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SOLENT SME GROWTH


TM No. 46 – Naturetrek The road not (often) taken


The road was long. And very, very dangerous. Working in Peru in the late 90s, Andy Tucker travelled one of country’s deadliest routes. Today, as general manager of highly successful Hampshire wildlife travel company Naturetrek, he’d probably do things differently - but back then it was all about the adventure, as he told Alison Tilley


“I’d heard of the dangerous road connecting Cusco to Puerto Maldonado – and decided to try it out, riding on the back of a lorry,” says Tucker.


“At a small town square outside Cusco, I got on the back of a truck loaded with apples and sugar for a 40 hour ride over the Andes. I was totally unprepared. I didn’t have the right clothing. I was freezing to death – and hungry. I’d anticipated stopping at roadside shacks for food, but they never stopped.”


Ravenous, he ate an apple from the cargo as the truck lurched perilously on. “Rain falls with such intensity that parts of the road wash away and makeshift bridges are constructed – just two logs to bridge this chasm with a raging torrent of a river thousands of feet below; the lorry carefully inching its way forward. It was crazy – but I was the toast of the town when I arrived at the lodge with all my stories.”


His glory didn’t last long. He’d contracted cholera from eating that apple and was bedridden for two weeks, on industrial strength antibacterial medicine.


“Looking back I don’t regret doing it; I just wouldn’t repeat it” says Tucker, sagely.


Working in Peru and learning fluent Spanish opened up tour guiding from Spain to Latin America, and back in Britain in 1996 he found a job with Naturetrek, founded by David and Maryanne Mills in 1986.


“David trained as a lawyer, then went trekking around Nepal and the Indian subcontinent for two years, sometimes as a guide and eventually as a tour leader,” explains Tucker. “During treks he noticed people lagging behind, less interested in getting miles under their belt than photographing things and observing wildlife. He identified a niche that wasn’t really catered for and that led to the birth of Naturetrek.”


Three decades later, Naturetrek offers the wildlife enthusiast everything from a bat- watching evening for £35 to a three-week Antarctic cruise for £11,000. As a business, that same intrepid grit brought it through the 90s Gulf War (“The phone didn’t ring for six months”), 9/11, (“The phone didn’t ring for three weeks”) and the 2007-8 crash (“We plateaued until 2013”).


It survived the Icelandic ash cloud of 2009 and is now riding out Brexit and Trump, but its core clientele, willing to rough it


in temperatures of minus 15 for a snow leopard sighting, seems unshakeable.


“It takes a huge event to curb the spirit of our clients; most are in their 60s, retired or semi-retired; with a desire to travel. They’re a pretty hardy lot.”


In business terms Naturetrek has yomped steadily uphill since 2013 with growth of 6-10%, fuelled by the collective experience of 22 staff based at a converted barn in Chawton, Hampshire, and 120 tour leaders around the planet. Already arguably the world leader in stringently organised wildlife tourism with strong eco credentials, as Tucker sees it, the only way is up.


He necessarily travels less now, but still has personal ambitions; to take his wife and four children on an African safari. To see a snow leopard… or a yeti. Maybe to repeat that moment in a dugout canoe in Peru, chugging along the Amazon in the shadow of the Andes…


“We rounded a bend in the river and there was a jaguar on the river bank, merged into the pebbles and the sand; we motored up to it slowly and it just stared at us with its big green eyes, swished its tail and trotted back into the trees.”


20


businessmag.co.uk


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – SOLENT & SOUTH COAST – MARCH/APRIL 2017


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