What is alternative travel?

Travel itself offers an alternative from stay-at-home stuckness. A way out of habit, routine, and sameness. But there are different ways to go.

Going the mainstream routes, and ending up with hordes of other tourists in hotels and restaurants and shops that give you an ambience you are familiar with in the country you came from--that's not much of an alternative. There is a global "culture" which is really no culture at all, spreading everywhere and taking up the space of older local cultures.

The kind of travel covered here offers a different way to go and a different way to be when we get there: different than the mainstream North American and European style. Even if it's just walking out the back door into the forest; even if it's connecting with trees and water halfway around the world.