know their country extemely well and due to the time difference are usually able to get back to us within 24 hours. Both Jan and Lorena have previously worked in the hotel business and have negotiated the most competitive rates with a large number of hotels. They have a wide knowledge of Costa Rica and can organise trips to some of the wilder parts, such as Corcovado.
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World Travel Market -
visit the World in one day | |
The World Travel Market is the largest travel trade show in the world and is held annually in November in London. We (Roger, Susanne and Janet) travel down and stay in London for two nights and meet up with our agents, who come from all over the world, at Excel Exhibition Centre in the Docklands.
It's good to see old friends again and the party like atmosphere is great. You can often hear the sound of African drums in the background, Brazilian ladies in their colourful carnival outfits handing out leaflets or have a well-deserved neck/head massage at one of the Thailand or India stands.
We visit the whole world and at the end of each day you have walked for miles, because all our agents have their stands scattered all over Excel. We visit every continent, starting off with Africa and Central and South America and finishing either on the Indian Sub continent or Borneo.
These two days are exhausting, but for very important for Footloose, since this is always a great opportunity to discuss business (and trips) face to face. We review our trips, talk about new and exciting trips and exchange the latest news.
We have taken pictures of some of our agents who attended WTM this year, although Tehsin from Tanzania had to send his own picture in (top left), because the camera played up. Clockwise starting with Tehsin, you have Dago (Bhutan), Douglas (Brazil), Philip (Borneo,) Zainab (our other Tanzanian agent) and Paul (Peru), who is orginally from Wales.
  
  
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Tanzania Update
The future for wildlife | |
Here's some more information about Tanzania
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Gone are the days, in December, when we looked forward to receiving all these different Christmas cards by post from colleagues and friends all over the world. Envelopes with exotic stamps (collected for charity) and festive greetings in different languages.
Nowadays we only get a few cards, since the majority of well-wishers send their greetings by email. Okay it's cheaper and a lot quicker, but sadly you can't put these messages on display anymore, like we used to with all the cards.
Footloose has also succumbed to this electronic trend and for the past two years we have tinkered with locally taken photographs and put our festive wishes on it. This one was taken in the Lake District.
We also realised how much money this has saved us on stamps and cards, which we used to get from Survival International. This charity helps threatened Tribal Peoples worldwide. Last April (during our Two Extremes Hot and Cold presentation with Exodus) we raised money for this charity.
More recently we have been donating our Christmas card money to the charity Practical Action, who use technology to challenge poverty, working with poor women and men around the world.
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