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The Age of Virture:
Ages 17-22
Singletrack and School Supplies
Benefit Biking in Cambodia
Can doing good be this much fun? Groups who've biked the flat, dusty roads of rural Cambodia have already funded two schools in Siem Reap Province. The annual PEPY Ride is the flagship effort of the organization Protect the Earth, Protect Yourself. Both of its three-week pedals ($1,000, plus a $2,000 fund-raising minimum, November to February; www.pepyride.org) launch from the Angkor Wat complex and proceed through numerous villages, with visits to schools and orphanages along the way. As a rider you'll deliver school supplies and teach classes on environmental awareness. "The average tourist spends two and a half days in Cambodia, sees Angkor Wat, and that's it," says coordinator Daniela Papi. "But we get to see Cambodia at the pace the locals move—the speed of two wheels." PEPY's funds even help provide bikes to Cambodian sixth graders who might otherwise drop out of schools that are too distant to walk to. PEPY Ride cyclists average 45 miles (72 kilometers) a day and rest in simple guest houses by night. The ride stops at the floating village of Kampong Chhnang and Oudong Mountain—dotted with stupas and temples—and tours the notorious killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh.
Rare Apes and Jungle Camps
Orangutan Rescue in Borneo
You can be depressed by the fact that orangutans have lost 80 percent of their worldwide habitat in the past 20 years, or you can do something about it. Biruté Galdikas, Ph.D., has been taking action for 36 years from her base in the peat swamp forests of Tanjung Puting National Park, in central Kalimantan—aka Indonesian Borneo. Rampant logging has endangered the great red apes, but three quarters of the remaining 50,000 to 60,000 can still be found in Borneo. Galdikas's Orangutan Foundation International (OFI) works to restore degraded forest, reintroduce orangutans to those areas, and help the "forest police" patrol protected parklands. Volunteers work in groups of 12 for six-week stints ($1,084; April 21 to June 2, June 16 to July 28, August 4 to September 22, and October 6 to November 17; www.orangutan.org), living in crude huts or sleeping in hammocks in the forest. Showers are a bucket of water over your head. Building riverside guard posts in the adjacent Lamandau Wildlife Reserve will be a major push for 2007. Volunteers can also spend time tracking apes with local assistants. You might not meet Galdikas, but you'll certainly meet some of her charges: orphaned orangutans in OFI's care center, being nurtured before they return to the wild. Thanks to OFI and its participants, there's still a wild to welcome them home.
Guidelines: "Some come for adventure, some to do good for the planet. Protecting orangutans combines both."—Biruté Galdikas, Orangutan Foundation International
Thrills and Outdoors Skills
Higher Learning in the Rockies
Every time group members from the National Outdoor Leadership School leave a campsite, they have one question in mind: Can you tell that we camped here? This speaks volumes about the high standards of the hands-on academy of all things outdoors ($9,950 for 87 days in spring; $9,175 for 68 days in summer; $10,100 for 94 days in fall; www.nols.edu). Spend a semester in Wyoming's Wind River Range and you get 16 hours of college credit while mastering route-finding, alpine mountaineering, rock climbing, winter camping, wilderness first aid, and river travel. Students (average age: 20) gain the skills to lead groups of fellow students on independent wilderness forays. And with the West as the schoolhouse, environmental science is anything but theoretical. "You're not sitting in a classroom learning about flora and fauna," says Dave Glenn, 41, NOLS Rocky Mountains director. "You're turning over rocks to see what bugs are underneath. Then you go out and catch fish. You learn about the stars, plants, how to track. You come out with an amazing appreciation for wild places." And the desire to preserve them.
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