 Hiking
in the Dolomites, one of the 'extreme travel options'
featured by National Geographic Adventure.
Photo courtesy Walking Softly Adventures
|
WASHINGTON -- Want
to endure gut-wrenching flights at cosmonaut boot camp in
Russia, go diving in the near-freezing waters of the Canadian
Arctic, spend two weeks hiking in Iran?
Me
neither.
But there's a growing number of people
who do like that sort of thing and National Geographic
Adventure magazine has the list for them -- the 25 greatest
adventures in the world.
"Adventure travel is a
burgeoning industry. There are a lot of people with a real yen
to do something more than just sit on a beach when they travel
and who have the resources to do it," explained Mark Jannot,
executive editor of the new magazine from the National
Geographic Society, which goes on sale today.
Billed as the first annual adventure list, it
includes a half-dozen newly available exploits, along with
others that have been around for a while but remain the
editors' choice for most exciting.
Jannot fondly
recalled his own adventure on one of the listed trips:
paddling along the Tatshenshini River in the Yukon, a rafting
trip now open to kayakers too.
"The thing for me
that was so extraordinary about that trip was the sense that
you have of isolation and being somewhere, relatively
speaking, no one has gone before," he said.
Though the river has been open to travel for a
few years, "you never see anyone else. The number who have
gone on that river are fewer than the number of people I see
when I walk to the deli for lunch," he said.
One of the sites you might see in
Tanzania.
Photo courtesy Safi Safaris
|
Fans of
shipwrecks might enjoy visiting the ship HMS Breadalbane. The
vessel sank in the Canadian Arctic in 1853 and the cold water
has preserved its remains, 104 metres deep.
The
northernmost wreck ever found on the sea floor was located in
1980 and now submersible vessels carry visitors to the site.
It's a seven-hour flight from Ottawa, plus
another half-hour hop in a small plane but the $9,980 US trip
also includes evening presentations by marine biologists and
the local Inuit and an outing to a polar bear den.
Walking with the Masai in Tanzania is among the
new treks listed in the fall edition of the magazine.
The trip is available to "six athletic
adventurous participants," the magazine reports -- for a walk
that covers 240 kilometres in 17 days, escorted by outfitters
and local Masai guides.
Walkers cross the vast
savanna amid elephants, cape buffalo, zebras, giraffes and
their predators, tour the famous Olduvi Gorge and conclude
their trip during the annual migration of wildebeest.
The good news, donkeys carry the gear. The bad
news, the price is $6,495 US.
It took a team of
editors and researchers six months to collect nominations and
compile the list of the cream of the travel crop, Jannot said.
Perhaps the most extraordinary, he said, is
cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia.
"It's
an opportunity not may people will end up having."
The cover of the Fall 1999 edition of
National Geographic Adventure magazine.
--National Geographic Society |
That exploit
carries a hefty $14,950 price tag for a week at the Gagarin
Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow.
The
tour promises flights in a specially equipped aircraft that
provides periods of weightlessness, rides in a massive
centrifuge that simulates launch and re-entry in a rocket and,
for certified divers, a chance to join cosmonauts training for
weightlessness in a giant water tank.
The 25
great trips aren't ranked, so there's no No. 1 adventure.
Jannot said the group tried to provide diversity both in
location and for people with different interests.
For those who prefer hiking to diving there's a
13-day trek in Iran, beginning with the ruins of the ninth
century Castle of Assassins, a walk through the Elburz
Mountains north of Tehran then down to the tea plantations on
the Caspian Sea.
Other trips featured by the
magazine editors include:
--Searching for lost
tribes in Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of the island of New
Guinea.
--Joining the nomadic Kazaks of western
Mongolia for hunting trips using eagles to catch prey.
--Kashmir on wheels, a bicycle trip into the
Himalayas
--Climbing the Dolomites, a chain of
mountain peaks in northern Italy.
--Scuba-diving in Mexico's Noboch Nah Chich, the largest
known underwater cave system.
|
