Adventure Travel Is Increasingly Not Just for the Young
The average age of participants has risen over the past few years, outfitters say, thanks in part to better gear and more-accommodating trips
4 min
When Peter Cox wrapped up his career as a paediatric critical-care doctor at age 65, he celebrated by signing up for the Tour d’ Afrique, a transcontinental bike trip with TDA Global Cycling. The roughly 5,600-mile route from Cairo to Cape Town spans 10 countries over 74 days of riding with just 28 rest days. Riders average 74 miles a day and spend only 10 nights in hotels. They camp the rest of the journey.
Cox wasn’t the oldest participant. The group had five riders over 70.
Outfitters specialising in adventure travel say the average age of their customers has ticked upward since Covid, according to a survey by travel research company Skift. At TDA, for example, the average client age currently is 62, compared with 57 pre pandemic. And some 6% of its clients last year were over 75; before the pandemic, the percentage never exceeded 1%, the company says.
Adventure South NZ, a New Zealand-based outfitter, says the average age of its hiking and biking guests was 55 during the 10 years before the pandemic. It jumped to 65 directly after.
A U.S.-based operator focusing on trips for women, Adventures in Good Company, says its average guest age rose to 62 in 2023, compared with 58 pre pandemic, and on many of its most-challenging trips, ages skewed even higher. Last year a 73-year-old completed a nine-day slackpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail in Georgia that averaged 7 to 16 miles a day, and an 80-year-old woman completed a nine-day trekking tour of Mont Blanc in France.
About 4.1 million Americans will reach 65 years old this year . “Sixty is the new 40,” says Shannon Stowell , president of the Adventure Travel Trade Association. “My dad stopped being active at 50.… People are living longer, healthier lives and are more active than ever.”
Intensity with comfort
Adventure travel doesn’t have to be as intense as it once was. Stowell says it has gained popularity with an older demographic in part because there are more comforts available, such as lodges with good food and guides who will transfer your gear. “Trekking to Machu Picchu or Everest Base Camp used to be so much more hard-core,” he says. “Better gear and more professionalism in guiding have made these adventures more accessible.”
Also, clients in the 55-plus crowd have traveled more than their parents and grandparents did, Stowell says. “They’ve done Rome and Paris. Now they want to go deeper to places like Mongolia,” he says.
Cox, who is now 70 and lives in Toronto, rode 2,547 miles from Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City last year. This spring, his wife, 60, will join him on a 35-day, 1,637-mile bike expedition in Morocco. And in 2025, he plans to pedal 3,295 miles in the Himalayas from Srinagar, India, to Kathmandu, Nepal.
“I’ve never been on a cruise or to an all-inclusive resort,” he says. “The nice part of cycling is you’re moving at a speed that allows you to interact physically and emotionally with the environment.”
On long rides, Cox experiences discomfort in his shoulders and hips, but he says regular stretching has kept most aches at bay.
Rita Tellerman of New York City celebrated her 70th birthday in 2019 by cycling 1,885 miles through Madagascar with TDA Global Cycling. The trip featured 31 days of riding, nine rest days and a mix of hotel stays and camping.
“It ticked all of the areas that took me out of my comfort zone,” she says. “It was my first trip to a Third World country. I had no clue about camping equipment. And I’d never ridden a gravel bike.” The retired public-health nutritionist started cycling at age 50 and says her speed isn’t what it once was. “It pisses me off when I can’t keep up with the 50-and 60-year-olds,” she says.
Time and money
Such trips require significant time and money, two assets that many older people tend to have at their disposal. Monika Sundem , chief executive of trip planner Adventure Life, says her company’s trips, which average eight to 10 days, cost $600 to $800 a day per person. Her customers in the post-65 range, meanwhile, have gone from 23.5% in 2019 to 35% last year, and they are booking such trips as treks in Patagonia, mountain biking in Ecuador and climbing in the Alaskan backcountry.
Todd Rutledge , owner of expedition specialist Mountain Trip, says 60-plus customers make up 19% of clients on his Alaska Range itineraries. “A lot of people tell us they didn’t want to go away when their kids were at home,” he says.
“Our trips are a hefty investment,” says Rutledge, whose multi-week to two-months-long expeditions typically cost $10,000 to $60,000. Most require a high level of fitness, too. “People age 65 and older statistically are more likely to experience some form of altitude sickness,” he says. “We’re not physiologists or trainers so in 2018 we partnered with a company to design personalised training programs for guests—and most, particularly our older guests, take advantage.”
Deb Shucka, 72, of Battle Ground, Wash., walks and hikes regularly to maintain her fitness for hiking vacations. She celebrated her 70th birthday trekking el Camino de Costa Rica, a roughly 175-mile cross-country trail with a peak elevation of more than 7,600 feet.
“At one point our guide told us, ‘Every morning starts with breakfast and a hill,’ and he wasn’t joking,” she says. “I had to stop a bunch on the hills but I never felt impaired,” she says. Guides transferred bags, which she says made the 16-day trip more appealing. Along the way she slept in tents, cabins and on the floor of a village community centre.
Last year, Shucka completed the Cape Camino, a roughly 400-mile route in South Africa, and she is hoping to trek in Ireland this fall. “When I retired at 63 it dawned on me I have to do these things now even if my husband doesn’t love to travel,” she says. “I’ve fallen in love with travelling by myself .”
Surf’s up
Betsy Cuthberton, 65, an accountant in Vail, Colo., and her retired husband, Mike Cuthberton, 66, recently took a vacation in Costa Rica so they could learn to surf. “We aren’t sit-on-the-beach people,” the wife says. “We do TRX classes and yoga a few times a week so we’re still physically capable of trying anything.” The couple, who are devoted skiers, booked a weeklong stay with Surf Synergy, a surf camp in Jaco that incorporates training, yoga and massages into the programming.
Surf Synergy co-founder Marcel Oliveira says he has seen an uptick in 65-plus guests wanting to surf for the first time. He assigns each guest two coaches so they always have someone with them in the water, whether taking off on a wave or getting out of the water. Betsy Cuthberton stood up on her first wave, and her husband was up and riding by the end of the first day.
“Not once did anyone say, ‘You’re too old,’ ” she says. “I believe staying young is embracing a mindset where you’re always learning.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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