In 1973, Richard Bangs decided to travel before settling down for graduate school. The trip, rafting on wild rivers in Ethiopia, was his first experience overseas and arguably the most important trip of his life.
“It was supposed to be a wayward exercise between undergrad and grad school,” Bangs said. “But I was so swept away that it led to starting my own company.”
Along with his travel companions, Bangs co-founded a rafting company called Sobek (named after the ancient Egyptian god of crocodiles). In 1991, Sobek joined forces with an adventure tour company to create Mountain Travel Sobek, one of the leading small-group adventure companies in the world.
More than 30 years later, his company and a lifetime of adventures, are Bangs’ legacy.
Today, Bangs has authored and edited over a dozen books, including White Water Adventure: Running America’s Great Scenic Rivers, Islands of Fire, Islands of Spice: Exploring the Wild Places of Indonesia, and his most recent addition, Adventures with Purpose: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Earth. He’s a regular columnist for The New York Times and hosts segments on Yahoo! and MSNBC.
Unlike many of his other books, Adventures with Purpose focuses largely on the vanishing culture and ecology in places like Libya, Bosnia, Thailand, and the American West.
“Most of the other books I’ve been involved in are chronicles of the various expeditions,” he said. “This is more reflective, looking at places I was involved in pioneering or exploring and taking a survey, taking stock and being acutely aware that things have changed.”
Many of the destinations and adventures Bangs helped introduce to the world are now compromised or, in some cases, completely gone. He said the overall theme of the book is to inspire and invite people to go see rare treasures – while they still exist.
Bangs noted that his decades of traveling have given him a strong sense of how things have changed. He attributes preservation to popular tourist spots. The Grand Canyon, for example, wasn’t damaged because enough people saw it and thought to preserve it, he said. He feels strongly that many places he visited early on didn’t receive enough visitors, so nobody thought to protect them.
“Almost every place I was involved in exploring in the ‘70s has changed, in many cases for the worse,” Bangs said. “You hopefully will be persuaded to be involved in preservation – that’s key in ecotourism.”
And over all this time, what is his number one travel tip?
“Only have a carry-on!” he chuckled.
Listen to Richard Bangs live on Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio this Saturday 10AM-noon.
You can buy Bangs’ books on Amazon.com and see his projects on sites such as Yahoo!, MSN and Slate.com. Or, visit Mountain Travel Sobek at https://www.mtsobek.com.
By Dara Bramson for PeterGreenberg.com
To learn more about how climate change is affecting travel, check out “Climate Changing Travel”.
