Insider Voyaging

When most people think of organized group travel, they imagine cramped tour buses, theme parks, and singles cruises. They picture voyages where you pretty much know what you're going to get.

"It's not a tourist experience. It's really immersion."

Take an organized trip with Philadelphian Jim Kane, however, and you're in for a surprise. Kane is the founder of Culture Xplorers, a 3-year-old travel company that sends people to see parts of Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and Brazil, in ways that few tourists ever do.

After spending much of the 1980s and 1990s living all around the world, in 2003 Kane decided he wanted to help others see places through the lens of a traveler, not a tourist.

"I used to look at group travel in a negative way," he says. "Group-based travel can sometimes erect barriers between travelers and native people when that doesn't need to be the case. So I built up Culture Xplorers with the opposite approach - I wanted travelers to be able to have a genuine interaction with people in new places."

This means that on trips to Peru, travelers might learn about the weaving communities of the Andes; in Brazil, teenagers in the poor outskirts of Rio de Janeiro give visitors tours of their neighborhoods (called "favelas"), and then might join the "Xplorers" in a game of beach volleyball.

When exploring a place, Kane tries to give his clients a taste of both ends of the spectrum - from staying in a family's home one night to staying at a city's finest hotel the next.

Sylvia Gardner-Wittgenstein recently celebrated her 60th birthday on an excursion with Kane to Mexico. The trip included a mescal tasting at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Santo Domingo church and an afternoon learning from locals how to make dye from lime and pomegranate juice.

"There were people from their twenties to their seventies in our group," she says. "I loved it because you are in a small group and it's not a tourist experience. It's really immersion."

The highlight of her trip? A scavenger hunt in Oaxaca where she had to get her shoes shined. "And then I had to convince the shoe-shine guy to let me shine his shoes!" she says. "It was a wonderful moment."

Posted on February 20, 2006