Founder of RealAdventures.com a Travel Enthusiast

By Junko Kaji, Boston Digital Industry
To get an idea of what Vik Kachoria is all about, just ask him what he's planning to do on his next vacation. "I'd love to go on a bike tour through Europe," says the 37-year-old CEO and founder of RealAdventures.com, a website hawking the joys of adventure travel to the online community. "Or maybe I'll go on a parasailing trip-those sound like a lot of fun. And I'd like to do some camping, too." Obviously, here's one CEO who has no trouble at all living up to his company's slogan: "Life's an adventure, live it!"

Kachoria has never been a stranger to the peripatetic life. "I was born in a rural village in remote India," he recalls, "where there was no electricity, no roads, no trees, and they still fetched water on camels." When he was three, however, his doctor father moved the family first to England, then to the United States, where they lived in such diverse locations as Augusta (Ga.), Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Rochester, N.Y. "My dad loved to travel, and he took a lot of professional opportunities in different cities," Kachoria explains. "That's probably part of where I got my own penchant for travel."

After getting a combined math and physics degree from BU in 1984, Kachoria decided to do a little roaming of his own before returning to the area to start a lucrative job with a large semiconductor company based in Massachusetts. However, the nine weeks he and a friend spent backpacking around Europe and northern Africa caused a complete change of life plan. "I left my friend in Egypt to come back for the job," says Kachoria, "but I only lasted two days. Nothing wrong with the job-I was just horrified at the thought of spending the next 60 years of my life in a cubicle." With no savings, Kachoria bought a plane ticket to Australia on his credit card, and left the country two weeks later.

That was the start of an eighteen-month odyssey through Australia, New Zealand, Southern Asia, and Europe, as Kachoria hitchhiked his way through the countryside doing odd jobs to earn spending money. He did everything from picking strawberries ("only for a day-it hurt my back too much"), laying dynamite lines, hunting kangaroos, and mining opals in New South Wales. All in all, Kachoria estimates that he covered about 30,000 kilometers in one and a half years.

"The hardest part about that kind of traveling," says Kachoria wryly, "is re-entry."

Prompted by a nagging sense of responsibility, Kachoria eventually returned to the States and started work as a computer consultant. But although he founded and sold two successful companies, earned an MBA from Boston University in 1996, and worked in the mergers and acquisitions field, Kachoria's thoughts kept returning to adventure travel. Finally, in 1998, Kachoria came up with the idea for RealAdventures.com, a Web-based business that would allow him to merge his love of rugged travel with his professional life.

RealAdventures.com currently sports over 4500 listings of everything from local weekend getaways to safaris and llama treks in Africa and the Middle East. "We are trying to consolidate the wide range of travel experiences that people are interested in into a single online travel community," says Kachoria, who designed the site himself. "A lot of travel sites are focused very narrowly on one thing-accomodations, for example, or skiing, or hiking. We plan to distinguish ourselves by offering a lot of things in one place, so a person doesn't have to scour the Web every time he or she wants to do something new."

Because Kachoria has been "really focused" on getting the company up and running in recent months, he hasn't had time to do very much of the kind of rugged travel that his site promotes. But for now, he's content with bringing that opportunity to others via the Web. "Adventure travel will challenge, inspire and motivate the explorer in everyone," says Kachoria. "Whether it is your first adventure trip or tenth, you'll take home a lifetime of memories."

Source: Boston Digital Industry
Web Site: http://www.DigitalIndustry.net

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