Richard Bangs Adventures Travel Brought to You by Yahoo!   10/24/2005 - 1,170 views,

According to the Yahoo ‘Richard Bangs Adventure’ site, “If anything separates Richard Bangs from your average world-traveling vagabond, it is that he invites us along for every wild ride. He lets us sit shotgun on wild first river raft descents, get splashed with hippo mucus, feel the spray of frothy water in our faces, and hear the affectionate hum of exotic, disease-carrying insects in our ears. With Richard as river guide and adventure-travel executive, as magazine writer and book author (with more than a dozen titles to his credit), as filmmaker and Internet-travel pioneer, his virtual and live fellow travelers have paddled African rivers, journeyed to Antarctica, trekked to Himalayan mountain thrones, bestowed digital cameras upon New Guinea highland villagers, and made the first 21st-century Western foray into Libya.”

Ok, I have a couple of observations here. First, what is “Internet-travel”? It would seem as apocryphal as time travel, and yet apparently Richard Bangs does it on a regular basis - indeed has pioneered it.

Second, while it’s mighty kind of Mr. Bangs to let us get splashed with hippo mucus, thanks, but, well, no thanks.

Still, there’s more to it than just hippo mucus and disease-carrying insects. The Richard Bangs Adventures site will follow and document intrepid adventurers along on all sorts of adventures, allowing you to be the ultimate armchair adventurer, for some voyeuristic value of “adventurer”. The first adventure in the series will follow mountain climber John Harlin III on the same unfortunate climb up the Eiger which lead to the demise of John Harlin II, his father.

Other upcoming adventures include a look at the “Sea Gypsies of the Andaman Islands,” and an adventure with “the lucky winning family of the Richard Bangs Adventures sweepstakes (which kicks off October 24th) as they go on a heart-pounding quest into the heart of Panama.”

Explained Scott Moore, Yahoo’s VP of content operations, “We want to share stories that quicken the pulse and appeal to the growing interest in adventure travel. We are attempting to use the Internet’s unique attributes as a rich storytelling medium to help consumers make discoveries that they wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to.”

I dunno. I don’t think that it will ever replace Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”.

You can see for yourself at Richard Bangs Adventures.