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 Kathryn Levenson during a recent tour of Pakistan. |
Imagine spending the day in Peshawar, Pakistan, taking a group on a drive past Afghan refugee camps, visiting the university where Pathan chieftains educate their sons, and stopping in at the city museum before returning to your hotel. Keeping in mind that this is merely day four of the 15-day "Cross-Cultural Women's Tour of Pakistan" you are leading, imagine that you are also caring for your four-month-old son, Max. Now you have an idea of the life of Kathryn (Nickel) Levenson, A.M. '80, owner of Top Guides Treks and Tours, a company specializing in small-group tours to exotic locales.
Levenson became a world traveler in college, where she focused on cultural anthropology and archaeology. "Every summer I worked on some type of dig and found a way to do a little travel on either end," she says. "As a result, I knew many languages and had a good feel for geography." After working for several firms, including the largest adventure travel company in the United States, she started her own business in 1993.
Top Guides sends clients on vacations as diverse as birding in Panama, trekking in Vietnam's rain forests, and hiking in the Tatras Mountains of Poland. Levenson herself leads several trips each year. The company tries to give customers "something beyond what they think they'll get after they read the itinerary," she says. One of her goals in Pakistan, she explains, was "to facilitate contacts with Islamic families, where children, especially boys, are highly valued." Taking Max, she knew, would help make connections with many Pakistanis who might otherwise dismiss her group simply as foreign tourists. Besides, she admits, "I couldn't bear to leave the little guy behind."
A firm believer in ethical tourism, Levenson gave a seminar on modernization versus preservation at the Pacific Asian Tourism Association's Adventure Travel and Ecotourism Conference in Malaysia last January, where the 400 participants from 30 countries discussed how to run responsible tour programs. She passes such information on to her clients. In Pakistan, her party made donations to Bedari, a women's resource center whose name means "awakening" in Urdu, and Top Guides matched them, in keeping with its policy of donating at least one percent of its revenue to nonprofit groups. Another client who visited Vietnam's rain forests returned there to teach local researchers scientific English. Being around "people who love adventure and education" is a definite perk of her job, Levenson says. "I like to promote the idea of traveling in a responsible way, to learn about people in other cultures and not just sit on their beach."
~ Brooke Donovan