the times Saturday January 1 2022
100 trips for 2022 Travel 33
COVER AND BELOW: GETTY IMAGESin-depth view of life here, exploring
jungle villages, tropical beaches, farming
communities and the legacies of
Portuguese, Japanese and Indonesian
occupation — and getting a glimpse of
what lies ahead.
Details Twelve nights from £3,075pp (a
mix of B&B and full board), including
transfers, departing on October 9
(regent-holidays.co.uk). Fly to Dili10 Tackle Chile’s
Route 7
Best for A life-changing road trip
Arguably the world’s most spectacular
road trip, and indisputably one of
the most challenging, Chile’s Route 7,
aka the Carretera Austral, runs
770 miles from Puerto Montt in the
Los Lagos region to Villa O’Higgins in
Patagonia’s brutal, beautiful heart.
It’s a land of unending mountains,
intensely blue rivers and nights of
a trillion stars, all threaded on a
single-track, mainly gravel road.
As a trip of a lifetime it’s not one to
be rushed, so this itinerary gives you
three weeks in a 4x4, offering the
time in which to explore the lakes,
icefields and mountains by kayak, boat
and on foot.
Details Twenty-one nights from
£5,800pp (a mix of B&B and full board),
including car hire (pura-aventura.com).
Fly to Santiago11 Sea-kayaking in
Scotland
Best for Reconnecting with nature
Something good happens to your soul
when you’re paddling a sea kayak. The
steady rhythm of the paddle, the hiss of
the boat as it cuts through the water and
the overwhelming sense of privilege
combine to create feelings of serenity
and awe. But before surrendering to
this addiction you need to gain the
necessary skills to become a paddler.
You’ll get them on this five-day sea
kayaking introduction course on
loch and open water, based in
Torridon in the northwest Highlands,
combining daily instruction with
magnificent scenery and a cosy billet in
a lochside bunkhouse.
Details Four nights’ half-board from
£875pp; departures from April until
September; women-only departure on
August 13 (wildernessscotland.com)12 Big cats of South
America
Best for Wildlife encounters for the
whole family
The wildlife specialist Naturetrek has
embraced the fly-less, stay-longer ethos
of sustainable travel with this two-week,
twin-centre expedition in search of
South America’s big cats. It’s a grand
tour that begins with four days in the
Torres del Paine National Park
looking for pumas before relocating to
Brazil’s humid Pantanal to spot jaguars.
Led by expert local guides, your
chances of seeing both species seem
high: 2018’s trip tallied nine pumas and
six jaguars, and 2019’s a score of 11 and
eight respectively.
Details Fifteen nights’ full board from
£7,995pp, including flights, transfers and
guides, departing on September 26
(naturetrek.co.uk)13 Heli-skiing in
Andorra
Best for Off-piste thrills
In everything other than topography,
Andorra has never really been the high-Lycia escort their flocks away from the
parched coastal plains into the cool
pastures of the Taurus mountains, and
on this new group hiking trip you’ll be
joining them for autumn’s return
journey. But you’ll be doing so much
more than walking: looking after their
sheep; making cheese and butter;
cultivating vegetables; harvesting olives
and making oil. In return you earn a
boat trip over the Sunken City and
perhaps time to explore the astonishing
ruins of Patara.
Details Nine nights’ full board from
£1,395pp, including guides and
transfers, departing on October 1
(walksworldwide.com). Fly to Dalaman
9 Discover Timor-Leste
Best for Far-flung exploration
From 1975 East Timor’s struggle to rid
itself of Indonesian occupation was a
fixture in the foreign pages: a dirty war
in a distant land that few could point out
on a map. That occupation ended in
2002 after a referendum in 1999, and
with independence, newly named
Timor-Leste has made huge advances,
but this Catholic-majority nation isn’t
out of the woods yet. The new challenge
is to diversify an economy dependent on
oil and gas production — and tourism
could be one solution. On Timor-Leste
In Depth, a new 13-day tour, you’ll get an
end choice. All that is changing, with a
sprinkling of exclusive hotels tempting
the well-heeled skier to the Pyrenean
microstate, which is little bigger than the
Isle of Wight and easily accessible from
Toulouse or Barcelona. Thrill-seekers are
warming to it too. Heli-skiing is part of
the offering, with the Anglesey-based
operator Absolutely Snow pulling
together a thumping good package that
offers four “drops” (don’t worry, that’s
not a literal term), a four-day ski pass for
Grandvalira, the Pyrenees’s largest
resort, and four nights in the five-star
Grau Roig Hotel, which wouldn’t look
out of place in the most gilded corners
of the French Alps.
Details Four nights’ half-board from
£2,645pp, including flights, private
transfers and guiding, and heli-skiing
(absolutelysnow.com)14 Snow leopards in
Ladakh
Best for Winning photography
competitions
Artfully produced wildlife
documentaries have made nature’s most
elusive feline seem almost common, but
the truth remains that this ghost among
cats remains devilishly hard to spot. If
you are lucky enough to see one, your
trophy shot is more often than not a blur
on a distant slope, but in 2022 a new
camp in a high valley in Ladakh
promises to increase the chances of
seeing a snow leopard and the comfort
in which you’ll spend your downtime.
Lungmar is set up bush-camp style, with
luxury dome tents and a veteran staff of
conservationists and trackers. It’s
expensive, but snow leopard sightings
don’t come cheap.
Details Fourteen nights’ full board from
£3,995pp, including two in Delhi,
three in Leh and seven at Lungmar
Camp, plus flights and transfers
(steppestravel.com)15 Kayaking in Panama
Best for A sustainable South American
challenge
Much Better Adventures is a trailblazer
in sustainable adventure travel. Its chief
executive, Alex Narracott, is one of the
founders of the Tourism Declares
climate activism movement and every
trip is designed to focus as much on
people and planet as on profit. New for
2022 is a real challenge, combining
open-water sea kayaking in the
Panamanian Guna Yala islands,
jungle hiking in Chagres National Park,
and a rafting expedition down the
Chagres River. The total carbon cost
is 120kg — deal with that however you
see fit — and a note from the operator
mentions that you need to be fit
and willing to endure “minimum
home comforts”.
Details Seven nights’ full board from
£1,391pp, including flights and transfers
(muchbetteradventures.com). Fly to
Panama City16 Volcanic Spain
Best for Spectacular views
Not La Palma, but the little-known and
rarely visited Garrotxa National Park in
northern Catalonia — a bizarre yet
beautiful landscape of extinct volcanic
cones, mossy waterfalls and silent stone
villages. Until now, no tour operator has
offered holidays in Garrotxa, but for
2022 there’s a new seven-night, guided
group itinerary involving gentle hikes of
between five and nine miles a day — andMore trips next page
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7 Akodessewa fetish market, Togo
5 Petra, Jordan
13 Heli-skiing in Andorra