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Off the chART Travel

Jump off the chart in Independent Samoa, the heart of Polynesia

This three week trip begins in Los Angeles where we meet to fly to Western Samoa. Our first stop is the indigenous village of Lu'ua. The focus here is on creating art reflecting your experiences in this ancient culture and your impressions of this magical land. We sleep in family owned fales (similar to bungalows) with at least two participants to a fale. It's a home-stay experience surrounded by familiar faces in adjacent fales.

The afternoon activities are planned by the group each evening and can include visits to the green turtle rehabilitation center, walks across the rainforest canopy, and launching coconuts out of blowholes created by the ocean.

The second half of the trip is based out of The Hidden Garden Guesthouse. We can take day trips to the Uafato Conservation area, snorkel at the Deep Hole National Marine Reserve, and visit the homestead of Robert Louis Stevenson.

A Hidden Garden guide, Eti Sapolu, takes us on an overnight hike to a volcanic crater lake to swim and camp under the stars. Beyond camping is the four day PADI SCUBA certification course to wrap up the trip.

The basis of Off the chART Travel is to encourage real life skills in a fun and relaxed atmosphere. Our goal is for participants to run aspects of the day to day activities of the program independently while making informed decisions on how to best immerse themselves in Samoan culture and represent their experience artistically. By leaving the logistics of aspects of the trip in the hands of the participants they develop certain skills by using them: problem solving, decision making, communication, critical and creative thinking, collaboration, leadership and organization. This system of learning by solving real problems is based on The Critical Skills Program at Antioch Graduate School.

The benefit of this experiential educaiton is that it allows students to take risks in safe, controlled and supervised circumstances and make decisions that have real consequences. Students have the opportunity, through these experiences, to develop a connection between their decisions and actions and the result of those decisions and actions. The consequence of an action or decision gives the student experience upon which he or she bases future decisions. Off the chART Travel deems this an important part of developing into a mature adult.

They realize the impact of their decisions and risks that may be involved by making one decision as opposed to another and they have the ability to differentiate and evaluate the difference between choosing one action as opposed to another and the projected outcome of that decsion.

Which would be preferable: a 17 year old who learns to be better organized after missing a bus or a boat? Or a college student who learns that credit is real by running up a huge credit card debt without being able to pay it off? It is advantageous to develop an awareness of the impact of decisions and actions at an early age when there is time to practice. The effect travel has on necessitating critical skills happens in syncronicity with the mind expanding experience of being in another culture. Recording this mind expansion through art as it happens brings concreteness and a level of consciousness to the experience, giving it depth.

For more information ...

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