"If experiential travel signifies engaging meaningfully with the people, history, environment and culture of a destination (like a local, not a tourist), then transformational travel is..."

"... supposedly the next step: Engage so meaningfully, the trip actually changes you. This can mean extreme adventure travel...  Or it can mean wellness-inflected, small-group trips aimed at building fellowship, as with a slew of female-focused companies... Black Tomato, a New York- and London-based agency, recently debuted a 'Get Lost' service, which drops travelers into remote destinations, requiring them to find their way out.... This past spring I swallowed my skepticism.... ... I was whisked from the Lisbon airport in a black sedan with tinted windows by the driver and a local guide. After dropping my bags at a hotel on Lisbon’s central Praça do Rossio, the guide, Edgar Miguel Rodrigues, took me on a walking food tour of central Lisbon. We tried ginjinha, a smooth, sour-cherry liqueur, ate bifana... Edgar dropped me off at the hotel at the point of bursting and informed me that my next guide would soon arrive for — I’m not kidding — an evening food tour, coinciding with the Feast of St. Anthony.... [T]he breakneck pace and constant chaperoning felt suffocating, and the only viable option seemed to be drinking heavily until I joined a cluster of middle-aged women dancing wildly to an onstage band playing pimba, an up-tempo style of Portuguese shlock-pop, in a packed Alfama square.... The next morning, moderately hung over, I was in the back of a car headed for... pastel-hued villas and palaces... [W]e found ourselves descending the spiral stone staircase of the initiation well at Quinta da Regaleira... 'This is the rebirth process,' said [the guide] Susana as we made our way through a tunnel... 'You are buried in the earth. You go through the dark, this tunnel, until you come out and are born again. The entrance of the cave is …' She trailed off. 'A vagina? I offered. 'Yes, like a vagina,' Susana said...."

From "Can a ‘Transformational Journey’ Change Your Life? Our Writer Had Her Doubts/Seeing the world “through new eyes” was the aim of a rigorously planned trip to Portugal, offered by a new breed of tour operator. It almost worked." (NYT). The photograph at the top at the link looks (unintentionally) like a skull. Oh! I see it's the thing that's supposed to be like a vagina.

I'm interested in that Black Tomato "Get Lost" idea. When I was a teenager, I used to drive my car until I got lost, then try to find my way back home. But that's not really possible anymore, not if you have a phone that sees where you are and gives you directions. Does Black Tomato take away your phone? This service you pay for is strangely like getting victimized by a crime. Some will rob you with a sixgun and some with a fountain of youth promo.