By Larissa Clark, Founder of Another World Adventures

Today an email arrived in my inbox that made me stop, breathe, and smile. It was a newsletter from Sunniva Sorby — fellow Explorers Club member, polar guide, historian, and expedition leader whose words carry the kind of clarity that decades in wild places brings.

She began with a line that has been turning over in my head ever since:

“Exploration doesn’t just take us outward. It calls us inward — to who we are, and what we care about.”

It struck me because this, to me, is the very heart of transformational travel — the soul of why Another World Adventures exists.

The Bark Europa and My Own Beginning

Many years ago, long before Another World Adventures had even taken shape, I stepped aboard the tall ship Bark Europa. I thought I was signing up for a sailing trip. What I found instead was a journey that reshaped me entirely.

The Europa was more than a ship. It was a floating world where strangers became family, where night watches under endless stars stripped away the ordinary and revealed the essential. I remember standing on deck in the Roaring Forties, sails straining, the Southern Ocean heaving, and feeling smaller than I ever had before — and yet, more alive, more connected.

That voyage cracked something open in me. It made me realise that travel isn’t about collecting stamps in a passport. It’s about what Sunniva describes so beautifully: not an escape, but a homecoming.

She writes:

“After more than thirty years exploring both poles — as a guide, historian & expedition leader — I’ve realized that I don’t travel to escape. I travel to come home.”

That line could have been written about my own Bark Europa experience. I came home changed, with a deep conviction that others deserved the chance to step into experiences like this — to be challenged, humbled, awed, and ultimately transformed. And so Another World Adventures was born.

Why We Travel

Sunniva reminds us:

“I travel because movement invites reflection. Because awe — that rare, humbling sensation of standing before something vast — rearranges the furniture of the heart. I travel because curiosity keeps me alive.”

I couldn’t agree more. In my work curating journeys for thousands of people since that first tall ship voyage, I’ve seen this transformation play out time and again whether it’s a teacher returning from an Arctic sailing voyage not only with photographs, but with a conviction to change the way she teaches climate science to her students. Or a father and daughter who sailed across the Atlantic together, finding not just an ocean crossing but a deeper relationship forged in shared challenge.

These are not “holidays.” They are turning points.

The Courage to be Changed

One of the most moving passages in Sunniva’s newsletter reflects on the documentary The Longest Goodbye, where astronaut Cady Coleman speaks about returning from space.

“She’s been to the International Space Station, floating above the only home any of us have ever known — and yet the hardest vector isn’t up; it’s back.”

How many of us have felt that?

The challenge of coming home after a transformative journey — of reconciling the extraordinary with the ordinary. Sunniva calls it the tender handover from acute purpose to everyday life.

I also know that liminal edge well. After Bark Europa, I struggled to explain to friends what had shifted in me. Words failed. The only way I could honour it was to help others find their own version of that shift.

Transformational travel asks something brave of us: to surrender, to be vulnerable, to let go of control. As Sunniva says:

“Travel changes us not by what we see, but by how deeply we are willing to feel.”

Travel as Belonging

Travel today often gets packaged as escape, as luxury, as ticking off lists. But at its best, it’s about belonging. Sunniva captures it:

“When we strip away comfort and routine, we remember our dependence on one another. We see how every human story — from Inuit elders in Cambridge Bay to astronauts orbiting Earth — is part of one shared narrative: the survival and flourishing of our planet.”

I’ve witnessed that belonging on expeditions large and small. On sailing voyages where crew from a dozen countries pull ropes side by side. On wilderness treks where laughter bridges language barriers. Even close to home, where walking a familiar coastline with new eyes suddenly connects us to place in a deeper way.

As Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Everyday Transformations

Not every journey requires the poles or the open ocean.

Sunniva writes from Vancouver Island about walking the forest trails and hearing the eagles call overhead. Having lived on Vancouver Island in recent years I know the majesty of the place well. And over the past 18 months, I’ve found my own versions of this while living aboard my family’s sailboat, watching my children learn geography by exploring a sandbar or studying tides by feeling them lift our anchor chain.

Transformation is not about distance. It’s about presence.

Join the Journey

On October 24th at 1400 EST, Sunniva Sorby will be live on YouTube with former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman for a conversation called Pioneers of the Possible. They’ll be speaking about courage, curiosity, and what unites us across space and polar ice. It promises to be a conversation that expands not just horizons, but hearts. Join them here.

And if reading this has stirred something in you — a longing, a question, a spark — then perhaps it’s time to answer your own call to adventure.

At Another World Adventures, we can’t send you to the moon (yet), but we can certainly blow you away right here on Earth.

Because exploration doesn’t just take us outward. It calls us inward. And when we answer, the world — and our place in it — is never the same again.