A Global Hunt For Adventure
Want to endure gut-wrenching flights at a cosmonaut boot camp in Russia, go diving in the near freezing waters of the Arctic or spend two weeks hiking in Iran?
A growing number of people like that sort of thing, and National Geographic Adventure magazine has a list for them: the 25 greatest adventures in the world.
Senior editor Michael Frank has outlined some of these adventure getaways for CBS News This Morning Co-Anchor Mark McEwen.
Billed as the first annual adventure list, it includes half a dozen newly available exploits along with others that have been around for a while but remaining the editors' choice for most exciting.
Americans are working very hard and desire to do more than just sit on a beach when they travel, explains Frank. The list provides diversity both in location and interests.
Walking with the Masai in Tanzania is among the new treks listed in the fall edition of the magazine.
The trip is available to "six athletic adventurous participants" for a walk that covers 150 miles in 17 days, escorted by outfitters and local Masai guides, the magazine reports.
| The 25 Greatest Adventures Scan the list compiled by National Geographic Adventure magazine. |
The good news: Donkeys carry the gear. The bad news: The price is $6,495.
If you have fantasies of being a cosmonaut, you can keep reaching for the stars. That exploit carries a hefty $14,950 price tag for a week at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow.
"Thanks to the Russian economy you can actually train with cosmonauts," explains Frank. "You literally put on a spacesuit [and] experience zero gravity. "
The tour promises flights in a specially equipped aircraft that provides periods of weightlessness, rides in a massive centrifuge that simulates a launch and reentry in a rocket.
"If you're a diver, you can experience zero gravity by diving into specialized neutral buoyancy tanks that they have. You feel what it's like to be on a space walk," Frank adds.
Fans of shipwrecks and the cold, for example, might enjoy visiting the ship H.M.S. Breadalbane. The vessel sank in the Canadian Arctic in 1853 and the cold water has preserved its remains, now found 340 feet under.
The northernmost wreck ever found on the sea floor was located in 1980 and now submersible vessels carry visitors to the site.
"It's well preserved. You fly up there, hop in a submarine, take several 90-minute dives. You don't have to be a diver at all. You don't even get cold,"/b> Frank says.
It's a seven-hour flight from Ottawa, plus another half-hour hop in a small plane, but the $9,980 trip also includes evening presentations by marine biologists and local Inuit and an outing to a polar bear den.
For those who prefer hiking to diving, there's a 21-day trip to where tribes live in Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea.
"These are tribes - many of which have 2,000 people or less, [and] speak their own unique languages," Frank notes.
"In many ways, you could go and be the last person not of their culture to go and meet them before they literally ingrate with the rest of Indonesian society," he says, adding that for 21 days the price is relatively inexpensive: $5,000.
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