10 Spooky Adventure Destinations Around the Globe

Just in time for Halloween, we've pulled together our list of the top 10 scariest adventure spots around the world. We're not talking your average haunted hayride: These destinations have a long history of creepy lore. They're also great adventure destinations, just make sure to pack your garlic necklace and your silver bullets.

Sleepy Hollow, New York

Made famous by Washington Irving's spooky tale The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, this historic town is the quintessential eerie fall destination. By day, experience the colorful foliage on the Old Croton Aqueduct Trailway: it passes the Pocatino River near the spot where the Irving's Headless Horseman scared Icabod Crane. At night, visit Irving's headstone as you tour the town graveyard by lantern; you might just hear the faint sound of hooves pounding and heads rolling in the distance.

sleepyhollowcemetery.org
aqueduct.org

Catacombs of Palermo, Italy

If you thought the catacombs of Paris were creepy, brace yourself. In the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, you wont just see a few old bones. Skin, hair, and clothing hang on the intact skeletons of people long deceased. Walking among these dead bodies makes for one of the ghostliest adventures out there.

St. Louis Cemetery #1, New Orleans's Oldest City of the Dead

One of our 100 Adventure Towns, New Orleans has plenty of non-bone chilling adventures. But walk through the vast cemeteries of above-ground graves known as the City of the Dead, and you'll see why this is one of the spookiest spots around. Visit the grave of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, rumored to have walked the streets of the city even after her death in 1881. If you perform a series of knocks and leave an offering at her tomb, you can channel her power and perform your own Voodoo curse. Or so legend goes. Just make sure to go in a group: Muggers sometimes lurk in the narrow paths between large tombs.

Best New Trips in the World: Hike and Rappel on Costa Rica's Caribbean Coast

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Costa Rica. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

Costa Rica: Coast Confidential

With Costa Rica’s Pacific coast looking more and more like Southern California’s —overdeveloped and overcrowded—it’s a far cry from the adventure getaway of 15 years ago. And until recently, the country’s other coast, the Caribbean, simply wasn’t a viable alternative. But the extension of a paved road to CR’s far east has unlocked the area’s beaches and parks, and inspired one outfitter to launch a new trip. Wildland Adventures’ nine-day excursion begins near the Panama border at Selva Bananito Lodge, a family-owned eco-retreat on a private, 2,000-acre preserve. You can hike through rain forest, rappel down an 80-foot waterfall, and help reintroduce a tropical hardwood forest to the area by planting trees on a rundown 19th-century banana plantation.

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: Costa Rica"

Ski Report: Early Snowfall Sends Skiers to the Rockies Backcountry

Snow is coming early to the West this year. While El Nino recently brought in two feet at Tahoe, the Rockies are now getting an early-season dumping with projections upwards of 18 inches of snow over the next few days. Few ski resorts have opened their lifts yet, but it's not too early to break out your skins and start exploring the backcountry.

"It's sweet because the ski season is going off from now until June in some places," said Harrison Buck, director of BuckNaked Visual Works, a ski film production company based out of Crested Butte, Colorado. His suggestion? Start in Leadville, the highest incorporated town in the U.S. at 10,152 feet. The surrounding high-mountain passes make for a great variety of early-season runs above tree line. This weekend, try Independence Pass: before the road over the pass closes for the season you can drive to the top, pick your line, and ski on down.

Get outfitted with maps and avalanche gear at Sawatch Backcountry in downtown Leadville. There, knowledgeable locals will set you up and point you in the right direction.—Greer Schott

Find out where to ski now with our guide this year's best deals, trails, and upgrades >>

New Zealand Hiking Challenge: One Man, One Week, and 223 Miles of Trail

New Zealand's Great Walks, nine hiking loops that range from about 20 to 50 miles around, provide the country's ultimate scenic tour. "They're iconic long distance hikes," said Kiwi adventurer Malcolm Law. “The very best New Zealand landscapes.” Good thing, because Law's sure going to need something to distract him on his daunting endeavor.

Starting November 25, Law, 49, will attempt to do in a week what might usually take a month: covering seven of the Great Walks in as many days on foot—that's 223 miles of challenging trail running. Law came up with his 7 in 7 Challenge to raise money for Leukemia research—a cause that's been close to his heart since age nine, when his older brother died of the disease. From the time he sold his market research business last year and began training for the event, to the day that Law embarks on the challenge, he'll have run roughly 2,000 miles in preparation. “You just have to remind yourself," he said, "would you rather be out here feeling some pain in this beautiful scenery, or giving a presentation to a bunch of people about toilet rolls?”

