With extra cash to burn, well-to-do Russians are turning to exotic tourism and have taken recreation to new – and sometimes illegal – levels, reports Christopher Kenneth.

"People who choose non-standard forms of tourism are not newcomers, as they have already been to places such as Turkey and other resort centers commonly visited by mainstream tourists," said Vagran Nazaretian, director of Extraordinary Tour Agency, which organizes tours to carnivals, major sporting events and unusual destinations.

One distinctive feature of exclusive tours is that all the services are specially tailored to meet the specific tastes of individual clients, taking into attention their demands, likes and dislikes, said Viktor Kuzerin, general director of Sodis Travel Co., which provides comprehensive tour services. "That means such clients have the services of a private tour manager, health care specialists and other tourism experts who provide extra services the clients might require," he added.

Some exotic places that are becoming regular tourist destinations among the Russian upper class are Mauritius, the Seychelles, Barbados, the Maldives, Fiji, Botswana and China.

"There are some exclusive, non-traditional destinations like Namibia, Vanuatu, Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands and New Caledonia," said Kuzerin, adding that tours are organized to these places only on a client’s special request. "In my opinion, traveling to these resort centers are more like fun, sporting expeditions than classical cases of extreme tourism," he said.

But, while exotic locations have become pastimes for many, some exclusive tours are tasking clients’ adrenaline levels and wallets as entertainment-service providers conjure up more sophisticated, expensive tour programs to wet potential clients’ appetites for unusual adventures. One such program is driving a Formula-1 sports car at AGS Le Luc, near St. Tropez on the Cote d’Azur in France.

The program, at a minimum cost of 2,700 euros per person, includes the services of a translator, F-1 technical instructor, track-familiarization excursions, a 20-round test drive in a 3,000 horsepower sports car – which culminates in actual driving of a real F-1 sports car through four rounds on the tracks – and meals in the resort restaurant, according to Sodis, which started the program two years ago.

Kuzerin noted that round-the-world tours have also become popular among well-to-do Russians, citing a New Year’s tour in 2000 when jubilant festivities were organized to mark the dawn of the New Millennium at $30,000 for two people. "This was a four-week, round-the-world trip with stops in wonderful locations in Japan, Australia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Hawaii, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas."

So-called "hedonism tours" are also coming into vogue, Kuzerin added, citing a pleasure-seeking trip to Jamaica in which tourists were accompanied by a Playboy group of models and a camera crew to film their behavior.

Client category

On average, the majority of clients are business moguls, political heavyweights and celebrities, tour agents noted.

Also, the variety of such excursions is very wide. "The extraordinariness of these tourist destinations depends on the individual client’s taste, the type of hotel preferred and the requested services," Nazaretian added. As an example, he cited a tour to an undisclosed destination in which six tourists jointly doled out $220,000, the highest single payment for a trip in his firm’s history.

Kuzerin put the average price of a tour at $3,000 per person. "Of course, there are more expensive tours, and there are enough clients for them." He has been selling a number of packages for Fregate Island in the Seychelles, which has only 16 exclusive villas. Prices start in the six figures, as accommodation alone costs $2,174 per day for a two-bedroom villa. With extended New Year’s holidays, it is not uncommon for these super-rich Russians to take off for three weeks in groups of six to eight.

One tour operator noted that at least 12 charter Russian aircrafts carried passengers to Maldives.

Unfamiliar pastimes

And, it seems, even the individualized tour packages to exotic places are becoming boring to some deep-pocketed Russians, who are now indulging in more controversial – and sometimes illegal – forms of recreation.

These include being disguised as "bomzhy" – the Russian derogatory word for a homeless person – or shoplifting goods in Moscow’s elite supermarkets just for the fun of it, playing night ice hockey on frozen lakes or rivers with thin ice or illegal night-time racing on main city roads. Other activities include parading the streets as prostitutes, burying oneself in a grave and other risky adventures.

The new wealthy Russians’ latest sporting activities have made headlines in the local press, with some dedicating substantial parts of their editorials to the issue.

Night ice hockey is one of these pastimes. Renting a skating rink alone costs $200 per hour, and each team spends about $25,000-$40,000 per year. There is also a half-kilometer driving contest in which participants try to outrun each other in expensive foreign cars on Moscow streets at night with flagrant disregard for normal traffic laws, threatening lives.

The really "non-traditional" pleasure-seeking activities include dressing up as homeless people or prostitutes, according to Sergei Knyaziev, the general director of Knyaziev Show Production Center, which runs a private club that organizes such activities for those who can foot the huge bills that, ironically, accompany such slumming activities.

"These people are aged between 35 and 50 and include high-profile politicians, top business moguls and show-business celebrities. Though membership in the closed club comes at a fantastically high fee, it’s just not enough to have a lot of money to be accepted," he told a local newspaper.

For instance, for 16,000 rubles, these wealthy people are dressed as homeless people to loiter Moscow’s streets just for the fun of it. However, private bodyguards and the police – usually notified ahead of time that these are a special category of bomzhy – are on standby to handle any emergency situation, Knyaziev said.

The same level of security is also present when some wealthy Russians hit the Moscow red-light districts – fun that carries a price tag of 63,000 rubles per participant, he added. This level of security is necessary for fear that real prostitutes and their pimps might pose problems and also protect them from clients that might want to treat them like real prostitutes.

Orgies are too commonplace to even earn a mention. Many Moscow night clubs and strip bars have private rooms and restaurants where almost anything can happen as long as the price is right.

The list goes on

According to a TNT television channel program, a Russian businessman recently paid over $2,000 to eat a rare arthropod species on an endangered-species list in a restaurant that later led to a fracas with the Chinese wildlife-protection police. Another wealthy man, vacationing in Laos, brought ladies’ underwear as a special birthday present for his business partner. "The uniqueness of the present, which was bought in a fetish sex shop in Laos at an exorbitant price, is that the underwear was given to a prostitute to wear for a very long time without much in the way of hygiene," the man, who gave his name as Dmitry, said.

Do not think that affluent women are left behind. For $1,000 a person, or $450 for a group lecture, women can take lessons in love-making at one of roughly 12 tantric sex or geisha schools in Moscow.