The WanderRock Curriculum
Our curriculum is designed to follow our main ethos: Putting more life in our travelers lives. We believe that travel is one of the best ways to gain real world skills that will last a lifetime.
It doesn't look much like a curriculum
There are no modules, no worksheets and no evening sessions. Nobody sits in a circle. If you read one of our itineraries next to a conventional tour, ours looks like it does less — because a conventional operator fills every hour, and we don't.
Our itineraries have gaps in them, and the gaps are the design. On a day in Kyoto the schedule might say one thing: lunch, own arrangements, back at the station by two.
All the work is in making "own arrangements" a task a traveler can finish rather than a void that frightens them. We choose ground a traveler can walk and read. We set the meeting point somewhere they can find. We brief the task so that it carries an objective and a deadline without carrying the answer. We position guides so that following one is a choice rather than the default. None of that appears on the itinerary, which is why the itinerary looks sparse.
This is also our honest answer to the question parents ask most: what are they actually doing all day?
What they are doing all day
- Choosing where to eat
- Navigating a foreign street
- Ordering food they cannot read
- Working out the ticket machine
- Finding their way back, on time
These are not activities in the brochure sense. They don't photograph well and they can't be listed as attractions. They are the ordinary acts of an independent adult — and for a good number of our travelers, they are being done for the first time.
Then at dinner, twenty people have twenty different stories about what they found. Tomorrow, three of them go looking for the tempura place somebody else discovered today.
The walk is the lesson, not the temple
In Nara there are two ways to reach Todai-ji, the great temple with the bronze Buddha. Which one you take is the entire difference between our trips and a standard tour.
The coach route · 15 minutes
Dropped at the gate
The coach parks at Nandaimon Gate. You walk through one gate, see the Buddha, walk back out, get on the coach.
The excursion bypasses the town completely, along with the shopping street, the park and the konbini on the corner, because from its point of view none of that is the product. It treats those places as logistics and optimizes them away.
The way we go · 40-60 minutes
On foot from the station
You come out of Kintetsu Nara station and walk through the town. You pass the shops, then Kofuku-ji, then the park, then the deer, and you climb through every gate in sequence until you reach the Buddha.
Every meter of that walk hands the traveler another part of the day. They cross the shopping street, they meet a deer for the first time, one of them stops to buy a drink, and the approach path tightens as the gates grow larger and the trees close in.
One is what it means to be somewhere. The other is what it means to have been somewhere.
Everything on that walk is small, manageable and completely survivable. The ticket machine is in Japanese. The deer will headbutt you for a rice cracker and nobody intervenes. The menu has pictures but the waiter doesn't speak English. The platform is confusing. By the end of the day a traveler has spent eight hours proving to themselves that they can operate in a place that was not designed for them, and that proof outlasts any photograph of the Buddha.
We choose public transit for the same reason, because a coach removes the part of the day that does the teaching. All fourteen days of our Japan itinerary run on trains, subways and our own feet.
Those skills include...
Four areas that a fortnight on the road develops, whether or not anybody names them at the time. We don't run sessions on any of this. It gets practiced because the day requires it.
Executive Functioning Skills
Travelers will learn & gain confidence in the practical application of logistical skills that they can take into every day life. These skills aren't something that can be taught in a classroom or by reading, so we emphasize practical experience whenever possible.
For example, travelers might have to research dinner options, negotiate with peers, check to see if the restaurant fits within their budget for the week, and plan how to get there on public transportation.
Sequencing and Processing
Gathering information, prioritizing that information and then acting on it.
Time & Money
Budgeting, time management and practicing value judgements.
Problem Solving
Thinking through the steps required to achieve a goal, readjusting expectations, and being persistent.
Perspective & Wisdom Building
One of the great things about travel is that by experiencing different cultures, it gives our travelers a new sense of perspective & a greater wisdom as they go about their daily life. Our program uses deep cultural immersion & the physical environment to give our travelers a greater understanding of themselves, their worldview and the people around them.
