Resource Inventory

With this abundance of outdoor opportunities, local people have developed outdoor skills and offer guiding services. Near the main pier 30 or so tour operators offered day trips and typical tourist excursions. Among them, a dozen people were selling adventure trips. Their display boards were home made with letters and photographs and among the activities offered were rock climbing, rappelling, spelunking and biking. A young girl who offered her services as a climbing guide: Tatiana Borovskaya, NII Project - Room 11, Tavricheskaya Street No. 1,Alushta, Crimea, Ukraine tel: 5-19-50 fax: 3-44-79

Adventure Tour operators do not exist and local guides all work independently.  A Germans operator had tried to put a biking outfit together and had failed because the traffic and road conditions just didn’t allow for biking. Inexplicably, they missed the many biking options away from traffic.The road into the Yaltenskia Yaila mountain range south of Yalta is steep and scenic, leading to mount Ai Petri via the Great Canyon and the Ochan-Su waterfall. The road from Alushta into the same mountain range leads through the Crimea State Reserve, the approximate equivalent to a National Park. The road ascends gently passed the reservoir up the mountain through cool beech forests and continues at a pace that makes it ideal for biking. The forest is almost completely void of undergrowth and equally ideal for camping. A bike trip along this route takes two days from Alushta to Yalta, with overnight camping. A one-day trip is offered, for which bikes and bikers are ferried to the top of the mountain for a hair-raising descent to Yalta.

View from Al Petri, Crimea

Development of Specialty Tourism that caters to the sophisticated small group traveler requires some basic hospitality facilities. The Olymp-Luzhniki, Perekopskaya Street 9, Alushta, Crimea, Tel/Fax: (06560) 3 44 33 or 3 44 25, appears to be the perfect place for small group travel and will hopefully encourage others to follow. This old Georgian three-story house was renovated in 1997 and the result was charming. The ground floor living room to the right had been made into a small restaurant, spilling over onto a large stone terrace with stone pillar railings. The interior was contemporary, a small bar, half a dozen black tables and chairs, and attractive lighting. The entrance lobby was the former hall with a staircase at the end, a new elevator to the left. The inn has ten rooms, ranging from standard to deluxe with kitchenette. All sleep two or three people and have private bathroom with shower. The rates were more than reasonable, 72-110 hrivnas per person in high season, 49-92 in low season.

The components are in place to start with the development of six ten-day trip offerings for September and October 1999 or April/May/June of 2000. Trip development would require that the logistics be worked out through actually doing the trip with one or several outfitters. Not only would this deal with the timing and pace of the trips, it would also address the mix and compatibility of activities and the adequacy of the equipment currently in use. It is highly likely that the existing equipment needs to be supplemented or replaced in order to satisfy the demands and safety concerns of the travelers. Consideration needs to be given to the ratio of guides to trip participants. The more complex the activity, such as climbing, the greater the ratio of guides. While the backpacker and young adventurer may come to an area with experience in one or more activities and may be less concerned with safety of equipment and experience of the guides, the average participant in Specialty Travel is new to the outdoor experience and is more inclined to go for the "soft-adventure" approach, which is more controlled.

Individual guides, trying to compete and maintain their autonomy are not likely to team their efforts to develop this more sophisticated approach to tourism. Currently, there is no operator in the Ukraine, who has packaged Specialty Tourism. Vladimir Korolev is the best contact to start working on the packaging of trips. Another concern that needs to be addressed before any offerings are made to the European and US markets, is the language problem. None of the guides speak English. Since guiding requires the issuing and explicit following of quick commands, English is essential as the most commonly understood language.