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 (QMI Agency files) |
Once upon a Neanderthal, all you had to do was accidentally step on a sleeping critter’s tail to find adventure.
Today, there’s an entire industry set up to sell off what once came so naturally.
For those wild at heart — but civilized enough to have a credit-card — there’s a world of ways to feel, if only in the retelling to friends, as if you’ve left our sheltered existence behind.
- Great Bear Nature Tours (greatbeartours.com), located in the central coast of B.C., offers a grizzly bear viewing program.
Guides Tom Rivest and Marg Leehane track the bears as they crawl from their mountain dens each spring, to graze on protein-rich sedges and grasses. Clients view the great bears during the day, and then retreat to soft beds at night. Price — Start at $1,350 per person, for two nights.
- Bike down the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Road’. Gravity Bolivia (gravitybolivia.com) offers scary runs down a Bolivian mountain pass locals call ‘The Death Road’. It’s 64kms of largely downhill riding, past grazing llamas, drug check-points and sheer cliffs alongside narrow dirt roads that fall away to sheer 1,000 meter-plus drops. Price — Bike guides cost less than $100.
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- Hike into the highlands of Laos to experience ethnic hill tribe culture for eight days. Cost — Starts at $1,465.
- Space is within reach, if you want to wait around awhile. Russia this month announced they’re ending their space tourism program, that would send the rich to the International Space Station for $20-$30US. However, a number of startup companies are preparing to soon rocket off. Price — Sir. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is planning sub-orbital spaceflights (virgingalactic.com) to the public for around $200,000 per person.
- Or if you want to go down and not up, plans are underway to build the Hydropolis Underwater Hotel (hydropolis.com). Located 66 feet below the surface of the Persian Gulf, just off Jumeira Beach in Dubai, the entire complex would cover 260 hectares. Cost — If ever completed, rooms would reportedly be around $5,000 per night.
- Sleep in a cave house in Cappadocia, Turkey. The Gamirasu Cave Hotel (gamirasu.com) is located in a 1,000-year-old Byzantine monastic retreat. Cost — Start at around $100 a night.
- Dive with great white sharks. There are any number of outfits in South Africa, Australia, the Bahamas and California that offer humans the chance to — from inside a cage at least — get up close and impersonal with a creature that’s perfectly designed to kill you. Price — Varies.
- Abercrombie & Kent (abercrombiekent.com), which specializes in tours for the wealthy, run caravans through the sands of the ancient world by camel. In Israel, Jordan and Egypt, the expeditions offer a taste of Bedouin life by having tea with locals, working up a Jordanian meal at the Petra Kitchen and jumping into the Dead Sea. Price — From $6,995 US.
- The Gaia Hotel and Reserve in Costa Rica (gaiahr.com) offers days exploring the country’s rainforest and running white water rapids. Price — From $1,305 to $3,570US.
- Rent Old Changi Beach Houses, in Singapore. Built by the sea, many guests have said they’ve felt as if someone was watching them. Others report being slapped by invisible, ghostly hands, or have heard the crying of old women. Price — Varies.
Man, it can be tough being a guy
At least when it comes to learning what you’re really made of, says Brett McKay, co-author of The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man.
McKay, along with his writing partner and wife, Kate, also run www.artofmanliness.com, which offers up wisdom once passed on by fathers and, in the days of black and white TV, your local barber.
How to tie a tie, hold a screwdriver, split firewood, command a room like a man and how to even apologize like one as well.
All are lost arts, says Tulsa, Oklahoma-based McKay, who finished law school last year, but put aside becoming a lawyer to focus on manly explorations.
McKay says men and women no longer have clear rites of passage in our society, and instead pass by simple markers of getting older — graduating, buying a car, leaving home and getting a job.
“In Africa, they can still take a boy away from a mother, so he can live with men…to learn from their wisdom,” he tells QMI Agency.
They go through separation, transition and reincorporation into the community, knowing more about themselves and their expected role. But in western society, he says: “We stifle the boyishness. They get scolded for being energetic and showing those traits.”
Adolescence now extends into the 20s and 30s.
“Ask people my age, and they’ll say they don’t want to grow up,” the 27-year-old writer complains.
“Men no longer face challenges. But that, traditionally, is how men defined themselves.
“So what I think you’re seeing is a longing for challenges.”
It explains everything from the popularity of mixed martial arts to survivor reality shows, he explains.
He’s sure: “What we see now is that longing.”