The road
less travelled

Warren Burton has spent the last 24 years out of New Zealand travelling and guiding people to some of the remotest countries on earth. Here he talks to our London correspondent, fellow alumnus Peter Coleman, about a planned two-year adventure that has never really ended.

There is a breed of traveller who travels with guidebook in hand, accommodation booked, and timetable tight, finickily ticking off the must-sees. This kind of micro-managed, risk-free experience is not for the Warren Burtons of this world.

Not that Warren Burton courts risk, but he expects to meet-Êand overcome-Êoccasional glitches and discomforts. Travel, after all, derives from the word travail. That way you end up with a superior kind of adventure - and certainly a better class of anecdote.

Burton went through Massey University between 1972 and 1975 doing the industry-sponsored Diploma in Dairy Technology. The dairy industry would be where he would make his career (so he thought), but first there had to be the New Zealander's rite of passage: 'the big OE'. Two years would do it, he thought. At which point he should, according to convention, have winged his way to Heathrow.

But he yearned to see India, Pakistan, Afghanistan... Places that had seemed impossibly exotic during the years he spent growing up on a Thames Valley dairy farm. So when he eventually did reach England it was after travelling through Asia at a time when few attempted such a trip and tourism was still virtually unheard of in many of the countries he set foot in.

There was time spent on a kibbutz in Israel (it was meant to last six weeks-he stayed five months). He never really got paid as such, but the more time he worked, the more time he got off, which meant he could hitch around Cyprus, Greece and Italy. Friends he had met convinced him to go to Switzerland, where he experienced central European farming life - with the livestock tucked up neatly indoors below where he slept. He travelled through the US, hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco, and from Miami to Alaska, with his only navigational aid a cheap road map he had picked up somewhere on the way.

Road rules Warren's rules for a successful trip: Go where your first hunch takes you. Go with a bit of foresight - but not too much. If you can afford the time, money is no barrier. Don't plan it too much. Everyday you can change your plan. "As far as I'm concerned that is the way to travel. If you've got it all mapped out in front of you, you are probably going to miss half of what's there."

"The more I wandered, the more I wanted to. After two years I had realised that in two years you can barely scratch the surface. I desperately wanted to keep travelling and see Africa, South America and return to Asia."

Working for a company called Viking - which operated a Contiki-style coach service -ÊBurton spent time guiding and bus driving. Thus armed, he walked into the Encounter company office and confidently told them he wanted to go to Africa.

He would spend the next six years as a driver/expedition leader, taking groups of around 20 in converted ex-army trucks through Africa, Asia and, near the end of this period, South America.

He entered Rhodesia just as it became Zimbabwe. He led one of the first overland groups into Uganda after the end of the era of Idi Amin's atrocities. He saw mountain gorillas, and helped set up the support project around them.

"Africa captivated me. It was a massive continent and everything I saw was new... Everywhere we would go kids would scream with excitement. As long as I live I'll never forget the beaming smile of those Africans.

  "You can come face to face with a bull elephant about to charge, and of course that is exciting and there is adrenaline, but it can't be compared to the friendship of those people."

He took an expedition right around Africa through central Sahara, across the Congo into east Africa, attempting to go through war-torn Ethiopia during a lull in the conflict, but ending up having to go directly up through the Sudan instead. It was an overland journey never considered before.

They had to rely on their own resources, even taking their own fuel. There was very little infrastructure, no communication and poor roads. They used what tracks they could find and literally drove along railway lines as they found their way through.

"We linked up with another company's truck and began working together. They were our competitors but we decided we were stronger doing it together than apart."

In 1986 Burton came off the road to become Encounter's operations manager and trouble shooter: "I'd got a huge amount out of the travel I had done as a group leader. Now I wanted to give others the opportunity I first had travelling overland."

In 1995 the company changed ownership and he along with eight other company insiders decided to become part owners. He got into product marketing, developing brochures, and became a driving force in the development of new products. Challenging enough, you would have thought, but for Burton it was getting perilously close to the same old, same old.

So earlier this year Burton became European General Manager of a new company called Docleaf, dedicated to providing crisis management to the travel industry. While airlines and industries like oil and manufacturing have had crisis management services offered to them for a while, this is a first for the travel industry.

"It is a challenge to get people to accept and prepare for something they ultimately hope won't ever happen. But it is like when I was preparing roadcrews with Encounter. I would tell them that sooner or later they would probably get something wrong. It is then you are judged - at how good you are at.

Looking for a ticket to ride? If you're at a loose end, have people skills and a sense of adventure, then maybe, just maybe, you should consider becoming an expedition leader. The travel industry is having trouble finding good people, says Warren Burton. While companies like Encounter once looked no further than Britain to recruit leaders, they are now casting the net wider. The biggest credential is people skills: "They can teach you to drive, and teach you about mechanics, but they can't teach you people skills," says Burton. And don't be deterred by the difficulty of getting a British work permit. Because so much of an expedition leader's time is spent overseas in the field, you are unlikely to need one. "I'd say to people out there aged roughly between 24 and 38 who are prepared to commit three years, that it would be the time of their life," says Burton. "If you've driven a tractor across a Hawke's Bay farm, imagine it's a truck across the Sahara Desert."