Intrepid Travel Launches New Off-Map Adventures

by David Cogswell
Last updated: 7:00 PM ET, Sun July 3, 2016

In case you haven't migrated with Berber nomads in Morocco lately, or tracked the snow leopard in Ladakh, or run a marathon on the Great Wall of China, Intrepid Travel just rolled out a new series of what it calls off-map adventures, a group of 12 limited-departure expeditions designed to provide deep immersion and novel experiences in exotic locations.

The new daring dozen are designed to target the most adventurous travelers, those desirous of the most extreme diversion from the humdrum conventional pathways of everyday life. Intrepid provides the opportunity to travel within the Arctic circle among the reindeer with the Nenets, one of the last nomadic tribes in the world today. You can watch a Russian rocket launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, or attend a new year's celebration with the Naga hilltribes in Myanmar.

Intrepid Travel considers itself a company of travelers and its off-map adventures are created from suggestions from the whole range of the staff, from tour leaders to sales and marketing people.

"We take the most interesting suggestions and put them out there to provide our customers with some really cool new, interesting places to visit," said Leigh Barnes, Intrepid's North America director. "They travel to some really amazing off-the-beaten-path destinations in pretty much every corner of the earth. We have some really cool trips that our staff and customers are really interested to get on."

"It's a really cool aspect of the company that people really want to create new and exciting trips, share a piece of themselves with our customers and really create something exciting and different, like nothing that has been created before."

Intrepid Travel, as the name implies, is designed for adventurous travelers and the off-map explorations take it a step further than the company's regular line of tours.

"Most of our customers are still going on our regular trips to Peru, Vietnam, Morocco, Cuba or Italy, but once they've got through those and done those trips and traveled with us a number of times, they are looking for that next step, that extra bit of exploration, going to that untouched place," said Barnes. "We were founded on the idea of getting out and having life experiences on every continent on earth. I think it's just an extrapolation of our company further to go to these places."

Here is the list of the new off-map adventures:

Expedition - Baikonur & Kazakhstan (10 days)

Departure Date: Nov. 13, 2016

$4, 680

Expedition Djibouti - Footsteps of the Afar (13 days)

Departure Date: Nov. 13, 2016

$3,255

Expedition - Moldova, Ukraine & Romania (13 days)

Departure Date: Oct. 1, 2016

$1,910

Expedition - Rivers and Mountains of Bhutan (11 days)

Departure Date: March 3, 2017