From woo-hoo to boohoo: travel gets emotional
The buzziest trend in adventure travel? Journeys of self-discovery that trigger emotional detoxes and deeper connections with a destination.
For all its ubiquity, adventure travel is a curiously slippery thing to define. The Cambridge Dictionary has an adventure as “an unusual, exciting and possibly dangerous activity” – and while the last part is optional, a degree of jeopardy is implicit in the purest definition of any adventure. So I’m not sure that many of my supposedly adventurous forays actually qualify.
The heli-skiing trip to the Niehku Mountain Villa in Riksgränsen, in the far north of Arctic Sweden, was a joyous far-flung epic. But a true adventure? We were safety-briefed within an inch of our lives, and taken up in helicopters to whoop-holler down icing sugar powder fields with not a rock in sight. We slept in cloud-like Hästens beds, and – at communal dinners where a group of Swedish finance and construction bigwigs compared tales of Kamchatka and the Sydney-Hobart race – we drank Languedoc reds over six-course meals of Narvik skrei and Sami reindeer.
Similarly, my trips to Iceland have involved Instagram shots of volcanoes and crashing falls that have implied a certain derring-do, but have really involved a lot of driving beautiful safe empty roads and lolling around in hot baths. At the wonderful Deplar Farm, in the far north, I fell out of a sea kayak and was submerged in a two-degree plunge pool, but the overriding sense was of being cosseted and sound-bathed into a state of childlike bliss.
Of course, jeopardy can be difficult – if not unwise – to seek in a travel experience. But I wonder if a proper adventure requires at least some sort of dissonance. A few years ago, I went on a five-day hike across the tundra in Norway’s high north, organised by the great Norwegian polar explorer Børge Ousland to act as a taster of his record-breaking unsupported solo journeys to both poles. Our little group schlepped across monotonous white tundra with cross-country skis and pulk sleds, camping on the ice.
One night, after the sky had turned orange, then lit up with Northern Lights, the temperature dropped below minus 30 degrees. When I couldn’t feel my toes, and my eyelashes started to freeze together, I started to wonder whether my fate was to become a perfectly preserved corpse in this relentless white wasteland. The following day, with my boot laces frozen, I almost set fire to my tent trying to make porridge, then watched the porridge crack open my bowl, settling on my crotch in a sort of chilled oat pebbledash.
But though it was a frequently torturous experience, that trip also became a journey of the soul. Swishing through the near-silent nothingness, big questions started to appear. Who am I? Where am I going? What’s the point? In that meditative white space, I simultaneously had an acute sense of my own smallness, weakness and coldness, but also a sense of digging into some untapped store of something almost profound.
And when I spoke to Ousland after the trip, he further shifted my perception of what a real adventure looks like. Historically, we’ve tended to think of explorers as conquerors of sorts, a notion that hasn’t been helped by the fact that so much so-called adventure has been the preserve of privileged white men (and privileged journalists like me), with more than a whiff of colonialism. But, to Ousland at least, his arduous expeditions became about humility and supplication rather than planting flags. The first days were the hardest, he told me, when he could still feel the warmth of a hotel bed. But over time, when he was alone in the darkness and the minus-60-degree cold, he told me, “my mind slowly began to stop racing, and I’d start thinking like an animal; seeing shapes in the snow, sensing changes in the air. I began to think like a polar bear, sniffing the universe; surviving and just keeping on going.”
It turned out that his trips were in many ways prosaic – about managing supplies and simplifying his mindset – and that his ego wasn’t his friend, but the thing he had to discard like an unwanted skin. Or, in his words: “I was initially motivated by seeing what was beyond the horizon, but what I really went on was an inner journey. I found a balance, a harmony within myself.”
