Her introduction to America was not gentle. Her ship ran into the terrifying waters of Maine. Isabella was thrown against the ship and knocked unconscious. She came ashore bleeding from a head wound. As true Mainers say, if you can sail the waters of Maine, you can sail anywhere. I like to think Isabella would agree.
Izzy. Isabella Lucy Bird. Explorer. Writer. Photographer. Naturalist. The first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Rode through the Rocky Mountains. Traveled Japan, Korea, China, Persia, Kurdistan, Malaya, Tibet. Kept going into her seventies.A woman who paid such close attention to the living world that we can still read her a century and a half later and know precisely what she saw. A woman whose name was Bird, and who earned it.
One of the first books I touched in America was The Englishwoman in America. That was how I met Isabella Lucy Bird. I did not know who she was. I was an Englishwoman's opposite in every way that mattered, but newly arrived, looking at a country I did not yet understand, and here was a book by someone else who had once done the same thing. She had done it in 1854.
She went west later, finding something she had been looking for. The wild. Freedom. Solitude.
I did not have to wait until I went west. I found it in the ever-loving Maine. The woods. The mountains. The Atlantic. The silence. I found it in the Boston Seaport, where Isabella saw a bustling, fast-growing city. And I found it in the sheer bravado in New York City’s people from everywhere, building.
So building RAAHI in this Maine-Boston-New York corridor has been fun. In some strange way, Isabella had introduced me to it.
There was another connection. Isabella was a naturalist. Birds, wildlife, plants, mountains, wilderness, and travel were part of her world. They have always been part of mine too.
She was a naturalist by instinct. The scenery behind the journey was the journey itself. Open any of her books at random. You will find a woman describing a plant she did not recognize. A bird call she was trying to place. The way a horse behaved on bad terrain. The color of water at a particular hour. The behavior of an animal nobody else had bothered to write down.
I am a birdwatcher. It is sometimes difficult to explain as a hobby. You stand still in a wet field at six in the morning. You wait. You look at something small and far away and try to work out what it is.
Birdwatching teaches you three things. Patience. You cannot hurry a bird. You cannot schedule one. You arrive, and you wait, and the universe decides whether it will show you anything today.
Those three things are also what make a good traveler. And they are exactly what separates a good guide. A great guide is a birdwatcher of places. Patient. Attentive. Humble about the ground they stand on. They know that the interesting thing is rarely the thing on the itinerary.
What Izzy is
Izzy is RAAHI's travel engine. Among its capabilities, it does four major things.
It finds the right people. Not a directory, not a scraped list. The people who actually know a place, matched to what a particular traveler is trying to do. It coordinates. Availability, scheduling, and the sequencing of a trip across multiple independent professionals who have never worked together before. It handles the transactional layer. Bookings. Communication. Payments. The parts that quietly break most independent travel operations. It absorbs change. Weather turns. Flights slip. A guide falls ill. A traveler decides on day three that they want two more days in the highlands. Izzy re-plans the ground.
That is the machinery. The philosophy underneath it is one sentence. A traveler in an unfamiliar place needs a person, not a platform.
Isabella understood this better than any modern travel company. Every one of her journeys was carried by local people. Guides, boatmen, interpreters, horsemen, hosts. She did not conquer those places. She was helped through them by people who had known the ground since childhood. She wrote about them by name. And it tells you what she thought mattered.
That is RAAHI's entire thesis. Travel is not just about where you go. It is about who helps you find your way. That is why we call it Izzy.
Isabella did all of this in the 1800s, when travel was overwhelmingly a man's world. She was told it was improper. She was told it was dangerous. She was told a woman of her health and class should be resting. She went anyway for fifty years.
Here is the uncomfortable thing. In many parts of the world, guiding is still a man's world. Go and count. Look at the licensed guide rosters in most countries. Look at the wildlife and outdoor professions. Look at who is leading treks, running boats, calling birds, driving safari vehicles, managing camps. The number is small. In some places it is close to zero.
It is a supply and access problem, not a talent problem. Training is expensive. Licensing is gatekept. Fieldwork has historically been structured around men. And travelers rarely ask for something they have never been offered.
I want RAAHI to attack that number. I want us to help build a generation of female naturalists. Female guides. Female outdoor professionals. Women who make their living from knowing a place deeply and taking other people into it.
The moment you seriously build a network of guides, you discover that half the best candidates were never in the pipeline at all. That is not a diversity statement. That is an inefficiency, and any founder should see it as one.
Izzy is the mechanism. An engine that routes work to professionals can also route it to professionals who have historically not received it. Visibility. Bookings. Income. Reviews. A record. The things that turn a skill into a career.
If Izzy does its job, the roster will look different in ten years. That is the point.
I want RAAHI to serve the solo traveler who wants to explore the world today the way Isabella did more than 170 years ago, not by removing the unknown. The unknown is the reason to go. Strip it out, and you have a package holiday with better photographs. But by helping her find the right people along the way.
The right guide. The right host. The right naturalist who knows which ridge the raptors use in October. Someone competent, vetted, and actually present.
That is the difference between a trip that expands you and a trip you spend managing.
So when we needed a name for RAAHI's travel engine, I already knew it.
Izzy. Isabella Lucy Bird. Explorer. Writer. Photographer. Naturalist. The first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Rode through the Rocky Mountains. Traveled Japan, Korea, China, Persia, Kurdistan, Malaya, Tibet. Kept going into her seventies.A woman who paid such close attention to the living world that we can still read her a century and a half later and know precisely what she saw. A woman whose name was Bird, and who earned it.