- Wellness & SPA
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written by Rough Guides Editors
updated 30.01.2019
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written by Rough Guides Editors
updated 30.01.2019
It's one of the ultimate travel goals: how to well and truly get away from it all. Here's ten trips, selected by the writers and editors at Rough Guides, that offer true isolation and recuperation. Share your own below.
The Mountain Bothy Association maintains around a hundred of them across the British Isles. They are very simple places: no water, perhaps a wood-burning stove and at best a platform upon which to roll out a mat to sleep. There’s no booking system, no room key and no charge – you simply turn up, sleep the night, tidy up and move on.
Bothies are only to be used for short stays and are too small for groups any larger than six. The Mountain Bothy Association (www.mountainbothies.org.uk) offers members details of where the various huts are located.
Wildlife, however, is another matter. You can watch (or catch) salmon as they swim and leap their way upstream to spawn. The sky is patrolled by buzzards, peregrine falcons, ospreys and even golden eagles. And amid the heather and pine-covered terrain, along with the many deer, there are wild boars, pine martens, otters and a couple of elk.
For more information on rates and activities see www.alladale.com.
Denali National Park, Alaska © Bryan Neuswanger/Shutterstock
Occasionally you’ll come across “social trails” of footprints where others have gone before you, but to limit your impact on the fragile ecosystem it’s best to avoid these and forge your own route; negotiating the boggy tundra, traversing ridgelines and following the many rivers in this spectacular heartland of Alaska – home to wolves, Dall sheep, moose, caribou and bears.
The challenge of negotiating your way across the trackless tundra, camping out in the wild and pitting your wits against Alaska’s elements requires determination, flexibility and ingenuity, but your reward is hiking in true wilderness with only wild animals and wildflowers for company.
Reservations (only available one day in advance) are made at the Backcountry Information Center at the park’s Riley Creek entrance area. For a checklist of equipment and advice on low-impact hiking in Denali see alaska.org/denali/advice-denali-backcountry.htm.
This wilderness is far from empty though. Around 200,000 northern fur seals spend their summer here to mate and give birth and a million sea birds, including fulmars, guillemots, puffins and kittiwakes form huge colonies atop the coastal cliffs.
Dr Vladimir Sevostianov, a marine biologist with more than 25 years’ experience of fieldwork in the region, leads two-week trips to discover the islands by sea and on foot. One day you might be bathing in a hot spring, the next following migrating whales or training your binoculars on colonies of sea birds on the cliffs above. Guests stay in simple cabins in Nickolskoe, the only town on the islands, or on board the research vessel, part-funded through tourist fees. As time is also spent meeting the local Aleut people you’ll leave with some insight into the culture of those who make this inhospitable place their home.
For more on the people, art and fauna of the Commander Islands see www.wildlifeworldwide.com/locations/commander-islands.
Lake Baikal is a frosty winter day © Julia Kuzenkova/Shutterstock
Jack Sheremetoff – a native of the nearby city of Irkutsk, where you can stay at his Baikaler Hostel – takes visitors from the hostel to explore this island, where you’ll peer over precipitous cliffs and shine your torch into icicle-filled caves. Accommodation is in the wooden home of one of Jack’s friends, where instead of running water there is a banya (a Russian sauna) to get clean. Dinners include omul, the salmon-like fish found only in these waters.
Three-night or four-night tours start from Irkutsk, a major stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway, five days’ travel from Moscow. For more on Baikaler Hostel as well as tour details see baikaler.com/.
Tourists are welcome as part of groups (or escorted individuals) and account for its second-largest industry – but they are still few and far between. All tourism must be approved by the government as being environmentally and socially sustainable, and as such the idyllic landscape – scattered villages surrounded by terraced paddy fields, soaring snow-covered peaks and stone mountain fortresses with foreboding iron doors – remains almost untouched by industrialization. The close familial bonds, religious devotion expressed publicly in an endless array of colourful festivals, and the shifting of the seasons all still define daily life for most of the people you’ll encounter.
