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Going for a hike in the rust-red landscape of Jordan’s Wadi Rum is the closest thing you’ll experience to walking on another planet. So otherworldly is it in fact, that it’s served as the primary filming location for a number of space-based films, from The Martian (2015) to Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker (2019). And this intrepid nine-day adventure puts you right in the heart of it. You’ll spend the night with a local Bedouin family and hike through the red-walled Dana Canyons on the Shaq al Reesh trail. The next day, you can ease your aching muscles with a Dead Sea soak.
The jungle, mountains and Caribbean beaches in Colombia make it a hiker’s paradise. And this eight-day adventure makes the most of this lush landscape with a day of trekking through the jaw-dropping Tayrona National Park. Tayrona miraculously combines the best of all worlds – tropical rainforest and palm-fringed beaches sit against a backdrop of snowy mountain peaks – and you’ll want to keep an eye out for howler monkeys, iguanas (and, very occasionally, a jaguar) as you make your way through the thick vegetation. You’ll be rewarded with a sea dip at Cabo San Juan at the halfway point, before finishing in Canaveral.
If there’s one place every hiker dreams of taking on, it’s the Himalayas – and our epic 11-day expedition gives you the opportunity to do just that. You’ll start in the high-altitude, high-octane capital of Kathmandu – sling your backpack on and hit the dusty trail up to the hilltop temple complex at Nuwakot and spot proper Himalayan peaks in Sarangkot. It’s after this, however, that things get a bit tougher: a three-hour hike through rice terraces and remote villages will lead you to Naudanda, where you’ll spend the evening rowing out onto the mirror-like Phewa Lake.
With the heat and humidity, a hike in Thailand is rarely a stroll in the park – and our 10-day adventure includes two lengthy hikes to really get your blood pumping. The first is a full-day jungle trek around the hills of Mae Hong Son, where you’ll stomp through lush vegetation and stop to cool off at waterfalls along the way. The second one starts early, with a 4am wake-up to summit the peak of Doi Inthanon, where you’ll watch the sun break through the clouds. Your reward, later that day, is to feed and bathe former working elephants at Chiang Mai’s Elephant Nature Park.