Working tours

Crooked Trails allows visitors to live and work in local villages in Peru, Nepal and elsewhere
Heidi Dietrich

From the Puget Sound Business Journal
When Chris Mackay traveled through Thailand with a tour groupsix years ago, she drank tea and slept on bamboo floors at the homes of the hill tribal natives.

"I felt like I was in National Geographic," Mackay said. "I wanted other people to experience this."

Devoted to the idea of complete cultural immersion, Mackay and fellow female traveler and environmentalist Tammy Leland decided to found Seattle-based Crooked Trails. The ecotourism company takes travelers to live and volunteer in communities around the globe.
"The best thing is seeing the changes in people when they come back from our trips," Mackay said. "They say, 'You changed my life.' I say, 'No, you changed your life.'"

Crooked Trails trips, which also include more generic sightseeing, allow travelers to experience five-day home stays in villages. In Nepal, the group usually helps build a school. In Peru, villagers welcome the travelers into their homes and teach them how to cook Peruvian food. In exchange for the hospitality, the native people are paid for the visits. Crooked Trails never visits a community unless it is welcome.

The kind of responsible tourism that Leland and Mackay believe in continues in the sightseeing component of each trip. Crooked Trails hires local guides and asks clients to filter their own water so not to leave water-bottle waste behind.


Crooked Trails trips are part of rapidly growing tourism segment called community tourism or ecotourism. These tours often focus on the environment and emphasize doing no damage to the local culture.

Mainstream tourism companies are increasingly seeing ecotourism as a lucrative niche, said Jeremy Garrett, founder and principal of Waterbury, Vermont-based sustainable tourism consulting firm NaTour Communications.

"People want to do more than sit on the beach and drink mai tais," Garrett said. "They want to learn."

Megan Lane, who owns a business development company in Seattle, went on a 21-day Crooked Trails trip to Peru because she liked the way the group gave something back to the communities they visited.

"We weren't just showing up and taking pictures," Lane said. "We were there to work with them."

Leland and Mackay met while attending an environmental education graduate program at Western Washington University in Bellingham. After reading a book on the effect of tourism in the Himalayas, both women decided to travel to England together to take a class taught by the author. That course, which focused on the positive and negative effects of tourists on a local economy, laid the initial groundwork for Crooked Trails.

Upon finishing her degree at Western in 1995, Mackay decided to travel the world. She had become hooked on travel after seeing India at age 16 and met the love of her life abroad. Mackay's Scottish husband, also named Chris, was her hang-gliding instructor during a tandem flight in Nepal. The pair became engaged after just three months.

Mackay ran out of money after nine months of her around-the-world trip, but before she returned to the United States, she discovered the tour group that took visitors to meet the indigenous tribes in the highlands of Thailand. The guide and owner of the tribal tours was looking for someone to take over the business. So, the following year, Mackay and Leland went to Thailand and made the trips their own. They asked the rural communities what they needed, and then, with the villagers' permission, brought in tourists to build bridges, community center, and other municipal projects.

Mackay and Leland named the company Crooked Trails and signed up for a business license in Washington. During the school year, the pair taught environmental education in Seattle middle schools, and during the summer, they took tourists to Thailand.

Two years later, Mackay and Leland added the Peru trips. Since then, they've brought on India, Thailand and Kenya, and they plan to soon add Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador. Last year Crooked Trails ran 10 trips, and next year the company plans to do 20. Revenue this year will exceed $250,000, Mackay said.

As business grew, Leland and Mackay dropped their teaching jobs and Mackay stopped guiding trips. While Leland leads Crooked Trails groups across Peru, Mackay runs the company out of her West Seattle home. The deal suited both women, as Mackay wanted to have children and is now raising her baby daughter, Trinity.

Mackay admits she knew nothing about running a business, accounting or marketing before starting Crooked Trails. In the beginning, almost all the firm's travelers were friends of Mackay and Leland.

Universities have become one major source of business, as Leland and Mackay now organize sustainable business practice trips for the University of Washington and University of Delaware and ecotourism trips for Western Washington University.
Contact: hrdietrich@bizjournals.com • 206-447-8505x112