30 Years of Adventure Travel: How a 50p Gamble Became the UK’s Longest-Running Adventure Magazine

Adventure Travel is 30 years old. To mark the occasion, we sat down with founder Alun Davies to hear how the magazine began with an empty wallet and a stubborn refusal to work for anyone else, and why, three decades on, the whole point of it hasn’t changed one bit.

The 50p origin story

“We were at the local fair, and my daughter, Meg, wanted to go on a ride. I remember thinking, ‘well, there goes our last 50 pence. If that magazine doesn’t produce money on Friday, we’re going around to our neighbours and we’ll be begging bowls of food.'”

That was the reality facing Alun Davies as the first issue of Adventure Travel rolled off the press at the end of 1995. No experience in publishing. No contacts in the outdoors industry. No safety net. Just a conviction that he wanted a job that would pay him to travel the world and climb mountains, and since nobody was offering one, he’d have to create it himself.

“I’d had enough of working for other people,” he says. “I hung around the employment halls for months, but nobody came in with an offer. So, I decided to start my own magazine, and then I could legitimately travel the world to fill in the blank pages.”

It sounds mad. But here we are, 30 years later. Adventure Travel remains one of the longest-running independently published magazines in the UK. It’s still put together within 12 miles of where it all began. And Alun got his dream.

Skin of the teeth

The early days were exactly as chaotic as you’d expect from a one-man operation funded by sheer determination. Alun was the ad sales team, the editorial director, and the lead writer, often simultaneously.

“I’d sell all the advertising for an issue in about 10 days. I would bugger off somewhere for two or three weeks, sometimes taking the family, and then I’d come back, write the features and get a couple of features off the few tour companies that were around at the time. Then Geoffrey Negus, who worked at the Birmingham Post, would subedit, and Becky Huxtable would do all the typesetting. That was the team. Real skin of the teeth stuff. You do it or you don’t eat.”

The team is slightly bigger now, but only by a handful. What’s changed dramatically is everything around it.

How travel, and travel publishing, changed

There were no digital cameras when Issue 1 hit the shops. No email. The internet was barely a thing. If you spent a month shooting in the Himalayas, you wouldn’t know if your images were any good until you got home and developed the film.

“Without the internet, if you wanted to find somebody who had climbed Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, how the hell would you find them?” Alun says. “Now I can just go and tap on the keyboard, and there’s a hundred people who could write a feature on it. In fact, you don’t even have to go there anymore, you can see all the pictures, you can read everything about it. The internet has taken away a lot of the magic of seeing something for the first time.”

That’s the trade-off. The growth of low-cost airlines, the explosion of adventure tour operators, and the sheer volume of information available online has made the outdoors more accessible than ever — and that’s a good thing. More people in more places having more adventures. But the sense of discovery, of not knowing what’s around the next corner, is harder to come by.

Kit has changed too. Everything’s lighter, generally kinder to the environment, though not always more robust. We’ve lost some quality British brands and local manufacturing along the way, even if there are signs of a revival. And the tech at our disposal, GPS, phone cameras that rival dedicated gear from 15 years ago, has made us more equipped, if not any smarter.

The Adventure Bike Rider years

Alun’s involvement with Adventure Travel took a backseat in 2010 when he launched Adventure Bike Rider to pursue his other great passion: falling off motorcycles. ABR grew into the UK’s largest motorcycle festival, the ABR Festival, which has become a fantastic weekend for anyone interested in the outdoors and camping, not just bikers.

But the itch to come back to Adventure Travel never went away.

“I’m 66 now, and I was reading last week about a Spanish guy who climbs 8,000-metre peaks at the age of 86. That was the most inspirational thing I’ve read for a long time, and I’ve kept it on my desk. If he can do it, I’ve still got a lot left in me.”

Going back to the future

For a few years the magazine went by Wired For Adventure (a good chapter, but one that’s now closing). The return to the Adventure Travel name isn’t nostalgia. It’s a recognition that the original name says exactly what the magazine is about, and always has been.

“There are strange things going on in the world right now, and I think encouraging people to get outdoors more rather than sit down in front of Facebook or YouTube is life enhancing in so many ways. And that’s what Adventure Travel is about — the community.”

That word, community, is what’s kept the magazine going more than anything else. The words between the covers are only part of it. Reader trips to Kilimanjaro, via ferrata expeditions in the Dolomites crammed into the back of Alun’s van, and now plans for an outdoor adventure festival with the Adventure Travel Basecamp at this year’s ABR Festival: it’s the readers who take the inspiration and actually get out there that make the whole thing worthwhile.

So, welcome back to AT. Thirty years in, and the point hasn’t changed: get outside, have fun, and don’t wait for someone to give you permission.

Alun’s Top Adventure Travel Experiences… So Far

• Getting heat stroke while walking across the interior of Iceland.
• Wiping out on the World Championship Downhill Mountain Biking Course in Switzerland. Multiple times.
• Being invited by the American national bobsleigh team to ride as their number three down an Olympic course.
• Climbing alongside mountaineering royalty: Doug Scott and Sir Chris Bonington.
• Having a smoke with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• Being recognised by Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones in a Dublin bar. (Ronnie and Alun were next-door neighbours for a time in Ireland.)
• Walking across the whole of Tunisia over uncleared landmine fields, being threatened by an Algerian drug smuggler, and finding unexcavated Roman ruins along the way.
• Hiking in Yosemite and seeing the splendour of El Capitan.
• Meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace at a reception for adventurers and explorers — alongside David Attenborough and Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space.
• Being made a ‘Freeman of Trentino’ for bringing the region’s via ferrata routes into the spotlight.
• Abseiling into one of the largest caves in the world (roughly the size of Wembley Stadium) in Oman as part of a first descent.

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