1. Volcano BoardingWant to race down the side of an active volcano seated on a bit of board at speeds of up to 80 kmph? Volcano boarding is the sport for you. Said live volcano is in Nicaragua, the 2,380 ft-high Cerro Negro, or black mountain, Central America’s youngest volcano. It’s erupted over 20 times since its birth in 1850, making it rather an active specimen–which only adds to the thrill of the sport. Volcano boarding started in 2005, and to date, more than 10,000 people have had a go at it. It involves a moderately taxing 45-minute climb up the mountain to the start off point, a short training session, and you’re ready to whoosh down the slope. It’s a wicked ride–the side of the mountain is covered in pebbles and dust that fly into your face as you try and stay balanced on the piece of board as it zooms down. Protective jump suits, knee pads and helmets are de rigueur and don’t try and scream when you hit 80, the results aren’t pleasant. If you want to spike up the adrenaline, try the same 1,600-ft descent standing up.For more information check out www.bigfootnicaragua.com; www.tierratour.com or www.vapues.com2. Themed CruisesThere was a time when a cruise was all about the experience of life on the high seas. That’s so vanilla now. The new wave of voyages are all about the theme, and your choices are many. Marina from Oceania Cruises is all about gastronomy, with ten restaurants of which six are gourmet, a culinary studio for lessons and La Reserve for wine tasting. Too restrained for you? Try Carnival Magic from the Carnival Cruise Line whose water slides are as scream-inducing as anything on land and a whole lot of other waterworks that will have you have you soaking up the fun. Disney Dream from the Disney Cruise Line also offers some magical entertainment taking you into the world of Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean with interactive technology. Too frivolous? Try a Hurtigruten climate voyage in the Arctic circle, including polar bear spotting and lectures. Check out www.oceaniacruises.com; www.carnival.com; www.disneycruise.disney.go.com; www.hurtigruten.co.uk3. Bibliophiles BreaksEver since The Da Vinci Code sent masses of people on conspiracy theory tours of Paris, and Harry Potter showed them magical London, there’s no gainsaying the popularity of holidays for bibliophiles. Literary festivals are the new Woodstock, Hay-on-Wye draws a staggering 80,000 most of whom have camped out in the fields; closer home, Jaipur Literary Festival drew around 35,000 this year. If the festival is too long drawn out for you then there’s The Reading Weekend, which looks to be a new English institution combining the pleasures of a classic countryside retreat with bibliotherapy, bedtime stories and literary suppers. Such is its success that it’s soon going to become The Reading Week and up sticks to the Caribbean. Besides the ubiquitous tours based on books, there’s now also the possibility of live like your favourite author, with literary vacation rentals. Abercrombie & Kent offers East African Hemingway Safari and Jane Eyre & Bronte Country tours; visit www.abercrombiekent.com; and also check www.readingweekend.co.uk; www.novelexplorations.com4. Adults onlyKeep a hold on those X-rated thoughts, the new adult-only holiday aren’t so much orgiastic getaways as childfree zones. If you don’t want the crying and voluble excitement to disturb your vacation, you aren’t alone. There’s a growing number of people who want to leave the kids at home and check into resorts that cater only to grown-ups and some hotels now institute age bars. Some shoot for no-under-10s (Kim’s Beach Hideaway near Sydney, Australia), others raise the bar to no-under-16s (Triple Creek Ranch in Montana, USA). The Sandals chain of hotels in the Caribbean is 18+ as are the Excellence Resorts in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. You know adults-only is catching on when the ultimate child pleaser, Disney, offers Adult Exclusive tours. Then there are some places just all about adult fun, and boy! are they popular: Las Vegas, for example, where children aren’t allowed in the gaming rooms and much of the entertainment is adult oriented.Check out www.sandals.com; www.abd.disney.go; www.excellence-resorts.com; www.triplecreekranch.com; www.kims.com.au5. Geocaching How do you upgrade the treasure hunt to the 21st century? Replace the map with a GPS device or your smartphone (it has the app), the clues with GPS coordinates and the treasure trove with a cache that possibly contains coins and key chains, and you have a game that is currently the obsession of millions across the world. Geocaching was born back in 2000 when greater accuracy on the Global Positioning System was made available to everybody. As people wondered at its uses, computer consultant Dave Ulmer came up with one idea ‘GPS Stash Hunt’, which transformed into the much cooler Geocaching (there’s even a GeoWoodstock, the world’s largest Gocaching event). There are around a million caches hidden all over the world, from the top of Ben Nevis in Scotland, to the streets of New York or a ruin in Paris. They could also be just down the street from you. Look for coordinates on geocaching website and let the hunt begin.Check out www.geocaching.comadvertisementadvertisement6. B&B in DelhiIt’s not a combination that you would ever have expected to see in the