All Aboard
Princeton Journeys, in its 21st year, is looking to attract younger alumni on its excursions, including a recent trip to Argentina
On a rain-drenched Sunday in November, a group of Princetonians and their loved ones rose to roar as River Plate, one of Argentina’s most famous soccer teams, scored its first goal amid the frenetic chaos of its home stadium. Local fans — dressed in all kinds of red and white — grabbed onto each other with contagious cheer. The Princetonians followed suit. It seemed that few things could dampen the group’s spirits, if not for the haze induced by the afternoon’s heavy asado, the accompanying glasses of Malbec wine, or the late-night tango from the evening prior — and this was just as well, as things would only pick up from here.
Organized by Princeton Journeys, which sits under the remit of Princeton’s Alumni Association, “Buenos Aires: A People-to-People Adventure” was on day three of its five-day trip. Since 2004, Princeton Journeys has taken alumni to dozens of locations across land and water, orchestrating, in the process, meetings and remeetings between thousands of alumni who seek educational travel experiences abroad.
Though each group is unique, the Buenos Aires group — with its vast majority graduating post-2009 — had the distinction of not only being younger than the usual crowd, but also having been designed as an attempt to diversify a program that, to date, has yet to make itself a household name among recent alums. I hadn’t heard of Princeton Journeys until Jordan Salama ’19, whom I’d met on a journalism class trip to Bosnia, explained that he’d be leading a trip to Argentina with the program. Would I want to come?
And this is how I ended up in that stadium on the rainy Sunday, cheering with fellow Princetonians. To be with classmates experiencing something new — in a journey blending learning, travel, and a bit of luxury — seemed vaguely familiar. In a way it was like being back in a seminar set abroad, except the cost had been borne out of our own pockets (or, in my case, covered by PAW), we had crossed FitzRandolph Gate years before, and beside us were people with whom we realistically could not have shared a classroom until this.
The world can often be at one’s fingertips while one is at Princeton. There are courses that incorporate travel abroad during fall or spring break, summer internships available via the International Internship Program, and opportunities for students to design their own research, study, and work experiences with foreign universities and organizations. These days, travels of this kind are often free or heavily subsidized by the University via scholarships and grants, provided not only to encourage students to deepen their knowledge in far-flung locales, but also to equalize the possibility of travel — which can be prohibitively expensive — among students of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
Travel has been central to education for centuries. The origins of educational tourism date to the 18th century, when aristocratic British youth — usually boys — would embark on so-called “grand tours” throughout Europe. They would learn languages and skills such as dancing or fencing. The experience was almost always designed to civilize participants by educating them in contemporary culture and the classics. Centuries later, the modern-day version sends travelers of every age, nationality, and gender to every continent. While some embark on these journeys of their own accord, others purchase spots on trips led by cultural powerhouses such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, and the Smithsonian.
In the 1960s, universities across America began launching educational trips for alumni seeking to continue learning with people with shared intellectual and social backgrounds. At a time when university-alumni relationships primarily revolved around donations, as The New York Times observed in a 1992 article, such trips were a way of keeping alumni close without necessarily demanding a monetary contribution.
“Now there is a realization that the person who is an alumnus first came to an institution like ours for education, and that should be the basis for continuing that relationship,” Eustace D. Theodore, then-executive director of Yale’s alumni group, told the Times in 1992. (Though the article promptly adds that “money has not disappeared from the relationship”: At the time, Yale required a $300 contribution from each trip participant, with other alumni associations taking a 3% to 5% cut of the package price as a donation to their respective universities.)
The Alumni Association launched Princeton’s initial version of such trips, called Alumni Colleges, in 1970. Featuring faculty lectures, seminar discussions, and recreational field trips, the first Alumni College was hosted locally in Forbes. In the summer of 1976, the first international edition brought 35 travelers from the classes of 1925 to 1965 to Rouen, France.
The Princeton Journeys name entered the market in 2004 after successful models at Harvard and Yale, brochures for which double-affiliated Princetonians would observe and ask: Can I do this with Princeton?