Building Empathy & Creating Tolerance
Seeing people as individuals with their own struggles, successes and preferences.
Re-Aligning Personal Stories
Creating new self identities, building confidence & self esteem and shifting the personal stories we tell about our efficacy in the world.
Becoming More Flexible
Moving from black and white thinking to gray areas by experiencing different cultural norms & practicing tolerance.
Self Care & Emotional Regulation
Being out on the road teaches our travelers a lot about their basic needs, and our program highlights those needs and helps our travelers make good decisions about eating, relaxation, sleep, hydration & more, based on their own felt sense of checking in with themselves.
Emotional Capacity & Vagal Tone
Increasing resilience to stressors and building the capacity to tolerate difference.
Deep Relaxation
Practicing meditation, mindfulness, stillness and other aspects of unwinding.
Bodily Needs
Checking in with your body to know when to eat, sleep, rest, drink, etc.
Social & Community Engagement
Our travelers will have many, many opportunities to connect with their peers and the people of the various communities we visit, which will allow them to practice social skills & community engagement in a safe, welcoming way.
Sharing & Advocating
Travelers will practice advocating for their wants & needs in the group, and sharing ideas, concerns & preferences with others.
Interpersonal Skills
Building leadership, team & communication skills in a wide variety of settings & experiences.
Building Motivation
Understanding desires, and learning to rally a group around a common goal.
How it's taught, which is to say: it isn't
Nobody runs a session. Nobody hands out a worksheet. Our guides know the ground extremely well, and their job is to hold the task open rather than close it.
A guide at lunchtime in Osaka says: "I'm getting pizza. I'd recommend you get something else." That is the whole of it. The guide is not delivering an exercise, the guide is having lunch. The moment the guide solves the problem, the traveler goes back to being an audience.
When nobody solves it and the traveler picks the place, orders the food, finds the way back and arrives on time, they have taken something from beginning to end without being shown how. Tasks like that compound across the fortnight. They get lunch on day two, they take an afternoon on their own by day five, and they get a haircut in Tokyo by day ten.
Nobody names any of it at the time. Nobody tells a traveler that getting lunch is a life skill. It is just lunch, and they got it.
Stress, then rest. That's the shape of the fortnight.
A challenging day only produces anything if there's proper recovery on the other side of it. So we build the itinerary in a rhythm rather than a straight line — and the restful parts are as deliberately chosen as the demanding ones.
Big city days
Tokyo, Osaka and Rome are loud, fast and crowded. These are the days that ask the most of a traveler's navigation, patience and nerve.
Then somewhere quiet
Kinosaki follows Tokyo. There are hot springs, a small town, people wearing yukata in the street, nothing to catch and nowhere to be. Travelers get to come down.
And genuine downtime
Some afternoons carry nothing at all, some dinners run long, and we plan some evenings to have no plan in them. Rest sits on the itinerary because it does half the work.
We run fourteen days, because it takes days for anybody to put the bracing down.
For the first two or three days most travelers are still watching for the assessment, and they are still waiting for a guide to produce a clipboard. A weekend gets somebody to the point of almost believing it is not coming, which is worse than never starting. Two weeks is the shortest trip that actually works.
The test we hold a day to
We ask three questions of every day. Three yeses mean the day did what we designed it to do. Anything less means it was a very good tour, which is what everybody else is selling.
Can they say what they did today?
They can give a real sentence with a place in it, and that sentence is worth telling somebody at home.
Were the hours around it worth having?
The temple is not the only thing they remember. The walk counts, the wrong turn counts, and so does the shop nobody planned to go into.
Did they sort something out themselves?
They finished something that carried an objective and a deadline, and nobody solved it for them.
We want the day to be a little hard. We do not tolerate danger, and the line between the two is a wall rather than a slider — which is the part of this our guides work hardest at.
How we handle safetySee what a fortnight of this looks like
Each itinerary lays out all fourteen days, including the parts of the schedule that deliberately say nothing.