Adventures in Matrimony

On the third day, Christine Bubser began having second thoughts. She and her husband, David Baron, had just begun a bike trip through newly opened Bhutan when Baron was clipped by a passing truck and thrown into a ditch. When he tried to stand, he found it quite difficult.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God. I’m 36 years old, I finally get married and my new husband has just been hit by a truck in a country where to get decent medical care, they airlift you to India,” Bubser says now, four years later.

Wincing, Baron gamely got back on his bike and they finished their trip--an 11-day, 450-mile bicycle trek through the Himalayas that included 50,000 feet of ascent and 60,000 of descent. But although he could ride, Baron could not really walk.

“So I had to carry all the luggage whenever we made camp,” Bubser says. “I’m thinking: ‘What kind of honeymoon is this?’ ”

An extreme honeymoon. A postnuptial adventure that, more and more, is replacing the time-honored Caribbean cruise or trip to Niagara Falls. Forget two weeks in Italy, let’s go trekking through Nepal or bungee-jumping in New Zealand. A cabin in Vermont? How banal. Let’s tour Vietnam or Sri Lanka, let’s climb Mt. Everest. And if we must visit a predictable country like Switzerland or France, at least let’s do it on our bikes or with large packs upon our backs.

A generation ago, the honeymoon was a social rite of passage. As recently as the early ‘60s, it was often the first trip a couple took together, certainly the first one in which they openly shared a bed or even a room. The honeymoon was designed to allow a couple to live together for the first time away from the pressures of everyday life, to get to know each other in a way that perhaps they hadn’t before.

For modern newlyweds, that traditional concept of a honeymoon is practically obsolete. They are older, wealthier, better traveled and have usually spent a fair amount of time in close quarters with each other. Bubser and Baron’s first trip together was a six-week tour of Africa. “After something like that,” Bubser says, “I knew I had to marry him.”

The travel industry is nothing if not responsive. Honeymoon packages, once the province of high-end hotels and cruise lines, are now offered by trekking and adventure companies, although some have redefined “adventure” to include chateau-hopping and “tent” camping suitable for traveling royalty. International travel Web sites hawk the romantic possibilities of everything from ice camping to hot-air ballooning.

“People live together for years nowadays,” says Tom Hale, president of Backroads, which puts together adventure tours. “So they do what they want to do, not some preconceived notion of a honeymoon. We’ve had people take very high-end walking and biking tours, where they’re staying in high-end hotels, and people who have shared tents with other folks in the Grand Canyon.”

Backroads, which is in Berkeley, has seen so many honeymooners that it started a honeymoon registry--instead of gifts, friends of the new couple can donate to their bike, hike, kayak and snorkeling tour of Thailand. Which makes sense since such organized tours can range from $1,700 per person for a domestic trek to $5,000 for more exotic destinations.

“People are getting married older now,” says Hale. “They already have plenty of stuff.”

That stuff often includes a ticking biological clock.

“We see a lot of B.C. activity,” says Jim Sano, president of Geographic Expeditions in San Francisco. “People want to take the trip they won’t be able to take after they have children.”

That was the primary motivator in Carmen and Chris Joseph’s decision to take an 11-day trek into the Anapurna Sanctuary of Nepal after their wedding last year. Both are avid campers and hikers and had traveled quite a bit--he proposed during a trip to New Zealand--so the honeymoon bar was set fairly high.

“We knew we wanted to get pregnant right away,” says Carmen, who is due to deliver her first child in October. “So we decided to go someplace we wouldn’t take a small child. We thought about Africa and Tibet, but the altitude was too high. We chose Nepal and so we had to trek because that is what you do in Nepal.”

They were part of a group tour and so, although they had a tent to themselves, they were basically sharing their honeymoon with five other trekkers and a crew of 30, she says. A crew set up camp every night and broke it down in the morning and the food was good, but in 11 days she got to shower only three times. “That was hard.”

About three days into the trek, the party passed over a very high and narrow part of the trail, and Carmen began experiencing vertigo. “I thought for a minute I wouldn’t be able to go on, that I’d have to stay behind in a tea house while Chris took our honeymoon for us.” But the guides talked her down, or rather up, and she pressed on.

At 10,000 feet, she experienced altitude sickness but, fortunately, had gotten a prescription to fight the symptoms. (Her husband didn’t have the same luck when back in Katmandu, he brushed his teeth using tap water and was sick for the trip from Katmandu to Bangkok and for almost three months after their return.) The most difficult thing, she says, was getting up at 6 every morning to get on the trail.

“It was very hard,” she says, “but it was wonderful.”

Not exactly a conventional definition of a “wonderful” honeymoon, but, according to Cherri Briggs, president of Explore Inc., a lot of younger newlyweds don’t want to go conventional. The number of honeymooners calling her company has increased so much in the past four or five years, she says, that Explore, of Steamboat Springs, Colo., now offers several trips specifically geared to them. And the expectations have changed as much as the interest level.

“People want the exact opposite of what they wanted in the past,” she says. “They want to conserve rather than kill things, they want to hang out with the villagers rather than be waited on by them. And the new profile includes a lot of activity--there is something very sexy about a near-death experience,” she adds with a laugh.

Adventure travel in general, and Africa in particular, can break down emotional and psychic barriers faster than any trip to Europe, Briggs says. “In Paris, you’re going to museums, restaurants, it’s all in your head. Here it is absolutely primordial. You have to give up control, turn it over to the guides. Which is why so many women fall in love with their guides. Which,” she adds, musing, “might not be the best thing on a honeymoon.”

According to Geographic’s Sano, a general ratcheting up of travel experiences has pushed the limits of what some people expect from their honeymoons.

“Since the ‘70s, the number of trekkers in general has increased dramatically. When we started, there were five adventure companies in Nepal; now there are more than 300,” he says. “People are better traveled in general so it takes something extra to make a trip special.”

The proliferation of travel magazines also makes the world seem smaller and any trip plausible. “Outside magazine and National Geographic Traveler make even the most difficult trips seem accessible and doable.”

His company, he says, has always had a small but steady number of honeymooners, but he sees a huge increase in couples who might pass on a lengthy group tour, which can be pricey, but plan similar adventure vacations on their own. “Honeymooners, understandably, may not want to travel with other people,” he says.

For Bubser and Baron the group experience was even more souring than the accident. Being trapped with a bunch of “drunk, angry Brits,” many of whom were highly competitive cycling club buddies, Bubser says, was not exactly conducive to romance. “Even if you could get past the tiny tent, the various gastrointestinal problems and the clothes that never quite dried,” says Baron.

So when a couple of their well-traveled friends asked them for honeymoon advice, they were cautious. “Go somewhere relaxing,” Baron says. But Amy Guggenheim and Ed Shenkan, who took a five-week trip to Greece and Italy to celebrate their engagement, are leaning toward a bike trip in Vietnam.

“We thought about scuba diving in the Galapagos,” says Guggenheim, “but the weather’s not good in October. Vietnam is supposed to be beautiful in the fall.”

Although they haven’t agreed on the length of the trip (Shenkan says five weeks, Guggenheim says maybe three), they are committed to breaking up the biking with stays at beachside hotels. “We do want to make sure we have some air-conditioning,” says Shenkan.

They realize their plans are a far cry from their parents’ Caribbean and Bermuda honeymoons, but, says Guggenheim, travel is easier and cheaper than in her parents’ day and they will be older newlyweds than their parents were.

“I’m 37, Ed’s 31, we have more money, this isn’t our first trip together,” she says. “We want to do something we’d never done before.”

Besides, of course, getting married.