Alexandra Tanbai

Alexandra is a passionate traveler and explorer. Born in Austria and currently living in Switzerland, Tanbai is her pseudonym as a hobby writer. It is Mandarin Chinese and derived from the combination of the first character for Tanzania (坦, pronounced tăn) as well as her Chinese surname (白, pronounced bái). Incidentally, the two characters in combination (坦白, pronounced tănbái) have the meaning of being frank and honest, perhaps to the degree of confessing. And that’s what Alexandra also hopes to reflect in her writing, an authentic account of her experience including innermost feelings and emotions, positive and negative, strong and vulnerable alike. Via her writing, she hopes to foster mutual understanding and thereby provide her tiny little contribution to making this world a better place. Kilimanjaro Uncovered is Alexandra’s first publication. It started with a simple idea—to provide a review of a little-known hiking route as well as helpful preparatory information that she found lacking in other Kilimanjaro literature. It ended with an extraordinary story of a truly life-changing experience—written in real time while the author was unaware of being the subject of transformation. On Kilimanjaro, Alexandra found what no book could have prepared her for: herself. Alexandra’s life changes triggered by her Kilimanjaro experience couldn’t have been more profound—from a career in corporate finance into founding a social enterprise; from being a hopeless city chick scared of a week in the wild into a hopeful adventurer scared of a life in the city; from being intimidated by her first travel to Africa into cycling all the way from Cairo to Cape Town. Less than a year after publishing Kilimanjaro Uncovered, Alexandra founded KiliGATE.com—the first and only online Kilimanjaro tour booking platform committed to responsible tourism. Her goal—make it easy for tourists to book their climb with a responsible tour operator and promote fair porter treatment. To make booking a fair & ethical trip easy for all destinations globally, Alexandra went on to found the social enterprise FairVoyage.com. Fair Voyage is on a mission to build the world's first multi-day trip customization & comparison platform, promoting exclusively verified responsible suppliers. By making it easy for travellers to book their vacation with the world's most sustainable travel companies, Fair Voyage hopes to build a sustainable solution for fair & responsible tourism.