There’s a particular kind of traveller who never quite fits the brochure. The woman who wants adventure, not a spa day. The solo wanderer who’s tired of the “single supplement” tax. The person who’d rather eat where the locals eat than pose in front of where the locals used to live before the tour buses arrived. Melbourne-based Leatherback Travel was built for exactly these people.
Founded in 2019 by husband-and-wife team Mat and Rebeca Newton, Leatherback Travel didn’t start as one company chasing every kind of traveller, it started as a hunch that the “everyone” approach to travel was leaving too many people out. That hunch has since grown into six distinct, niche brands, each one built around a group Mat felt the wider industry had quietly overlooked.
There’s Patch Adventures, taking women deep into the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond, built on real cultural connection rather than a tick-list of monuments. Camino Women does something similar on foot, walking and hiking women through corners of the world from Morocco to Laos to Papua New Guinea. Magnificent Explorers is for those drawn to rail journeys and cultural immersion across the Balkans and India. Fencox Travel exists purely to fix one very specific injustice: the solo traveller surcharge. Salt Caravan turns every trip into a meal, and every meal into a story, getting travellers into local kitchens, markets and the hands of artisans. And Carex Garden Tours reads a destination through what grows in its soil.
Threaded through all of it is Mat’s belief that travel should give something back to the places it touches, proven in the group’s Salemi Ceramics project, a studio in a small Sicilian hill town helping keep a centuries-old craft, and the local economy around it, alive.
Six brands, one instinct: travel should feel like it was made for you, not sold at you.
Two Journeys, Two Completely Different Kinds of Immersion
To understand how differently these brands express that instinct, it helps to sit two of them side by side — one built entirely around the rails, the other built entirely around foot power.
Magnificent Explorers: Balkans Rail Explorer
Magnificent Explorers (formerly Magnificent Rail) is built for travellers over 50 who’d rather experience a region slowly, by train, than tick it off from an airport lounge. Their Balkans Rail Explorer is a 24-day journey across seven countries with a crew of just 14, beginning in Skopje and winding north through North Macedonia and its neighbours by way of retro-style trains, riverside cities and mountain-fringed border crossings.
Food shows up here too, but as a happy accident of hospitality rather than the main event, burek pulled from a wood oven, foraged truffles, and, by more than one traveller’s account, a level of generosity around the table that upends every itinerary plan of the day. Guides who’ve lived through the region’s harder chapters bring a weight to the stops at old fortresses and city squares that a guidebook simply can’t.
It’s a trip for people who want the sweep of a whole region, Adriatic views, minaret-topped skylines, Roman ruins, stitched together at the unhurried pace only a train window allows.
Camino Women: Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains & Ancient Churches
Where Salt Caravan slows down around a table, Camino Women speeds the pulse up on a trail. Their Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains & Ancient Churches itinerary is a 13-day, 12-night trek through one of Africa’s most dramatic and least-travelled landscapes, jagged escarpments, cloud-wreathed peaks and valleys that drop away like the edge of the world.
The centrepiece is a summit attempt on Ethiopia’s highest peak, but the itinerary doesn’t rush past everything around it. Along the way, you’ll come face to face with gelada monkeys, nicknamed “bleeding heart monkeys” for the crimson patch on their chest — an entirely wild-primate encounter unique to this pocket of the Ethiopian highlands.
The trek is bookended by visits to ancient rock-hewn churches, carrying centuries of history into a landscape that already feels timeless.
True to Camino Women’s model, this is a small, all-women group trip, hand-picked by the same team behind Patch Adventures, designed for active, energetic travellers who want the kind of insider access — and camaraderie — that’s genuinely hard to book on your own.
Would I Go? Yes — and It’s Salt Caravan for Me
If I had to pick one, it’s Salt Caravan, hands down. It comes down to a single line on their site: “every meal tells a story.” As someone who spends a fair amount of time these days writing about kitchens, ingredients and the small rituals of cooking, even from a compact bar kitchen in a Melbourne studio apartment, that phrase lands somewhere very specific for me.
Food has always been the fastest way I know to actually understand a place, faster than any landmark or itinerary bullet point. The idea of shopping a Cusco market with a local chef, then eating what I just bought, is the kind of travel memory that doesn’t fade the way a photo of a monument does.
The Simien Mountains trip is genuinely tempting too, there’s something magnetic about ancient churches and wild gelada monkeys on a single trail. But if I’m choosing where to spend the trip of a lifetime, I want it to end with a story I can still taste.