Bhutan also has some of the best trekking in the world, from short visits to the villages in the sacred Bumthang Valley to the awesome Lunana Snowman trek – a 28-day high-altitude trek into the most inaccessible parts of the country, home to yaks, yeti legends and the vast mountain of Gangkar Punsum. Head off into the beautiful hills and you’ll probably come across more yaks than fellow walkers.
If you're planning a trip, the national tourism website of Bhutan is a good place to start: www.tourism.gov.bt.
Painted cliff formation on Maria island off the eastern coast of Tasmania © Sasapee/Shutterstock
Because it’s 14km offshore – and only accessible by a small ferry – Maria (pronounced “Ma-rye-a”) remains a hauntingly beautiful Treasure Island while the much-lauded Freycinet National Park just up the coast is besieged by coach tours. And it is the isolation that saw it swing from convict sink of the British Empire to Victorian health retreat, preserving the wildlife in the eucalyptus rainforest and making it Tasmania’s very own Noah’s Ark for endangered species.
Take to any number of paths and Forester kangaroo, pademelons and Bennetts wallabies can be seen bouncing away into the bush. Cape Barren geese, a breed near extinction in the 1950s, trim the grass by the jetty – just one from a spotter’s book of rare birdlife – while in a marine park you can see dolphins, seals or even whales in season. Of course, you can also just loaf about on some spectacular sands such as Reidle Beach, the sort of improbably perfect arc you ache to tell friends about. Or on second thoughts, maybe not.
Maria Island Walk (www.mariaislandwalk.com.au provides four-day luxury treks on the island from October to April.
Only on foot do you appreciate the epic quality of the Tarkine. To traverse the southern hemisphere’s largest temperate rainforest, camping beneath moss-bearded myrtles and bathing in waterfalls of chilled spring water, is to timewarp into a world of myth forged when mankind was just a glint in evolution’s eye. To hike 30km up its empty coastline is to be humbled, whether by evidence of tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal existence or by waves that travel unopposed from Patagonia.
Everyone loves a travel secret. Yet after a moratorium on logging was lifted in 2003, the Tarkine is “still wild, still threatened”, as the conservation slogan puts it. This may be one secret to shout about.
Tarkine Trails (www.tarkinetrails.com.au operates the six-day Rainforest Track and five-day Wild Coast trip from November to April.
The lodge is one of two established by the former director of New Zealand’s Royal Forest and Bird Society – the other, Arthur’s Pass Wilderness Lodge, is 130km from Christchurch. Perched between the Waimakariri River Valley and the Southern Alps, the accommodation here has panoramas that are hard to beat. During the day guests can have a picnic on mountain meadows carpeted in subalpine flowers, or trek to the many waterfalls that cascade down Mount Arthur. The lodge even has a working merino-wool sheep farm, and depending on the time of year you can help out with the lambing, weaning or shearing.
Both lodges are open Aug–May; for rates, reservations and activities see www.wildernesslodge.co.nz.
Houses built on artificial islands in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands © Jeffrey Aluta Jionisi/Shutterstock
One of the islands under threat, Tetepare, is the largest uninhabited island in the South Pacific. Over 150 years ago its residents fled, for reasons unknown, but their descendants continue to visit the island to hunt and fish. Rare skinks, turtles and birds nest on this safe haven, where, so far, the loggers have not been welcome. Small numbers of hardy tourists can visit and stay overnight in a handful of simple palm-and-wood chalets, with visitor fees used to create jobs and provide improved healthcare for Solomon Islanders. You must be accompanied by a guide at all times, who will come across with you in the boat.
You can help the island’s wardens (who are also the resident chefs, making simple fish and rice suppers for guests) with scientific research like counting coconut crabs or monitoring turtles; snorkel over giant clams and coral gardens or hike through one of Earth’s last untouched island wildernesses. If you like your experiences removed from urban life, then this may be the perfect getaway.
For directions from Honiara, reservations, a list of what to bring and prices see www.tetepare.org.
Where do you head when you want to get away from it all? Share your top tips below.
Top image: Sacred rocks Shamanka on the Olkhon island. Baikal, Russia © Marina Khlybova/Shutterstock
written by Rough Guides Editors
updated 30.01.2019
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