Catch Maia Josebachvili (pictured) if you can because she’s hardly home. Her main living space is the outdoors in all its forms. At just 24 years old, Josebachvili, who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and grew up in Great Neck, New York, has traveled to more than 40 countries and at one point lived in Queenstown, New Zealand, for five months. She’s rock climbed, mountain biked, whitewater rafted, hiked up to Everest Base Camp in Nepal and, get this, has skydived naked – several times! She has pictures of her butt mid-air to prove it. The next sport on her list? The triathlon. During our interview, Joseibachili was actually driving to a triathlon practice in Long Island, tuning up one last time before her race the next day.

If you’re thinking Josebachvili hasn’t had a steady paying job since finishing college, let me reverse your course right now. Josebachvili was accepted to the prestigious Dartmouth College, where she studied mechanical engineering, and upon graduation she took a corporate job at Susquehanna International Group working on Wall Street. But the wildlife of derivatives trading wasn’t her ideal environment; she wanted to experience nature’s wildlife. After she fell in love with adventure sports on a freshman orientation outdoors trip at Dartmouth, she started organizing skydiving trips for as many as 200 college students. Her role as a guide kept expanding in the next few years, even doing it part-time while working at SIG, and it led to her just recently founding Urban Escapes. Her adventure sports travel company offers weekend trips ranging in skill levels throughout the wilderness of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, with the goal of providing travelers an escape from their concrete jungle and into Josebachvili’s unpredictable world.

I was able to catch Maia for 30 minutes to take a deeper dive into her extreme role reversal. Her fascinating story follows:

Q: When you were growing up, did you like nature and roaming outdoors?
A: Not at all actually. I mean, I was definitely athletic and played sports, but I just didn’t have the exposure to it in Long Island. It was really as soon as I got to college. I did a freshman orientation rock climbing/hiking trip and that was kind of it. I went to Dartmouth and they have these orientation trips right before you go to college that are camping or hiking oriented. That was really my first exposure to everything.

Q: What were some of your dreams when you were a kid? What did you aspire to do?
A: When I was like 8, I was convinced I was going to be President. I even started pulling my allowance together so I could start a presidential fund. I guess I always knew I was going to do something a little bit different than the standard doctor, lawyer thing. But this wasn’t on my radar really, this whole outdoor thing.

Q: On your Facebook profile you say for the About Me part, “Why walk when you can run.” What does that mean to you?
A: I think in the most literal sense, I’m always running to places. So if I’m walking to meet someone, I would literally just run there. Someone asked me once, “Why are you always running?” And my answer was literally because I wanted to run. But I think I take it figuratively too. I’m 24 now, I’ve finished college, dabbled in professional skydiving, I’ve traveled around the world for a year, I’ve been to 40 countries, I’ve worked on Wall Street for two years, I started my own company. I feel like I don’t like to take things slowly. I just like, jump in.

Q: What do you equate that to? Just being a try-everything-twice kind of person?
A: [laughs]. I don’t know if you saw on my bio page for Urban Escapes, I wrote, “I try everything in the world once.” I love new experiences of trying stuff.

Q: When you went to Dartmouth, you chose mechanical engineering as your major. What career did you have in mind?
A: I have absolutely no idea. I took a couple of classes and I really liked it. I figured it wasn’t going to close any doors and it was kind of interesting. But I definitely did not see myself sitting in front of a computer for the rest of my life.

Q: After college, you started working at SIG on Wall Street. When did this desire to start an adventure travel business kick in?
A: I was doing it part-time but not really for profit, more for just my piece of mind and my friends. So I was doing the same thing I’m doing now, organizing rafting trips and hiking trips and skydiving trips. And then I did four international trips for my friends, but I was like, “Give me money and I’ll plan everything.” I just really had some pretty spectacular vacations with me and my friends. I had always planned on taking a year off to travel anyway. You kind of learn about yourself in this whole thing. When I was traveling for a year and just planning it, I realized how much I loved traveling and how I’m actually kind of good at organizing this sort of thing. It’s always been in the back of my mind, but I thought it was going to be when I retire I’m going to start an adventure travel company. And then I was like, “Why not now?”

