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Heather O'Neal says the size of her firm gives her an advantage. "It's like traveling with someone who can show you around."Local spotlight
Fascination with Nepal spawns tour business
One-person company specializes in taking clients on customized trips to foreign lands.
O'Neal's garage is now a boutique, Himalayan Bazaar Imports, where she sells jewelry and other items from Nepal.
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Heather O'Neal spent her junior year in college as an exchange student in Nepal and fell in love with the Asian nation. Love morphed into an obsession.
And that obsession evolved into Of Global Interest Adventure Travel, a one-person company that specializes in taking people on customized tours of enchanting foreign lands, particularly Nepal.
At least twice a year, O'Neal, 39, takes small groups, usually consisting of no more than six tourists, on Nepal excursions. The trips average between two and three weeks.
Many of her customers take treks through the wilderness and parts of the mountains, interact with locals and get a firsthand view of their customs and culture.
But mostly the customers make the trip whatever they want it to be, O'Neal said, adding that the size of her Ann Arbor-based company gives her an advantage over large tour companies.
"It's like traveling with someone who can show you around," she said. Customers are encouraged to indulge their interests.
"If they're interested in painting or dance or music or if they want to take special classes they can do that."
Customers range in age from 24 to 66, but mostly, she said, they are middle-age women in their 50's like Robin Pothoff.
"She makes the trip special to you," said Pothoff, a nurse anesthetist in Ann Arbor, who celebrated her 55th birthday four years ago by taking a trip with O'Neal.
"She asked me exactly what I wanted to do. Being a medical person, I said I wanted to spend one afternoon volunteering at a Mother Teresa clinic in Katmandu. On one trip, she took someone to an organic farm."
Nick Miller, spokesman for the Ann Arbor Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said Of Global Interest Adventure Travel's uniqueness helps burnish the city's reputation as a place with an eclectic offering of businesses.
"Ann Arbor prides itself on diversity," he said. "Diversity in restaurants and diversity in opportunity. Whether it is businesses like hers or sporting or trekking businesses. It's just one of the vast array of things that we do offer."
Although O'Neal's love for Nepal never abated after her year as a foreign exchange student there, she came into this business through a circuitous route.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a double major in English and South Asian studies, she signed up for the Peace Corps, hoping to get posted to Nepal but ended up in Hungary instead.
She returned to the States after her Peace Corps duties, lived in Texas for about two years, taught school and then ended up in Spain, where a friend encouraged her to quit her job and go to Nepal.
"I was there two months and I said, 'Life is too short, I have to make a living at this,'" She recalled.
And so five years ago, Of Global Interest Adventure Travel was born.
O'Neal said that as a highly specialized niche business, revenues are seldom bountiful. She said she's not in it for the money, but sees the venture as an opportunity to visit Nepal often.
To supplement her income, she runs a two-room bed and breakfast, Eighth Street Trekker's Lodge Bed and Breakfast, in downtown Ann Arbor.
In addition, she paints, does talks at schools and local civic groups about Nepal, organizes treks in the Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor area for nominal fees and works occasional odd jobs.
She has converted her garage into a boutique, Himalayan Bazaar Imports, where she sells jewelry and other trinkets from Nepal.
"She's a woman who keeps reinventing herself," said Pothoff, who plans to take another trip to Nepal next year to celebrate her 60th birthday.
O'Neal, who has also done tours of Spain and Hungary, sees herself as a woman on a mission to educate people about other cultures and promote harmony. She believes this is particularly important in the post-September 11 era.
"Nepal has given me so much," she said. "It's taught me the richness of life. It's shown me that there are different ways to live. I am learning people are the same everywhere.
"I want to take people around the world and bring the world here.
"In this world post-9/11 we tend to be afraid of people different from us. We can focus on similarities instead of differences."
Lekan Oguntoyinbo is a Metro Detroit freelance writer.
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