SPOTLIGHT ON CROOKED COMPASS TRAVEL MAVEN LISA PAGOTTO

WORDS SALLY MACMILLAN

HIGH FLYER

Treehouse tribes, glacial treks, desert camps: if you yearn to explore the most remote corners of the globe with a (very) few like-minded travellers, where’s the best place to start? Meet Lisa Pagotto, founder of boutique adventure company Crooked Compass.

WORDS SALLY MACMILLAN

Travel has been Lisa Pagotto’s raison d’être since she was at high school. Before establishing Crooked Compass in 2014, Lisa worked as a travel consultant, a tour leader for Top Deck Travel and had been instrumental in setting up adventure tours for high-profile companies such as Lindblad Expeditions, Kumuka Worldwide and McLachlan Experiences. A turning point was creating the initial tours for Crooked Compass, spurred on by Karry On's Matt Leedham, Australia’s “Mr Entrepreneur of travel”. “I was actively seeking a new direction when I met Matt,” Lisa says. “I knew sales and marketing, logistics, the mechanics of bookings and dealing in foreign currency. I had a fantastic network of contacts from my adventure travel experiences, but I felt somewhat stuck in my role at the time. “I built six successful tours, as encouraged by Matt, after I had started Crooked Compass as a blog. It quickly attracted a big following and when I realised that there were many other people like me who wanted to travel to non-touristed destinations where you get under the skin of the place and have meaningful interactions with local people and their cultures, I re-launched it as a small-group tour business.”

UNTRODDEN PATHS Lisa, who lives in North Gosford with her son Jeong and works from an office in the Sydney CBD, explains that Crooked Compass offers tours and experiences that people would find extremely difficult, if not impossible, to organise independently. Liaising with contacts on the ground in destinations as diverse and remote as Bougainville, Patagonia, Syria, Tibet and Uzbekistan – to name just a few of the extraordinary places Crooked Compass covers – is key to gaining access to rare festivals, meetings with disappearing tribes and amazing wildlife encounters. For example, in Papua New Guinea – one of Lisa’s favourite destinations and where she pioneered tours to the Mount Hagen Cultural Show – their local guide is a fixer for TV documentaries for organisations such

as the BBC, and Crooked Compass is the only Australian company he works with. Considering about 850 languages are spoken in PNG, a lot could be lost in translation. Employing local guides helps support local economies and also encourages cultural exchange between locals and travellers. It’s a twoway process – travellers learn from the cultures they engage with, while locals learn about people outside their areas and the importance of retaining their traditions. Lisa adds, “Many of the tribes we spend time with and the experiences we offer cannot be found with any other tour operator, due – in part – to the support we offer many of these tribes beyond tourism dollars.”

NEW HEIGHTS As we all know, travel was one of the hardest-hit industries when covid swept across the globe in 2020. Crooked Compass had made a big name for itself in the niche area of experiential travel in just six years and was offering tours in far-flung places around the world for two to 12 guests as well as customised Tours by Design for smaller or larger groups. And then everything shut down. Having travelled constantly for years, Lisa was restless, to say the least. But as they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going and she decided to use the unexpected time in lockdown to rethink her goals. “I was so used to flying somewhere every couple of weeks that I used to drive to airports to get a fix,” she says. “At Newcastle Airport I saw a plane being prepared for a private charter for Abercrombie & Kent and it piqued my interest. I then went to Bankstown Airport, contacted aircraft charter managers and observed all the processes of aviation including buying, selling and refitting aircraft. I was hooked!” In fact, hooked to the point of signing up for flying lessons – “the world’s most expensive hobby", she laughs – which, in turn, led to building up a new branch of the business: Crooked Compass by Air. This has proved to be another winner, and Crooked Compass now offers an impressive selection of fully customisable airborne adventures to the furthest reaches of Australia.

WHERE TO NEXT? By the time you read this, Lisa will have been to South Bougainville for Crooked Compass’s inaugural Siwai Cultural Show tour and she will be getting ready to head off on the Saudi Arabia and Jordan Encompassed tour in November. One of the many highlights in 2023 is relaunching small-group touring in Socotra (the ‘Galapagos of Arabia’ off the coast of Yemen). Lisa is also looking forward to getting back to PNG. “It is where the business started and where the business continues to see opportunity and interest – a country so close to ours that feels a world away is brimming with possibilities as we continue to rebuild post-pandemic.” As for completing her pilot’s licence, Lisa made her first solo flight in March but as travel rebounds – and Jeong is now at primary school – flying for the sheer fun of it has been temporarily put on hold. Somehow we don’t think it will be too long before this intrepid adventurer takes to the skies again. For more information, see crooked-compass.com, crookedcompassbyair.com