Southern Exposure

January 16, 2000
By JOHN STUCKE of the Missoulian

Montana man's business offers South American tours

Brian Morgan has a twist to Montana tourism. From his home office perched in the Rattlesnake Mountains, he uses the Internet to lure travelers to his tours - treks that capture regional culture and offer stunning scenery. His customers, adventuresome sorts, pay to have guides usher them from place to place while offering tidbits of local color and history. The guides also serve as interpreters.

You see, Morgan doesn't bring people to the remote reaches or must-see vistas of Montana. Rather, he takes them to South America.

At 26 years old, the Havre native is plying his training with his wanderlust. After earning a masters in economics from the University of Montana and spending a year in Russia, Morgan moved to Ecuador. He soon landed some consulting work with CARE, writing a proposal to fund an effort to curb forest clearing along the Pacific coast while offering economic incentives to the people living there.

During his time in Ecuador, however, he became homesick, reading Montana-based novels. It was a time he thought about leveraging his business skills with his desire to travel. So he returned home to Montana and started Adventure Life. After choosing Havre as the base, he designed an amateurish brochure he hoped travel agents would dispense to customers. They didn't, his business struggled to become recognized and his business flopped.

"Here I am, a young kid with a scheme to bring people to Ecuador," he remembered during a recent interview. "No one called. I was just another flier."

Then he took a job in Missoula that lasted a few months and decided to try again. This time he arranged a $10,000 line of credit from his local bank in Havre and tapped it to buy a laptop computer and design a Web page at www.adventure-life.com. He learned more about the eco-tourism business, found a successful company offering some of the same types of tours he wanted to offer, and redesigned his brochure and sales pitch. Then he spent some money on Internet advertising. Soon after, he landed his first four bookings and the company has been busy since.

To make it work, Morgan's company takes groups of up to 12 people on intimate tours of the coasts, mountains and jungles of Ecuador and Peru. Once, he had a guide take one man: "We'll never cancel a trip. I'll take a single and that's the way it is." Morgan uses a network of handpicked guides from the villages and tries to give his customers a trip immersed in the culture.

To gain customers, he advertises heavily on the Internet, where anybody in the world with a computer and a modem can learn about his company and take steps to book a trip. That's how Gracia Schall learned about Adventure Life, and she's from Missoula.

"A friend of mine found him on the Internet. We had no idea he was from Montana, but it has made it a fun connection," said Schall, who works as a private practice counselor. She took a Peru trip with Adventure Life, and found the fledgling company to be a professional outfit that offered a trip with an environmental perspective and extra attention paid to the details of regional culture.

Instead of joining a throng of Americans being bused from one tourist hot spot to the next before retiring for evenings at Western hotels, Schall described her tour as a busy schedule, but one with time for exploration and discovery away from the group. Buying foods at a farmers market, watching the local weavers, or wandering in the towns or countryside, Schall said the tour often avoided the kinds of places foreign tourists congregate. Having a smaller group headed by local guides also gave Schall's tour a few unforeseen benefits. During her Peru trip, train workers went on strike the day her group was supposed to travel to Machu Picchu, an ancient Incan city high in the Andes. Instead of a lost day, Schall recalled, Morgan quickly arranged another ride. Because the group was small, Morgan was able to work with the local people to figure out the best alternative. The trip worked and the group returned with a good story, she said.

"Sometimes things don't go as planned."

Morgan said he hopes the people taking his tours return with more than pictures and memories. His travel brochures are filled with pictures of locals in their colorful dress going about their everyday lives - ones far different than those in the United States.

"I have tours that just do the natural wonders, but the tours I really love are the ones where you encourage an understanding of the people."

Already, he said his company is an economic contributor in Ecuador. One where his travelers spend their money purchasing goods and services from the local people, not American companies doing business in the country. With Adventure Life, groups don't stay in five-star hotels and eat American food. They stay in Peruvian hotels run by the locals. Secondly, he wants to build Adventure Life into an educational venue for students interested in a language immersion program. Lastly, the company can be one that helps the cause of conservation.

One segment of the tours are trips into the jungle, areas that are being cut and burned to make room for agriculture while destroying one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet. But travelers shouldn't expect to be preached at. Morgan said his guides are locals who live with the complexities of a country's appetite for development while concerns about culture and the environment abound.

He hopes the company can find a niche that isn't filled by glitzy tours or other trekking companies that offer American perspectives and guides while touring foreign countries.

"I really think there's a vacuum in the U.S. market for what my company is going to offer," he said.

Also, the company is good for Montana, Morgan added. A travel agency in Kalispell books competitive flights to South America, and Morgan said he plans to purchase as much business equipment and services as he needs in Montana. As he puts it: "I'm a business that wasn't here two years ago, with customers from around the world spending money (in South American countries) and Montana."