Q: Some people would say leaving a good paying job and entering entrepreneurship is a risky move and could have its consequences. Did you see it as risky? What were your feelings leaving corporate America and starting your own business?
A: I think being an adrenaline junkie – I was a Wall Street trader, you know – you take risks, right? You take calculated risks. But, of course, it’s a lot riskier to start your own company than to get a nice, cushy paying job. But there’s just so much more energy and excitement and happiness in it for me. I mean, my day at the office now can include hiking up the top of a mountain to scout out a trail, and that’s like a day of work.

Q: Does your company’s slogan “Get out of the bubble” represent your back story, what you went through? Does it mean telling people, “Look, get out of your office and experience something you’ve never experienced before?”
A: Yeah, 100%. I was part of this track: you go through college to get a good job. “Get out of the bubble” represents maybe there’s something else you want to do or at least recharge from what you’re doing.

Q: The people who are coming on these trips, what do they tell you about what’s going on in their lives? Do you get a chance to talk to them about the emotions they’re going through in their workplace?
A: I think most of the people honestly come to get away and to meet new people. What I hear a lot is it’s so hard to meet people at bars, and it’s not even meeting people for dating sense, although there definitely have been a couple of incidents of romantic encounters as a result of Urban Escapes. But I think New York City is a hard place to make new friends and meet people in group settings. And I think it’s also being in a concrete jungle and not seeing any green grass for weeks at a time.

Q: How many years of planning went into Urban Escapes? Talk about the process of getting it off the ground.
A: It’s been a few years in the making of just perfecting the product as far as really refining what kind of trips I think are good, can be affordable, fun and something that people can’t just go and do on their own. But I didn’t realize I was going to make this company until fairly recently. Ever since my junior of college, I started organizing skydiving trips for 200 kids at Dartmouth. That was probably my first stab at organizing day trips, planning transportation, accommodations and the activities.

Q: Describe the kind of guide you are. What are you hoping to accomplish as a leader? Do you teach people about the history of the region they’re in, the culture, things beyond the adventure element?
A: As the slogan says, “Get out of the bubble,” I don’t want this one square thing of what each trip is like because a lot of what people want depends on the group. I had one group that was so excited to learn how the camping stove worked, how to keep good fire, what to do if it’s raining. For groups that are eager about that, we spend a lot of time going over wilderness survival skills and stuff like that. We had a couple of people who were really into writing and yoga, so we spent a lot of time hanging out in the quiet spots and talking about the different flowers that were there, just having a more kind of meditative trip. There’s one trip that we did that goes through an old, historic mining town, which was pretty cool, totally abandoned, and you can see what’s left from these old foundations. That one we spent a lot of time on history obviously.

Q: Paint a picture of an unbelievable hike for readers, or if you can just describe your favorite trip that you’ve done.
A: One of our hikes has a lunch spot with literally a 360-degree view of the Hudson Valley in Bear Mountain State Park in the Catskills. You ascend about 4,000 feet to get there. You can see New York City in the far, far distance. And the coolest part about this spot isn’t just that it’s so gorgeous; it’s four really hard miles of hiking. So if you’re there and if you run into a hiker there, you know that people really hiked their butts off to get there. And it just makes the view that much sweeter.

Q: Tell me a crazy or funny story of something that happened on one of the trips.
A: On one of the hiking trips, we had a camping outing. We have a bunch of campfire games that we play. This was at a shelter on the Appalachian trail. There were a bunch of other hikers around the area. We were talking to some of them and all of a sudden they heard we were playing campfire games and they wanted to play. So we were like, “Yeah, sure!” And then like 10 minutes later, another hiker came by and he was like, “Would it be OK if I played too?” And we were like, “Yeah, no problem.” And this kept happening and by the end of the night, we probably had like 20 some odd hikers join our group to play campfire games with us.

Q: Adventure tourism is one of the fastest growing forms of international tourism. Why do you think that is?
A: I think the short of it, it’s fun. There’s something to be said, of course, for going to Rome and taking pictures of the ruins. It’s beautiful and it’s great, but when you’re rafting down a river in Nepal, that’s just really fun and it’s a really cool way to see something. It just gets you out of the bubble that you’re normally used to.