Best New Trips in the World: Horseback Ride Across Chile and Argentina

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Chile and Argentina. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

Chile + Argentina: Trot Cross Continent

This March, Patagonian guide Martin Jones, who has quietly led Boojum Expeditions trips in South America for 15 years, will realize a personal dream of his: leading the first ever guided horseback crossing of the continent. Ten client riders will join Jones, four Argentine gauchos, and Boojum owner Linda Svendsen for the 625-mile hoof from Chile’s Pacific shores through the Andes to Argentina’s Atlantic coast. You’ll pick your way along stock trails across central Patagonia, climbing 8,200-foot mountain passes and dropping down into the Chubut River Valley, continuing through the Argentine lowlands, and ending at the Valdés Peninsula. You need not be an expert horseman to sign up, but you should be comfortable spending three weeks in the saddle.

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: Chile and Argentina"

A Case For Zimbabwe: Five Reasons to Go in 2010

Mark Nolting of the Africa Adventure Company was recently in our offices singing the praises of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe?!? Place of rampant inflation and starvation? Run by iron-fisted crazyperson Robert Mugabe? We had questions, and Nolting had answers. And, biased though he may be—his wife is from the place, and Nolting’s company has some new and amazing trips there (such as 14 Day Zimbabwe World Heritage Explorer, which is new for next year)—his responses were pretty compelling. Maybe 2010 is the year to get to Zimbabwe, while the getting is good. Here are Nolting’s reasons for going, distilled:

Best New Trips in the World: Research (and Kayak and Ski) in Manitoba

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Manitoba, Canada. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

Manitoba: Tundra Quest

Visiting the world’s vanishing places has become a bit trendy these days—which makes the venerable Earthwatch Institute an unlikely tastemaker. Next year the research organization will bring travelers to what is arguably the most critically endangered site on the planet, then put them to work. Your lab is the lake-stippled tundra of the Mackenzie Mountains and the ridges surrounding Churchill, Manitoba, where permafrost is disappearing first (it’ll likely be gone by 2100) and temperatures are rising fastest (so far, 2ºF). You’ll stay in one of two research stations (watch for grizzlies at one, polar bears at the other), and help Earthwatch researchers monitor the ecosystem.

Photograph courtesy of Earthwatch Institute

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: Manitoba"

Best New Trips in the World: Biking Through British Columbia's Myra Canyon

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present British Columbia. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

British Columbia: The BC High Line

Anxious to protect its silver and gold stores, Canada created a railway through southern British Columbia in the early 1900s to keep certain stake-claiming international neighbors at bay. The resulting 250-mile-long Kettle Valley Railway crosses three mountain ranges and dozens of canyons—and since ceasing operation in 1972 has been gradually converted into a rail trail. This year one of the most scenic portions, Myra Canyon, was completed. Monashee Adventure Tours’ three-day cycling loop will link Myra’s 18 trestle bridges and two tunnels with the former mining towns of Penticton and Summerland.

Photograph Courtesy of Monashee Adventure Tours

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: British Columbia"

Where the Wild Things Are: Nature Calls the Shots on a Wild Rumpus in Australia

Director Spike Jonze’s new live action movie, Where the Wild Things Are takes on the ambitious task of bringing a boy’s boundless adventure fantasy to life in the real world. But where? To capture a stunning mix of extreme landscapes, Jonze’s team spent five months on location along the southernmost edge of Australia in Victoria. Here they found the rain, hail, whipping winds, and even rogue waves to be welcome, if daunting, challenges (particularly for the actors in the Wild Things costumes, which weighed up to a hundred pounds each). We caught up with production designer K.K. Barrett and producer Vincent Landay, both longtime Jonze collaborators, to learn more about where the action happened, close calls, and how nature called the shots.—Mary Anne Potts 

You considered many destinations—Argentina, Hawaii, New Zealand. Why Australia?
K. K. Barrett: We wanted to create a world that would be relevant to the story and a child’s imagination. And a world that Max could invent on his own and that the audience could absorb as new. Australia seemed to have the greatest diversity in a tight distance: Most of the locations were about 45 minutes to an hour and a half from Melbourne, and they were all so extreme. Max’s imagination drives the story as he's changing and inventing new worlds. He’s constantly taken aback by them and then accepts them and makes them his own. So each location needed to represent that.

Best New Trips in the World: Canoeing With Botswana's Big Game

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

A few years ago, the 320,000 acres of land connecting the Okavango Delta with Botswana’s Linyanti marshes were a trophy hunter’s paradise. Then along came National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert, who bought and transformed the region into the Selinda Reserve, a private sanctuary for lions, elephants, cape buffalo, leopards, and the rare aardwolf. The reserve’s centerpiece is the Selinda Spillway, a river that pours across the savanna, linking the delta with the marshes and providing thousands of animals with a massive watering hole. This year, the Spillway is at its highest level in three decades, which means more buffalo and elephants will come for a drink—and with them, more predators. To showcase the gathering, Explore Inc will lead canoe-camping trips in 2010.

Photograph Courtesy of Explore Inc

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: Botswana"