By Kimberly L. Jackson

Beyond vacation memories and souvenirs, an increasing number of international travelers want to bring home new skills and experiences from their journeys abroad.
For some, it’s learning the cooking techniques that can give a simple harvest vegetable stew the unforgettable flavor of Italy. Others might go beyond shopping for local crafts to see how resourceful African artisans grind up cast-off glass bottles and jars to melt in hand-hewn kilns, transforming recycled glass into irresistibly colorful beads.
“We’re seeing an increase in people who want to do more experiential-type things when they go on vacation,” says Jody Smith, the Ramsey-based spokeswoman for Liberty Travel’s 163 agencies. They still want to see the landmarks, Smith says, but they also want to move beyond sightseeing. Liberty Travel’s customers are sprinkling their trips with winery tours, safari adventures and other pursuits, she said. “We recently had clients working with elephants on a preserve in Thailand.”
Beyond the tours agencies arrange, niche guides continue to spring up, offering intensely focused itineraries, often organized around a particular interest or hobby. Whether they are seasoned travelers or those whose business needs take them abroad regularly, these independent operators focus on what they know best about a particular part of the world.
For both Marlene Iaciofano of Morristown and Lisa Shepard-Stewart of Rahway, the desire to lead small groups on tours abroad was an outgrowth of individual interests. For Iaciofano, it was Italian food and cooking. For Shepard-Stewart, it was African textiles, cast-bronze pieces and glass beads.
“Approaching a personal passion or hobby in a new setting can help you to uncover ideas that you might never tap into in your familiar surroundings,” says Shepard-Stewart, whose company Cultured Expressions has led quilting and craft-related tours to Jamaica and Ghana. “You soak in the energy of the place and come back with fresh perspectives for your craft and often for your life in general.”

A 1998 vacation to Italy was life-changing for Iaciofano, a travel agent who had vowed to take herself to cooking school in Italy as a 50th birthday present. While there, she had an epiphany: others might also enjoy learning about regional Italian cuisines at the source.
“I came home and I started calling some of my competitors just to see what they had to say. I was testing the waters,” she said. While competitors, of course, would not be encouraging, Iaciofano decided to jump right in. “If I had learned about it first, I probably never would have done it,” she said. ”Being naive about everything, I just kept going forward.”
In the years since, she has led food-centered tours to New York, including the Italian Culinary Institute and the Culinary Institute of America. Her company, Gourmet Getaways, has taken seven group trips to Italy. In addition to classes such as those at Mamma Agata Cooking School in Ravello, Iaciofano has arranged winery tours and wine tastings. Her groups also have visited cheese makers Sorrento and watched fresh oil flow from pressed olives in Norcia. Each tour has focused on a specific region, and Iaciofano is now planning a fall 2012 trip to Tuscany. Trip updates and a travel blog she has been writing since 2009 can be seen at gourmetgetaways.biz.
Exploring African artistry
Both Iaciofano and Shepard-Stewart, have had clients who were making first visits to their destination, and so they also build in time to see points of general interest. While Iaciofano has limited her groups to a dozen, Shepard-Stewart has taken as many as 25 to Ghana.
A fiber artist and the author of three books on crafting with African fabrics and other textiles, Shepard-Stewart, the Star-Ledger’s former crafts columnist, first traveled to Ghana in 2001 with the fair-trade web retailer Novica.com, a National Geographic affiliate. “My role on the trip was to interview Ghanaian artists and place stories about them and the Novica mission in U.S. media upon my return.”
While there, she also connected with Ghanaian artisans with whom she would later form buying partnerships for the fabrics and beads she sells at culturedexpressions.com. Shepard-Stewart had previously organized quilting retreats to a holistic spa in Jamaica, and her customers were also asking her for a trip to Ghana.
“I didn’t want to just go to sightsee, I wanted to give them an up-close look at the materials I work with,” she said. She did the first of two Ghana tours in 2010 and is planning the third for 2013. Visitors are not only taken to bead and fabric markets, they also attend artisan workshops where they make their own beads and fabric to take home.
“The trips were designed to uncover the traditional crafts of Ghana, interpreted through today’s artists,” she says. “Aside from the technical experience of how kente is woven or how glass beads are made, participants also get a feel for how people live in Ghana, and how much ancient tradition still impacts daily life.”