“There were two main goals that remain the goals of Princeton Journeys today,” says Bridget St. Clair, who has been the executive director of Princeton Journeys since 2015. “The first is engagement with the University, whether that’s the faculty that join the program, and engagement with other alumni as a way to build community. And number two is education. The real focus is to learn and to have some experience of lifelong learning.”
So what is a Princeton Journeys excursion, exactly?
For the uninitiated, it is a trip organized by an arm of Princeton’s Alumni Affairs office, part of a catalog of up to 22 such trips designed each year. Led by faculty members or University alumni whose academic or professional expertise overlaps with certain geographies, these trips take place on land, small boats, or large cruise ships cosponsored by other universities and organizations.
The prices of the 2025-26 roster range from $4,990 (Dublin and Belfast) to $12,990 (Madagascar and the Seychelles), the cost dependent on the length of the journey (days or weeks) and the kinds of activities involved (local museums or coral atolls populated by giant tortoises).
Around half the participants are usually Princeton alumni, while the rest have some kind of familial affiliation. Local tour operators serve as collaborators who help with logistics. It is customary for study leaders to provide lectures, setting up impromptu classrooms in campsites and cliffside temples.
Leslie Jennings Rowley, the associate director of the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at the University, preceded St. Clair as the inaugural executive manager of Princeton Journeys from 2004 to ’15. She suggests the experience resembles something of a return to Princeton life.
“The whole spirit of Princeton comes through,” she says. “We love our precepts, and these are like little roving precepts around the world.”
Adding to “the spirit of Princeton” is the kind of miraculous access that the Princeton name allows. “I don’t know how Princeton does it, but they have connections,” says Louis Tucciarone ’79, who joined a trip to South Africa in 2008. While waiting to go to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other prominent anti-apartheid activists had been imprisoned, Tucciarone popped into a nearby gift shop and bought a memoir by ex-politician Ahmed Kathrada. The group had learned about Kathrada on their visit to an African National Congress hideout in Cape Town just the week before.
“As I walk out of the gift shop, who’s standing there with our tour guide?” Tucciarone asks, a big smile on his face. It was none other than Kathrada. “He was in the cell next to Mandela for 25 years,” Tucciarone explains, recalling the tour Kathrada subsequently gave of Robben Island. “You can never get something like that on a routine trip.” Rick Hankins ’68 — who, with 15 or 16 trips under his belt, holds the record as the alumnus who has participated in the most Princeton Journeys to date — had a similarly star-studded encounter in 2010 on a 16-day boat trip traversing the Black Sea.
Primarily organized by a now-defunct travel company called World Leaders Travel, the trip — which was cosponsored by Princeton Journeys alongside Harvard, Yale, Foreign Affairs magazine, and others — was led, in part, by then-Librarian of Congress James Billington ’50, and featured as speakers former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
On the first night of the trip, Hankins went up to Rice during dinner and said he’d watched her perform a Brahms piece at the Richmond Forum four years before. Was she going to play something on this ship? “No, I couldn’t!” she responded, laughing.
Sure, it was a little disappointing. But the following night, Hankins did get to sit next to the former secretary of state (“Call me Condi!”) over dinner.
However incredible, the special access of that trip came at a cost. The World Leaders Symposium in the Black Sea — which involved three nights at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow — cost $23,990 per person. The trips typically cost much less; the average price of this year’s catalog totals $7,280.
Participants on most Princeton Journeys excursions can expect stays in five-star hotels and three-course meals. Because of the higher price point, most participants tend to be older than 50. Moreover, with the trips usually lasting weeks rather than days, the Journeys are not only costly but pose a challenge for younger alumni working full-time jobs.
Considering these obstacles, “Buenos Aires: A People-to-People Adventure” was an experiment to try to engage recent alumni by offering a discount. Defined as those who graduated within 15 years of 2024, “recent alumni” were expected to pay $2,499 (not including airfare and personal spending) for the trip — $500 less than those who graduated before 2009.
Having listened to Salama speak about his reporting in South America during a Princeton Pre-read event in 2022, St. Clair approached him about leading a trip. She understood that, if the program were to attract younger alumni, “we need to make a trip that is more affordable, shorter, and less challenging to get to.”
