Illustration by CASEY CROWE/Daily Bruin
By Suneal Kolluri
Daily Bruin Contributor
Planning exciting trips can be a frustrating task and
prospective travelers often drown themselves in travel guides,
hotel brochures and traveler’s checks.
In the stressful process of planning family vacations or weekend
getaways, a new Web site, RealAdventures.com, attempts to
lend users a helping hand.
In this case, however, the helping hand isn’t really all
that helpful.
RealAdventures.com allows users to choose from a list of
vacation options and find companies that offer various adventures
around the world.
Offering users brief explanations, contact information and
prices of such exciting excursions as skydiving in Aruba,
four-wheel drive tours in Australia and mountain climbing in
Russia, as well as about 5,000 other suggestions for your average
thrillseeker in exotic locations around the world, the site seems
inspiring.
Scanning for vacation ideas definitely turns up some interesting
results, but navigating the site is somewhat tedious. The
descriptions of various adventures are often confusing and a lack
of maps confuses users about the whereabouts of the particular
excursion.
Although the site offers a wide range of travel ideas for a lot
of different types of people (singles, families, gays, lesbians and
nudists), the varied options are definitely not extensive. The site
offers travel options in 100 countries, yet searches for many
common activities will often yield only two or three results, often
in obscure places.
If travelers already know what activities they are planning to
do on their trip, the use of a common search engine will yield far
more results than tediously perusing the content of
RealAdventures.com.
The site did, however, compile its 5,000 listings in a matter of
months, and is still relatively young. Time will hopefully yield a
wider array of resources and more organization.
For travelers unsure about their next destination, however, the
site can be a handy tool. A brief scanning of the site’s
travel suggestions can bring up ideas a user might not have thought
of before. For vacation ideas, RealAdventures.com can be a valuable
source for trip ideas to all types of exotic locations.
Photo galleries of the locations also provide users breathtaking
views of potential vacation spots, and are intended to help users
choose their next vacation spot. Scenic ocean views, log cabins and
majestic mountains definitely add a pleasing aesthetic element to
the Web page.
Aside from suggestions for travel, the site also accepts stories
in which intense travelers tell the most intricate details of their
wilderness adventures. Backpackers, mountain climbers and skiers
tell everything about their journeys from the scenery they observed
to immature jokes they told throughout the trip.
The anecdotes are rather entertaining tales of extreme
adventures, but aren’t all that helpful to the average
traveler that isn’t going to take a 71-day trek through the
Southern Sierra Mountains.
RealAdventures.com also allows users to send friends and family
postcards over the Internet without the hassle of those pesky
mailboxes and postage stamps. Travelers can simply log on to the
site and find an e-postcard to e-mail to all of their friends with
the click of a mouse.
A “Currency Converter” is also provided on the site
just in case users need to figure out how much more Bangladeshi
taka they need to get $100 worth of Estonian kroon to pay the taxi
driver to drive them back to Tartu County.
Such a wonderful tool just may come in handy.
The site does offer some useful services as a sort of electronic
travel guide. Most of the services the site has to offer, however,
can be done more efficiently elsewhere.
If adventure-seekers want to find travel Web sites, try a search
engine; to send a postcard, try the postal service, and to read
interesting travel stories, try the library. If a dire traveler
ever needs to find out how many yen are in 1,000 rupies, however,
RealAdventures.com is the place to go.