same sentence, but Bed & Breakfasts in Delhi are a reality, and likely to trigger off many more in the country. Because who wouldn’t want to stay in properties that provide all the creature comforts of hotels at less than half their prices and give you the opportunity to soak in the local flavour just by interacting with your hosts. Not to mention the added lure of great home-cooked North Indian food. Delhi Tourism has two categories of B&Bs–Gold and Silver–depending on the establishment’s facilities, amenities and size of rooms. Rooms start at Rs. 2,000 and can go up to around Rs. 7,000. The B&Bs are located in locations as diverse as Rajinder Nagar, Civil Lines, Malviya Nagar, Nizamuddin, Maharani Bagh, Friends Colony and Sultanpur. For a full list, search for B&Bs at http://delhitourism.nic.inSome options worth checking out: Sai Villa: www.saivilla.com; Delhi Bed and Breakfast: www.delhibedandbreakfast.com; Eleven: www.elevendelhi.com; The Estate Bed & Breakfast: www.theestatebnb.com7. Culinary vacationsFirst there were the wine tours, then you booked into villas in Italy and Provence and learnt to cook, then the rest of the world got into the game, so you could visit anywhere from the Far East to the Mid-West to add to your kitchen prowess. Now the culinary vacation shows up in a couple of new avatars. Like the outdoor culinary vacation, where you spend your days whitewater rafting or hiking and your evenings cooking wild salmon and Pacific oysters, learning from a gourmet chef and savouring the whole with wine that’s been packed for the trip. Or experience the hyper-genuine. Become a member of Home Food Italy, visit locals at mealtimes, help with the preparation of lunch or dinner, then enjoy the repast with the family. Or connect with the likeminded. There’s a festival for every food fad and type ever invented. Slow Food, Real Food, Real Street Food. Take your pick. Check out Wilderness Gourmet Rogue River rafting, USA: www.oars.com; Culinary Whitewater Series by ROW Adventures, USA: www.rowadventures.com; Home cooking: www.homecooking.it; The Crave Sydney International Food Festival: www.cravesydney.com; Taste of London: www.tastefestivals.com/london; Cheese slow food festival: www.cheese.slowfood.com8. HomeswappingYou’ve watched it in movies, you’ve read about it in books, and now all you need do is list your house online and begin your own homeswap adventure. Admittedly India’s still taking baby steps compared to the world’s giant leaps but it’s a promising beginning for this whole new travel experience. Exchanging homes, cities and, to some extent, lives, homeswaps give you an insight to a city as a resident, not a tourist. They’re also super-economical, a great way to engage with the locals, and make friends with your swapper. While the traditional homeswapping has you making simultaneous exchanges, for anybody with a second home, websites also offer the opportunity to trade at different times. The best homeswapping websites require you to pay a membership fee. Check out www.guardianhomeexchange.co.uk; www.homelink.org; www.homeexchange.com; www.craigslist.org; www.ivhe.com9. Space flightBack in 1991 when Richard Branson registered ‘Virgin Galactic’ a space flight for tourists was met with more sarcasm than thrill. Now, in about two years, the first commercial flight is going to take off with six passengers on board, and yes, it’s going to be from Virgin Galactic. The past two decades have seen space flights change from science-fiction to travel industry. More operators have jumped onboard, such as the US-based company Space Adventures, which plans both low-Earth orbit trips as well as longer ones around the moon. Another US company in the market is XCOR Aerospace; Boeing is developing spacecrafts and spaceports are springing up. Of course, a trip into space, whether suborbital, just far enough to see the curvature of the earth and darkness out there, or a trip to the moon is not an inexpensive venture–seats on Virgin cost US$ 200,000, while a journey to the far side of the moon can cost you US$ 50 million. Despite that there’s a waiting list of people for the trips. Come 2015, when a number of commercial space flights will be ready for lift off, you’ll know whether you should start saving.Check out www.virgingalactic.com; www.xcor.com; www.spaceadventures.com10. HomestaysIf you haven’t done a homestay yet, you haven’t done it all. Over the decade of its existence, homestays have not only become a means to visit areas where quality traditional hostelry is few and far between (Coorg, and the Spiti valley) but also a more nuanced experience of a place. Though much of the concentration of homestays is down South and up north–Kerala, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh–you can now find a homestay in almost every region. And the range in experience goes from the almost posh boutique hotel variety to the very basic village stay in the far reaches of rural India. Check out www.exploreruralindia.org; www.mahindrahomestays.com; www.keralatourism.org; www.himalayan-homestays.com11. Digital detox vacations The question to ask is no longer how connected your destination is, but rather how unplugged it is. At a time when your home, friends and office are just a phone app away, going offline has become the newest adventure. So what do you need to power off from the rest of the world? Will