They settled on Buenos Aires, where much of Salama’s latest book — Strangers in the Desert — is set. Though not the first trip to be targeted toward recent alumni, promotion and planning for the Buenos Aires trip differed from the usual playbook.
Aside from the more accessible price point and five-day itinerary, the Journeys team experimented with class officers from those first 15 classes advertising the trip via email. (The tactic seemed to have a middling effect: Post-2015 alumni learned about Princeton Journeys more via friends. It should also be noted that Princeton Journeys has paid for advertising in PAW in recent years, including a supplemental section that appeared in the September issue.)
Of the 17 people who enrolled in the Buenos Aires trip, 15 were Princetonians; 13 were recent alumni; 10 graduated post-2015. Populated mostly by those in their 20s and 30s, the trip activities reflected such. When planning, Salama was told that the typical day on Princeton Journeys ends around 8 p.m. “And every night we were done at 11 or 2 a.m.,” he says. The itinerary included the soccer game, a rock concert, and all-night tango at a local milonga. “That’s the beauty of Argentina. It’s a late-night culture. It’s the best place to be young in the world,” Salama adds.
“Because these young alumni trips are really custom, it takes a little while to make them come to life,” says St. Clair. “We wanted to see if this one was going to sell before we put another one on.”
The trip was successfully filled, and not only by recent alumni. Yasmina Vinci s’59 and her daughter, Vanessa King ’93, were encouraged to sign up when Vinci met Salama through the National Head Start Association, which she directs. The mother-daughter duo had also taken the Trans-Siberian railway on a Princeton Journeys trip and was keen to make another.
“‘Recent alumni’ is more of a mindset than a firm requirement,” King joked, when the three of us hopped on Zoom a month after our trip. We fondly recalled the conversation King and I had shared about our respective moves from Princeton to England — she to Cambridge, I to the “other place.” As we talked, we were joined by a tableful of other Princeton women eating cuts of freshly grilled ribs and skirt steaks doused with homemade chimichurri. We laughed. We exchanged observations and stories. It was day three of the trip, and somehow it felt like we had known each other for much longer than that.
Though a Princeton Journeys trip is a holiday at its core, it does demand of its participants a certain alertness. Plans have a way of changing last minute, for reasons as innocuous as a museum unexpectedly changing ownership (as we encountered on day one), or entry visas getting denied, as one trip to China confronted in 2008.
Dora Ching *11, who has led Princeton Journeys in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, and Bhutan, shares that even study leaders can expect surprises. “What I tell the travelers is that I’m going to share my experience, but I also signal to them how my preparation meshes or doesn’t mesh with the on-site experience,” she explains. “That we are all learning.”
Though Ching — who is the executive director of Princeton’s Tang Center for East Asian Art — is familiar with Tibetan Buddhism, Bhutan was new to her. On the last day of the trip, participants traveled to the Tiger’s Nest Monastery. While Ching could speak on the temple’s architecture and the iconography of the sculptures, the group’s local guide, a Buddhist adherent, could describe how their ascent had resembled a pilgrimage.
For leaders such as Ching, Princeton Journeys double as opportunities to collect material for future classes — a symbiotic effect that Stephen Teiser *86, professor of Buddhist studies in Princeton’s religion department, described in a 2009 Princeton Weekly Bulletin article as “rekindling [...] enthusiasm for teaching back in Princeton.”
Learning opportunities also arise when one least expects them. We were listening to our local tour guide, Princeton history graduate Martín Marimón *17, explain the political significance of Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires when Salama quietly stepped aside. He returned beside a street vendor with a flat basket of chipas — doughy rings of yucca with cheese — balanced on his head. “This is Ramón Martinez,” Salama announced. Martinez had been making his usual sales route that morning when Salama recognized, in the vendor’s flat, round basket, the wares of his own great-grandfather, who used to sell Syrian pastries like maamoul and baklawa on the streets of Buenos Aires in the 1950s.
What followed was something of an impromptu precept as participants peppered Martinez with questions like: What are chipas made of? Could he tell us more about his hometown, Misiones? What has changed over his 43 years working as an itinerant salesman?
