"Otto's Tours C.A." was founded by Andreas Zmuda in autumn 1992. Andreas then had been living for months in the savannah and jungle of the Canaima National Park in Venezuela with a Pemón family, developing tours with them that until then "white people" had not offered.
In its first year, the company offered only jungle and trekking tours in the Canaima National Park, including the (slightly modified) tour on a seat-in basis "Mt. Auyan Tepui Trekking & Angel Fall Expedition" which is still available today.
Already in our second year, many of the operators booking our tours inquired about other destinations in Venezuela, so that together with Maria Teresa Torrealba we established our office in Puerto La Cruz and included other Venezuelan regions in our program. Since then, we have continuously expanded our small company. As a result, not only has our range of Venezuela tours increased, but with the establishment of new country offices we also have extended the number of destinations.
From 1993 through 1999, Andreas lived on the Caribbean "Robinson Island" of Tobago, traveling over 60 Caribbean islands. As a result, we included the destinations Caribbean and English Guyana as special offers in our program.
In the years after, we constantly received new inquiries from enthusiastic participants of our tours, who asked us to organize trips to other South American countries. This gave us the idea to organize special, so-called pioneering tours to the most varying parts of the continent, which were all personally guided by Andreas.
During several trips to Ecuador, Andreas fell in love with the country “in the center of the world”, its friendly people and fascinating nature, and decided to establish another country office in Quito. Since then, all of the company’s marketing is being conducted from Quito. Since an experienced and reliable person was needed to organize the tours in Ecuador, in the following year Maria Teresa moved to Quito, where she has been in charge of the office management, ever since.
In the year 2003, we then established our branch office in Cuzco / Peru, conducted by the native Peruvian Rocio Alatrista. Also in Peru our idea quickly was in demand, and since then we have been offering inexpensive but high-quality seat-in and trekking tours where operators can book in beginning with one passenger.
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Ecuador - Peru - Venezuela - 2014