Indian adventure for £150
For more great holiday ideas, see page 41
miles of rolling sands. Find never-ending dunes and a spellbinding clarity to the night sky, especially when you sleep out in encampments such as the one at Wahiba Sands. GO: Experience Oman’s Arabian Sands with a small group on an eight-day trip, from £1,499 with flights. See explore.co.uk.
Free flow Great rivers
The world is swathed in great waterways, some of them easier to travel than others. In Europe, the Danube takes in no fewer than ten countries, and YOU can now get to India from just £149 if you are willing to fly the long way, via Iceland. WOW Air will start flying from London to Delhi via its Reykjavik hub from December 6. After two hours and 50 minutes you can cruise it all the way to the Black Sea in one of the longest of river journeys.
But the Amazon is the one that oozes river appeal, with huge chunks of its dense jungle and rainforest practically unexplored. Other parts are surprisingly easy to sample via a ship, which you board in Barbados. GO: The relatively compact cruise liner Braemar operates a 14-night Amazon river adventure, starting and finishing in the Caribbean and travelling upriver as far as Manaus. It costs from £2,299, including flights. See fredolsencruises.com.
Big hugs Forests
If only trees could talk, what stories they could tell. We tend to take them for granted but they are the world’s largest and longest-living organisms.
Some stretches of forest have existed longer than from Gatwick to Reykjavik, passengers carry on for another ten hours to Delhi. The route will operate three times a week, increasing to five times from January, on the airline’s new Airbus A330neo widebody jet liner. we have and the variety of woodlands, from the pinewoods of Siberia to the cloud forests of Costa Rica, is huge.
Canada’s British Columbia has swathes of tremendous cedars, particularly in the Great Bear Rainforest, where some are 90 metres tall.
On a completely different scale, and far closer to home, the laurisilva woodland of the Garajonay Forest of the Canary Island of La Gomera is barely more than head high. And yet this forest has been largely unchanged for many million years.
For the best selection of big beasts, head for California’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park, where some individuals along the Avenue of Giants approach 100 metres tall, weigh 4,000 tons and are 1,000 years old. GO: A seven-day fly-drive to San Francisco costs from £518, including flights. See virginholidays.co.uk.