“There was an intellectual curiosity that everyone had,” Marimón says, when asked how working with a Princeton group differs from other tour groups he’s led. “I don’t know if the reason for that was because they were Princeton alumni, but it might be, with the intellectual preparation, curiosity, the challenging questions.”
Make of Princeton Journeys what you will, but one thing’s for certain: It creates ways to recreate the Orange Bubble in places beyond New Jersey. It could be in Bhutan, Ireland, Australia. Malta, Cuba, Antarctica. We found it in Buenos Aires when we walked into the apartment of Robb and Liz Maass, both Class of ’78, whose Argentine home became, on the very last night of our trip, a version of Reunions.
Over empanadas and pizza, participants got to meet a range of local alumni including Ann Noguer ’05, president of Princeton’s Alumni Schools Committee for Argentina, and Naman Jain ’17 and Vidushi Binani Jain, who happened to be in Argentina on their honeymoon.
“The other travelers with you, the other alumni, are some fascinating people,” says Tucciarone. “You forge relationships. And you resume relationships you haven’t had for many years.”
Inadvertent reunions are common. In 2011, Tucciarone boarded a cruise ship in Sicily and walked up to the trip’s study leader, French and Italian professor Pietro Fassica. “He was like, ‘Oh! I know you,’” Tucciarone recounts. “I said, ‘You really remember Italian 101 from 1978?’”
The two have remained good friends since. Tucciarone invites Fassica to his eating club each Reunions. Ching exchanges holiday cards with Bill and Nancy Harwood, both Class of ’79, who have been on three of her four Journeys. Opening my hotel room door in Buenos Aires, I came face to face with my classmate Emily Reinhold ’21, with whom I used to share meals at the Rocky-Mathey dining hall. We hadn’t caught up since graduation.
Says Marimón, who lives in Buenos Aires, “Since I live far from Princeton and the U.S. in general, it’s been difficult for me to keep my links with people with whom I shared all those years. So for me it was a good occasion to reconnect with the University as an institution, and I even connected with local alumni that I didn’t know.”
When St. Clair reached out to Marimón in 2023 about the recent alumni trip to Buenos Aires, he was glad that the opportunity had resurfaced; a prior trip scheduled to Argentina in 2020 had been canceled due to the pandemic. But instead of pausing programming entirely, St. Clair invited study leaders to create virtual lectures that were collected, edited, then launched on the Princeton Journeys website as part of its Live Lectures series, which is ongoing.
The response was enthusiastic, according to St. Clair, and alumni can anticipate the rollout of an expanded (free) virtual lecture series over the next couple of years.
Though Princeton Journeys has made its reputation on trips abroad, it is also looking to expand its existing repertoire of domestic trips. In 2018, now-retired history professor Martha “Marni” Sandweiss led a trip to New Mexico, where participants visited the pueblos of Native alumni. In 2022, 25 travelers participated in a Civil Rights trail weekend in Alabama. “We’re trying to make sure that the stories we are telling are reflective of Princeton’s campus today, but also highlighting the stories within our own country,” St. Clair says.
On the final day of the Princeton Journeys trip to Buenos Aires, participants boarded a bus that took us around the city’s graffiti murals — from hip Palermo, where we’d shared our first dinner, to the famous rainbow-hued streets of Caminito — as our tour guide explained the cultural histories that linger across the city’s walls. Here was a public and unmistakable homage to Argentine soccer icon Lionel Messi. There, a subtle recognition of the lives lost and “disappeared” during Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 20th century. Everywhere, the sense that there are fascinating stories embedded even in the places we take for granted — and how these stories stay with each of us in different ways.
“Journeys have tremendous power to build connections and build bridges and start conversations between people who otherwise wouldn’t have conversations,” Salama says. With departure looming on the horizon, a smaller group of participants — representing a mix of class years, majors, and hometowns — headed to a pizza parlor at Salama’s recommendation to share Argentina fugazzetta for a final lunch. We exchanged our highlights. We wondered when we would see each other next. Later, Salama would tell me that one of the participants said the trip had made Buenos Aires feel like home. To create this impression was, he says, the intention; that it happened was a function of good planning, group chemistry, and above all the fact that we had all shared a home before.
Jimin Kang ’21 is a freelance writer and recent Sachs scholar based in Oxford, England.
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