A SUCCESS STORY ..!

Babis Bizas travels since he was a student. He followed the stream of young backpackers to India in his 20ties. He loved Afghanistan and was fascinated by Bangladesh. When the money was about to finish he found a job on one of the numerous Greek ships anchored in the port of Colombo in Sri Lanka and sailed to Mozambique , South Africa and the United States. For the next 8 years he was busy traveling as a tour leader. In 1987 when he had already traveled to all the known tourist destinations, he decided to slow down his trips for a while (only), to concentrate on planning and organizing new tours for small groups. The Cultural Tours were born. The beginning was with Cambodia and Vietnam (but not Laos at that time yet) where he led the first group. Soon, the countries of West Africa like Chad, Nigeria and Guinea Bissau followed, where the locals saw for the first time such a number of people traveling together. In a couple of years the Cultural Tours were a landslide.

Babis Bizas was the man for the unusual destinations!!! The old travelers, who wanted someone to lead their tour to places where no tourist infrastructure was available, looked upon him. In 20 years of traveling either as tour leader or as an individual traveler, he had been all over the globe. Eventually he joined the expedition by soviet helicopters to the North Pole, in a rough 19-hours-flight round trip from the Siberian arctic coast and 18 years later put the flag in the South Pole too. He traveled numerous times to Antarctica, visited the remote Islands of the Aleutian Chain in Alaska, and explored the off beaten track islands of the Pacific. But his passion was the tribal areas of Africa and Asia were old cultures and traditions survived to our days, resisting the modernization.

He spent time with the Himbas in northern Namibia, loved and been loved by the Hamers in South Ethiopia , met with the Bela in Niger and escorted the first visitors to the tribal areas of the Apatanis in Arounachal Pradesh and to the mountain areas of Southern China. It comes as no surprise the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER described him as “The most traveled person in the world”.

The tours he plans and organizes with the cooperation of COSMORAMA are fully booked months ahead. No two tours in the same country are alike. Every time he returns from a trip something different is added to the next one. And he travels a lot. He is away from Athens for more than 300 days a year searching for the tattoo designs on the faces of the Chin women in western Burma or exploring new areas in North Korea. The clientele is mainly Greek, but his tours have been joined by expatriates who live in Athens or travelers who came from as far as Australia, Taiwan, Mauritius or USA.

Whatever is the desire for a travel all agree in one thing: Babis Bizas is a kind of the reincarnation of Ulysses and has already become a symbol and a live legend! There is no coincidence then, that his wife’s name is… Penelope.