Certainly, to me, during well over a decade as a travel journalist and editor, the focus of adventure seems to have shifted from the external to the internal. The trend has moved away from generic bucket-lists (Sky-dive! Swim with sharks!) towards a search for meaning in an increasingly fragmented and wellness-obsessed digital age. We seem to be returning to the old Proustian idea that “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
One extreme example is The Extraordinary Adventure Club, run by ex-Marine Calum Morrison. The main event of this endeavour, typically solo and costing upwards of £200,000, is receiving a black envelope with cryptic instructions for a grand journey to an unspecified remote location – living off-grid with Mongolian camel herdsmen, say – but really it’s at least six months of extreme bespoke therapy, often in challenging locations, led by a crew of hand-picked life coaches, psychotherapists and scientists; possibly dance instructors or acting coaches.
“The most important thing we craft is an internal narrative,” Morrison told me. “A big part of transforming yourself is feeling mentally and emotionally dislocated, and vulnerable. It’s about helping someone to change their mindset, and that doesn’t happen just by gazing at a mountain range. You have to work for it.” The destination might be important, but it’s secondary to the internal transformation.
And when I think about my most adventurous recent trip, it wasn’t in a faraway place at all. It was in the Yorkshire Dales, on a men’s retreat called Men Without Masks: five days on the historic Broughton Hall estate with 24 other men, with no phones, coffee, alcohol, meat, or even books or magazines. Led by the sinuously no-nonsense Craig White – a former British Lions rugby performance coach, who had an epiphany on a Thai yoga retreat – the most adventurous moments weren’t the cold-water swim, the sweat lodge, the anger-release session with a baseball bat, the tree-hugging day in “noble silence”, or the strangely trippy breathwork and trauma-release sessions.
It was the times when we had to be totally vulnerable and real with each other: to discuss our secret shames, fears and loves. The bits where we were led to cry and hug and dance together – all of this entirely alien to me, with my defensive irony, my warped sense of masculinity, and my knee-jerk scepticism of anything excessively yogic.
These things terrified me, and left me feeling blown wide open, metaphorically naked and unmasked. But while making me feel small and scared, there was also a sense that I was somehow being positively rewired, ready to emerge just a bit stronger on the other side. I wonder if that might just be what a proper adventure feels like.
Four more heartfelt adventure tours
Retreat and Conquer: The 20-year-old company has a devoted following for its five-day equine therapy courses in destinations like Mustique, South Africa’s Limpopo or the Indonesian island of Sumba – which don’t involve riding, but leaning into horses’ innate ability to read our body language and offer clues to our psyche. Led by Andreas Liefooghe, a Belgian professor of psychology and psychotherapy, the connection with equine partners provides a trigger for an intense week of what he describes as “therapy on steroids”. retreatandconquer.com
Rat Race: The British company specialises in race-oriented challenges in remarkable places across the world such as the Mongol 100, which involves skating across the 100-mile Khövsgöl Nuur lake in Outer Mongolia; a 1600-kilometre cycling epic from coast-to-coast across the Andes; and a foot and fat-bike tour across the Namibian desert, finishing at one of the iconic shipwrecks along the Skeleton Coast. ratrace.com
Lurujarri Dreaming Trail: Every winter, the Goolarabooloo community around Broome lead a nine-day slow hike along the 80-kilometre Lurujarri Heritage Trail, camping while following the sand dunes, mangroves and salt plains of a traditional song-cycle route – with the goal not to rush, but to “arrive” and experience “living country”. With all cultures welcome, hikers can collect timber to learn to make karli boomerangs or coolamon water bowls, while slowing down to notice the patterns of nature. goolarabooloo.org.au
The Path of Love: Less a literal adventure than an emotional one, the seven-day Path of Love retreat has become a global phenomenon, with experiences held in the Hunter Valley, as well as across four continents. Established 28 years ago in India, it brings 30 people together with one-on-one nurturing from past participants for a week of intense phone-free catharsis, fusing Eastern spirituality with a banging playlist – every stroke, breathwork session and ecstatic dance designed to conquer past trauma and unlock liberating joy. pathretreats.com
Toby Skinner is the Features Director of UK Conde Nast Traveller
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