Marine Expeditions
Encounters offers trips to just about every kind of wildlife destination on and under the water. That can mean cage diving with great white sharks, swimming with whales and orcas, or scuba diving liveaboards to places like Galápagos, Cocos, or Indonesia. We look for everything from large pelagics to smaller and less obvious marine life.
Some expeditions are focused on specific animals. Others are built more around the different aquatic environments themselves, from freshwater caves and river systems to cold-water trips in the Arctic winter, or even deep-sea habitats explored using specialized submarines.
Safaris
Encounters originally started with diving expeditions, but land-based wildlife trips quickly became just as important a part of the company. Today, we organize safaris and terrestrial expeditions across all continents and a wide range of habitats, always focused on creating the very best wildlife encounters, whether that means traveling by 4×4, boat, or on foot deep in the jungle.
If there is an iconic species or a rare and beautiful habitat, chances are we are going there: India for tigers, traditional safaris on the African savanna, gorilla and chimpanzee tracking, rainforest expeditions to Borneo and the Amazon, or searching for highly specialized desert species in the Sahara.
Polar Expeditions
We organize expeditions to both the Antarctic and the Arctic, focusing on some of the most remote and wildlife-rich environments on the planet. In the South, trips include Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia, combining huge penguin colonies, seals, whales, and some of the richest wildlife concentrations in the Southern Ocean.
Northern expeditions range from polar bear trips in the high Arctic to snorkeling with orcas in the freezing waters of Norway during the polar winter.
These environments have always been among Barna’s favorite places to explore, and polar expeditions remain an important part of Encounters both above and below the water.
Specialized Trips
Some trips are highly specialized and focus on very specific natural phenomena, species, or ecosystems.
Barna’s interests have always extended far beyond conventional wildlife tourism: he will happily travel for active volcanoes and severe storms to northern lights, eclipses, and rare celestial events.
Some trips are designed to find one particular animal species in the wild: like herping expeditions focused on rattlesnakes, or birding trips searching for Wilson’s Bird-of-Paradise in West Papua, or tracking harpy eagles in the rainforest canopy. Targeting endemic species that most people will never even hear about can end up being just another Encounters trip.