power is a puny force in the face of twitter, facebook and email. That’s why there are hotels like Arawak Beach Inn in Anguilla where your cell phone and laptop are placed under lock and key for the duration of your trip. Many other hotels deliberately have a no-internet policy. Then there are the lucky pockets of dead air, places that have no cell phone reception, such as the Gobi Desert or more easily Mountain Sky Guest Ranch in Montana, USA, where you can experience life before cell phones, going riding, fishing and heading outdoors. A more exotic destination is Mongolia, large parts of which also don’t have cell phone coverage. Stay in nomadic tents at the Three Camel Lodge in the Gurvansaikhan National Park.For more information and some options, check www.threecamellodge.com; www.mtnsky.com; www.arawakbeach.com12. VolunteerismCombining a holiday with a way to give back to communities may not seem like the acme of fun, but more and more people around the world are opting to add a sense of purpose to their time off. This can include anything from working on organic farms to teaching English, building accommodation, documenting wildlife, snorkelling around reefs, saving turtles or helping out in emergencies. It’s a chance to travel to places that may not fall on the tourist map and look at it from an entirely different perspective. The intensity can range from a couple of days of volunteering amidst a welter of travelling and sightseeing to morning to night work on your project. Similarly accommodation can veer from very basic third world country to luxury digs. Meaningful holidays not only give you the opportunity to help but are also a great learning ground; but when volunteering ensure you ask enough questions to find out whether your contribution will actually make a difference (for instance, teaching English for four days doesn’t quite make the cut). Holiday centricwww.workaway.info; www.handsupholidays.com; www.familyadventures.comMedium intensity www.wwoof.org; www.crossculturalsolutions.org; www.elephantnaturepark.org/volunteerHard core www.earthwatch.org; www.unv.org; www.worldvolunteerweb.org13. The journey, the experienceNot everything in the world need be a short (or long-haul) flight away. Travellers yearning for a return to earlier times when the journey was very much part of the holiday are embracing alternative means that include river cruises, horses, trains, even driving. Some places fairly beg for a certain type of transport and that’s what they are getting. So ride through the steppes of Central Asia, saddle up in the Thar or cross streams in the Okavango Delta on your faithful mount. Experience Eastern Europe on the Danube, sailing from Budapest to the Black Sea on luxury riverboats, or down the Amazon. Or travel through the red heart of Australia on The Ghan, a train that’s been around for 80 years; or through the continent’s lush south east on the newly introduced The Southern Spirit. Driving holidays have got their fair share of mileage through the years, but India’s now square on the map with a slew of scenic drives from the traditional Manali to Leh to the roads less taken from Siliguri to Kalimpong or Gajner to Khimsar. Horses: www.wildfrontiers.co.ukRiverboats: www.tauck.com; www.ietravel.comTrain: www.railaustralia.com; www.thesouthernspirit.com.au14. Following the pop-upsAs experiences become readily available to everybody, and exclusive doesn’t stay that way for more than a few days or at most, weeks, how do you tell apart people in the know from everybody else? This decade, you do it by following the pop-ups. These are restaurants, stores, clubs, exhibitions, live acts that, well, pop up, for an extremely short time and. if you didn’t catch them in that window of opportunity, you are unlikely to see them again. Pop-ups can last for anywhere from a few hours to a few months; a few might last for a year, but they’ll only be open one night a week. An example is the The Cube by Electrolux in Brussels, a restaurant that appeared on top of the Parc du Cinquantenaire on April 1 and will stay there for three months before moving on to its next location. Pop-up restaurants are slated to be the big trend this year, so watch out. Check out www.electrolux.be/cube; www.popupculture.co.uk; www.sensoriumdc.com; www.kickstarter.com15. Soul breaksEven as fitness breaks, bootcamps, and weight loss vacations tilt the scales at one end by addressing the body they are being balanced out by holidays that feed the soul. From meditation to holistic holidays, vipassana breaks, even time spent at a convent, spiritual wellbeing is now an integral element in your time off. And the fact that many of these retreats are set in stunning locations only adds to the entire process of rejuvenation. India’s already one-up on the world in this regard with yoga, meditation and vipassana all addressing the same theme. Reiki, t’ai chi and natural therapies such as acupuncture that reach parts of you otherwise ignored are also part of this subsect. But soul breaks aren’t restricted to the mystical sounding bits. Unleashing your creativity, eating organic and vegetarian are just as much a part of this. Stay in a convent or monastery: www.initaly.comSome options for spas and retreats: www.saswara.com; www.shreyasretreat.com; www.shawellnessclinic.com.advertisement
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