Babis Bizas
Babis Bizas has been traveling since he was a student. He followed the stream of young backpackers to India in his 20's. He loved Afghanistan and was fascinated by Bangladesh. He found a job on one of the numerous Greek ships anchored in the port of Colombo in Sri Lanka and sailed to Mozambique , South Africa and the United States. For the next 8 years he was busy traveling as a tour leader. In 1987 when he had already traveled to all the known tourist destinations, he decided to slow down his trips for a while (only), to concentrate on planning and organizing new tours for small groups. The Cultural Tours were born. The beginning was with Cambodia and Vietnam where he led the first group. Soon, the countries of West Africa like Chad, Nigeria and Guinea Bissau followed, where the locals saw for the first time such a number of people traveling together. Babis Bizas was the man for the unusual destinations!!! In 20 years of traveling either as tour leader or as an individual traveler, he had been all over the globe. Eventually he joined the expedition by soviet helicopters to the North Pole, in a rough 19-hours-flight round trip from the Siberian arctic coast and 18 years later put the flag in the South Pole too. He traveled numerous times to Antarctica, visited the remote Islands of the Aleutian Chain in Alaska, and explored the off beaten track islands of the Pacific. But his passion was the tribal areas of Africa and Asia where old cultures and traditions survived to our days, resisting modernization. He spent time with the Himbas in northern Namibia, the Hamers in South Ethiopia and with the Bela in Niger and escorted the first visitors to the tribal areas of the Apatanis in Arunachal Pradesh and to the mountain areas of Southern China. The National Geographic Traveler described him as "The most traveled person in the world". As a film producer is best known for Manuel de Coco's films "Unknown Land" (2012) the shootings of which took place in Yemen & Israel and "Invisible World" (2023), shot over in Tibet, Mongolia, Russia, Italy, Vatican City, Greece, Israel and Palestine.