Q: Do you think many people are ever concerned that when they travel abroad to do these sorts of things you’re talking about, they’re scared of foreign health insurance and not being around their regular doctors? Instead of doing these adventure things that might be a little risky, do you think they’d rather do picture taking because it’s safer?
A: I think if they’re not scared of that, they shouldn’t be. I’ve spent a year in really remote places and I had a pretty substantial medical kit that I brought myself. I actually went and got a bit of training also in wilderness first aid. I was like, “What am I going to do when I’m hiking in the Himalayas and something happens, and I’m really far from any hospital and don’t even know what to do?” But I think you get travel insurance and you go with a reputable company that’s scouted the area and knows its stuff.

Q: Give me your top three places you’ve been to and your top three places you want to go to.
A: I’ve been to Everest Base-Camp in Nepal. It’s like a two-week hike to get there. That’s number one. Number two would be Queenstown, New Zealand. I lived there for five months. I did a lot of rock climbing, mountain biking every single day. I think it’s the outdoor capital. Finally Bariloche, Argentina. It’s a young, hip, outdoorsy place. Kilimanjaro is next on my list, Antarctica and Africa – it’s the one continent I really haven’t explored at all. I think I might go there for the World Cup in 2010.

Q: I know you’ve done some marketing already. You have the viral element with Flickr and Facebook. What other marketing and promotional things are you going to do to spread the word?
A: I really want to get in with all the e-mail lists. Flavor Pill just included me in their to-do list for Labor Day weekend. I want to tap into Urban Daddy and have that be a regular way to inform people. I think this is the kind of business that grows through word of mouth. This is just as much about the trips as it is about the people.

Q: In some sense, your slogan should be “Better than Facebook.”
A: [laughs]. I like that.

Q: What is your target demographic for the people who sign up?
A: It’s 20’s and 30’s. But with that being said, this Labor Day weekend we have a girl who’s 25 coming with her mother who’s 50. We’ve had a 45-year-old married couple come on a trip. I’m focusing my marketing on 20’s and 30’s, but people will come who are older and they’ll really have a good time too.

Q: Looking ahead, I know we talked about the international expansion. Any other ideas or goals that you have for your company?
A: Yeah, by next summer I want multiple trips every weekend that have different intensity levels. Right now, if you want a beginner trip, you have to go on a beginner trip. What I want for next summer is for each weekend, there’s a beginner trip, an intermediate trip and an advanced trip. You can have whitewater rafting or rock climbing on the same weekend.

Q: For someone who is interested in getting into the adventure tourism business or just becoming an entrepreneur in general, what advice would you give them?
A: I think it’s super exciting, but it’s also super scary. I think from what I’m learning, it’s easy to be a good entrepreneur when things are going well. I think the hardest stuff is when things aren’t going well and your product isn’t selling. And that’s when you need to kind of buckle up and really believe in what you’re doing. I think at the end of the day, that’s what you need to do – is really to have a passion for your product and know that it can succeed.

Q: What is your favorite part about all of this?
A: I would say my favorite part about all this is the people who never thought they would enjoy this, who are just dragged on by their friends and really have no desire to be camping in the woods, who think the idea of hiking is not fun. And they’re the ones who come up to me at the end of the day and send me an e-mail afterwards, and they’re like, “That was the best thing ever and I thank you so much. I just had the best weekend.” The people who come expecting to have a good time will have a good time, but the people who come and are really skeptical about the whole outdoorsy thing will end up loving it. They’re the ones who really make my day and make me feel like this is why I’m doing this.

Q: This is the one burning question that I saved for the end. For future trips, will you have any naked skydiving?
A: [laughs]. I will be honest, the naked skydiving stories come out more often than not. It’s a good icebreaker. I think we’re going to have a skydiving trip later this fall. I don’t know, there might be a little sneak peek [laughs]. It depends how cold it is. I’ll send you a picture of my butt, which you can use for the story [laughs].

For upcoming trips, check out urbanescapesnyc.com.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Maia Josebachvili

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 4:00 am and is filed under adventure sports, sports culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.