INTRODUCTION If you make Peru your destination in 2024, you can expect many things, starting with distinctly different landscapes, plants, foods and cultures. And possibly a caiman, or two, floating gently by.  This will be my eleventh escorted holiday with The Adventure Traveller. You can expect many first-time experiences. Like Amazonian microbats dozing on trees, and rustic town squares. Expect something special on the itinerary every day: traditional meals, national parks, monuments, heritage homes, parks and gardens. Or monkeys and hummingbirds competing for your attention.  Qua ..read more

Fifty five years ago, a gardener from Bowen made an important decision about his work/life balance. He developed a passion for begonias and so began a lifelong project – the continuous improvement of rhizomatous begonias. In the process he became one of the foremost breeders of our time. Bernard Yorke is a lawyer and cultivating begonias balanced his life. To this day, they bring him endless joy. As you might expect, from the outset the organised mind of a lawyer sought the definitive list of every Begonia species in cultivation in Australia. These would be the palette for his project. He aske ..read more

A horticultural & culinary adventure… If you enjoy discovering new and interesting plants in off-the-beaten-track places, then Timor-Leste and its slice of the rich flora of Malesiana is the destination for you. On this small group tour we will see landscapes that resemble those of Australia’s Top End – open, grassy, hilly and with semi-evergreen hardwood forest. Drier areas have scrub and vine thicket with similar plant genera to Australia, like peanut tree, candlenut, tamarind, sandalwood and gum. Some species are shared between these two countries, but many are not. This new country has ..read more

The annual Open Day resumes at Bellis in subtropical Brisbane this Mother’s Day Weekend, 13-14th May 2023. Over 500 different climate-appropriate plants grow at Bellis for food, medicine, pesticides, to support biodiversity, including climate change-ready ornamentals. A great opportunity to visit a working garden that works on multiple levels. On one level it was designed in 2003 to be an example – a model, affordable home and garden. A working 21st century cottage garden, diversely planted to be a pocket botanic garden. A home where living and gardening is affordable – sustainable water, ener ..read more

Expressions of interest are invited for this winter tour of Timor Leste. All enquiries, please contact Devin Hunt, E: devin@theadventuretraveller.com ..read more

How A Distinctive Taste of South America Can Be Grown Sustainably, Keeping its Growers Healthier and Better Off… On our tour of Ecuador, courtesy of The Adventure Traveller, we visited Carlos, a naranjilla farmer at Archidona in the foothills of the Andes. Naranjilla, Solanum quitoense, is a short-lived tropical perennial related to tomato. It is native from Costa Rica to Venezuela and Peru. It is particularly popular in Colombia and Ecuador, however the farmers who actually grow this fruit work hard, don’t earn enough – and their health is put at risk by the unnecessary and costly use of chem ..read more

This spring, I toured Norfolk Island, courtesy of The Adventure Traveller. This biodiverse island occupies 35 square kilometres and is situated 1,412 km due east of Evans Head (NSW, Australia). It is a heavily eroded former volcano, 2.3 to 3 million years old, surrounded by reefs, sitting atop the Norfolk Ridge which links New Caledonia and New Zealand. It is an isolated fragment of what was once the continent of Zealandia. The Norfolk Island fauna and flora have more in common with New Zealand than Australia. Just because this is a small, fairly well explored island doesn’t mean it lacks new ..read more

Gardeners are familiar with different plant phenotypes. For example, I grow White Icicle carrot which has a white root. It is a distinct and different cultivar of carrot. It was selected in a garden for horticulture because of its distinctive phenotype. Gardeners know tomatoes come in many sizes, forms and colours. Each is a distinctive expression of the phenotype even though they are the same plant species with the same genetic makeup. An ecotype is a naturally occurring variant in which the phenotypic differences are too few or too subtle to warrant the plant being classified as a subsp ..read more

“I live in Townsville and wanted to know how your trial of arrowroot vs comfrey went, so I can learn which produced the most biomass for soil improvement”, asks John. Reply: I found that Queensland arrowroot (Canna edulis) requires 1/5th of the water to produce twice the biomass of comfrey (Symphytum x uplandicum). At the outset, I already knew how incredibly productive and versatile arrowroot is. People who followed my garden’s development are familiar with my early reliance on arrowroot to mass produce leafy ‘cut and come again’ material for compost-making and mulching from 2003 to 2007. Dur ..read more

This tour offers two distinctly different adventures rolled into one. Both are biodiversity hot spots and both straddle the equator, yet the Islands of the Tortoises (Galápagos) are – geologically speaking – young and arid, whereas the Republic of the Equator (Ecuador) is mostly older and distinctly wetter with a great variety of climate zones from the frigid highlands of the Andes to the steamy, tropical Amazon rainforest. One thing they do share is constant re-landscaping by volcanic activity.  On the mainland, Reventador (“the exploder”) and Sangay volcanoes are currently erupting (as ..read more