Chestnut Hill’s premier world-traveler Carlson Wagonlit’s
Charles Weston has visited 120 countries

by LEN LEAR

Charles Weston wants you to see the world but not just its museums and cathedrals. Weston is the Godfather of ‘edge.’ David Letterman would probably call him exotic-orific. He wants you not just to experience something compelling but to go through the looking glass. In fact, the exciting adventure trips he promotes (he will not do corporate travel because “I do not want to be re-doing their plane tickets all the time”) remind me of this wry observation about camping: “You work hard all year so you can go away for one week and act like a homeless person.”

Weston, 61, a resident of Flourtown, owns and operates Carlson Wagonlit Travel (“Wagonlit” is the misspelling of a French word for Pullman car), which has been at 8138 Germantown Ave. for 12 years. A jolly, beefy cannonball of energy, Weston seems to be in motion even when he is sitting still.

Definitely one to put his money where his travel brochures are, Charles insists that he has personally visited 120 countries and that he and his associates combined have visited every country in the world except Libya.

Weston’s exploits have not gone unrecognized. In the August issue of Conde Nast Traveler magazine, which is currently out on newsstands, Weston is named one of the nation’s 100 best travel agents (out of 72,000) for the fifth year in a row. The award recognizes a travel agent’s “intimate knowledge of a place and the insider connections to create an unparalleled experience.”

“A lot of travel agents can easily book you into Europe or the Caribbean for sun and fun,” replied Weston when asked about his perennial award, “but very few of us have really traveled the world. Without blowing my own horn too loudly, I do fill that category. I’ve done plenty of museums and cathedrals as well, but my specialty is to go to remote places so I can tell my customers about them from first-hand knowledge, not just from reading about them.

“For example, I refuse to get off a ship with 1,000 people. I love a place like Anarctica, where they will not even let more than 100 off. They don’t even allow sled dogs. It’s so remote that it took us two days and two nights to get there from the southernmost tip of South America. You feel as if you are the only people on earth.”

Weston went to Anarctica in February of 2003 and January of this year, staying each time for 12 nights on a ship. “There were no other ships but ours,” he said, “and on a clear day you can see 60 miles away. I’d go again in a heartbeat. . . The ship was pulled onto a block of ice, and we’d go ashore on inflatable crafts. We’d go kayaking, look at the tame penguins and walk on the ice. My philosophy is that there’s a big world out there, and a lot of it is overlooked by people who travel.”

A native of Montclair, NJ, Charles graduated as an English major from Trinity College in Hartford, CT, in 1966. After a stint in the U.S. Navy Reserves, he traveled to Europe and eventually lived and worked in Belgium, Austria, Greece, Morocco and Kenya. He was employed by the Monsanto Corporation, which makes agricultural chemicals, in various capacities, the first being sales manager and the last being area director for Africa and the Middle East.

After 24 years of living in Europe and traveling extensively (vacation time is much more liberally given in Europe than in the U.S.), Weston returned to the U.S. for personal reasons and opened his travel agency in Chestnut Hill, for which he felt ideally suited. He insists that the travel he promotes is not dangerous, just remote. Luxury hotels are sometimes as hard to find as winning lottery tickets.

For example, on a trip to a rain forest in Ecuador, Charles took a double-engine plane from the capital of Quito to a remote airport, then a single-engine plane to the middle of a jungle, then a dugout canoe for one-and-a-half hours to a lodge built by local tribesmen. He stayed there for four days; there was no electricity, but there were solar panels.

In 1998, on another occasion Charles stayed in a lodge up on stilts in the middle of a jungle along the Amazon River in Brazil. It took two hours to get there by boat from the nearest town. “Believe it or not,” he said, “they had something called the Amazon Symphony Orchestra that played for us. At first I thought the sound was coming from frogs and crickets. The musicians were dressed in long dresses and tuxedos. They were Russians who desperately needed work because of the breakup of the Soviet Union.”

Some other destinations promoted by Weston because of their sheer awe-inspiring beauty are the Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia, southern Chile (“It makes the Grand Tetons look like pimples,” he said); the Valley of the Moon in La Paz, Bolivia, as well as Atacama in northern Chile (“Atacama has parts that looks like the lunar surface”). For magnificent wildlife, Charles suggests East Africa, of course, as well as a Peruvian rain forest (“there are tons of river otter, clouds of scarlet macaws and other wonders”) and the Galapagos Islands off the western coast of South America, where the abundant wildlife is tame because of the absence of predators for centuries. These trips are not inexpensive. For example, the 11-day Anarctica trip is about $7,000 per person, and the nine-day Galapagos trip is about $5,000 per person.

The worst travel experience Charles ever had was in Algeria in 1973. He was there at the same time as a Conference of Non-Aligned Nations was meeting, and security was extra-tight. While Weston sat in an airport speaking into a portable dictaphone, a policeman came over and questioned him. After a brief interrogation, all of Charles’ belongings were confiscated, and he was thrown into a holding cell. After a few hours, however, he was released when an airline captain vouched for him.

Weston, who speaks eight languages with some degree of proficiency, has had almost all positive experiences with adventure travel. Perhaps the most memorable was in Cameroon, West Africa. He made contact with the nation’s Minister of Youth and Sports, who took him to a village, “where I was treated like royalty. A sultan gave me palm wine in an animal horn, which was the highest form of hospitality there. There was actually a cockroach at the bottom of the horn, but I did not dare mention it.”

Weston has carved out a definite niche in the travel industry, and thanks to the national magazine awards, he gets many customers from beyond the Philadelphia area. His worst time was after 9/11, when most people stopped traveling abroad for leisure. “All we did was refunds for a while,” said Charles. “The government kept everybody scared with a non-specific fear, but now things are largely back to normal.”

Weston has a terrific assistant, Lisa Chiaro, and he lives in Flourtown with wife, Aliki, who is of Greek heritage but lived in Turkey as an adult, and children — Alex, 12, and Mary, 14, students at Springfield High School. (Aliki also helps out in the business.) Another daughter, Daphne, 22, is a coloratura soprano now attending a conservatory in Europe, and Penelope, 33, is an artist in California.

For more information, call 215-242-4242 or visit www.yourtrip.com