Outdoor excitement without the worries

HARLAND HAGUE is a retired history professor who has sworn off average fun-in-the-sun vacations and 40-person bus tours. They’re much too tame. For his leisure travels, he joins 12-person groups in “soft adventures”: a riverboat trip on the Amazon, a camping safari in Tanzania, a hiking expedition through Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest, a mountain bike tour of the American Southwest.

He has such a good time that he has set up a website, www.softadventure.net, that recounts impressions of those journeys and invites readers to join him on tours.

So what is this growing segment of the market?

A soft adventure is a vacation in the great outdoors that highlights nature over creature comforts or rural villages over famous cities.

It’s a trip made with a small group -- usually no more than 12 or so people -- that usually substitutes camping for hotels and uses small vans instead of buses for transport.

In some instances, it involves hiking or bicycling from place to place; in others, the “adventure” consists of visiting exotic islands and other destinations that don’t usually receive tourism or going on trips that place you in the native lodges of people in underdeveloped countries.

Why a soft adventure? Because the trip involves challenges but little risk of danger or physical hardship. On a soft adventure, you do not go mountain climbing, hang gliding or whitewater rafting. Though in some instances you travel over difficult terrain, you need not be an athlete, and people well into their 60s and early 70s can keep up. At worst, you need only make a mental adjustment to this new form of vacationing.

Who does it?

Two main sources of affordable, organized soft adventures are the new adult division of a longtime U.S. student tour operator and a growing Canadian firm marketing its exotic trips to Americans.

Footloose Tours, (800) 221-0596, www.footloose.com, is primarily for people 25 to 55.

It mainly consists of “cooperative camping” tours: You travel in a 12-passenger van with a professional driver and tents and other camping equipment supplied by the tour operator, supplemented by your own sleeping bag.

Participants share the job of pitching tents and cooking meals (purchased from a $7-a-day-per-person “food kitty”). Tours, which hit the most famous outdoor sights and national parks of America, last 10 days, two weeks or three weeks and cost $80 to $110 per person per day. (Figure $100 for most.) There is never a single supplement.

In recent years, the basic Footloose program of cooperative camping has been supplemented by some that feature long walks and hikes through wilderness areas and others that substitute simple lodges, cabins or motels for campsites. Except in costly Alaska and the Canadian Rockies, the Footloose program is only marginally more expensive than the basic program of cooperative camping.

Footloose is operated by the giant TrekAmerica, which has long operated cooperative-camping tours for travelers 18 to 38. Footloose brings this product to older Americans.

GAP Adventures, (800) 465-5600, www.gapadventures.com, is a growing 12-year-old Canadian operator of soft adventures devoted almost exclusively to Central and South America. Its prices range from about $90 a day for six-day tours to pricier and longer adventures of 10 days or more.

The aim is to show you the reality of Latin America, warts and all.

“It would be easy to shield you from the sometimes less-than-pretty parts, but we believe that would be a true injustice to the people of Latin America. It is their land and homes that we come to visit,” a GAP representative said.