Best New Trips in the World: Hike and Snorkel in the Philippines

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 the Philippines. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

PHILIPPINES: Summit to Sea

The Philippines has a PR problem. While it harbors as many islands as the Caribbean and some of the most spectacular reefs on the planet, the nation sees only a fraction of the visitors of nearby Thailand. Even travel companies, it seems, have bought the bad rap: Other than the occasional sea kayaking trip, U.S. guides have largely avoided the archipelago. But Wilderness Travel has finally gotten wise. This May the outfit will lead clients high into the 4,000-foot Cordillera Central, then deep into the world’s most biodiverse marine environment.

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Best New Trips in the World: Exploring Laos's Northern Hill Country

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 Laos. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

Laos: An Off-Limits Jungle

Traveling in Laos has always meant either a quick jaunt to Luang Prabang (the former royal capital city) or a monthlong expedition into terrain that wasn’t always worth the trip—think mosquitoes and a hothouse climate. But a new lodge in Laos’s hill country, north of Luang Prabang, is ushering in a fresh era of tourism. Reachable via the Ou River, Muang La Resort and its fleet of powerboats have transformed what was once a multiday water taxi ride to the region into a five-hour cruise. Guests can book rooms directly with Muang La or leave the planning to Asia Transpacific Journeys, the first (and so far, only) outfitter to run trips here.

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Featured Photo of the Day: Paddling Halong Bay, Vietnam

Halong Bay, Vietnam

This photo was taken while traveling through Southeast Asia. My stay in Halong Bay, Vietnam was a small "vacation" within a two-month journey. Traveling with a group of 16 with Pacific Discovery, we rented a boat named the Thanh Hung 09 for three days of relaxing, great food, a cave visit, and kayaking around the beautiful limestone islands. The sunsets in Halong Bay were the best I have ever experienced. Although I am merely an amateur when it comes to photography, I managed to capture this beautiful image.

This photo was taken with a Canon Powershot SD1000, simply a point-and-shoot camera with 7.1 megapixels and a few settings that allowed me to capture amazing pictures of Southeast Asia, including the option to change the shutter speed, the setting used in this photo.—Jenn Feasby

View more images in our photo gallery, then send in your own best picture (via our fan page on Facebook) for the chance to be featured.

Field FAQs with Holly Morris Picking Bushpig Over Burger King...And Other Advice

Holly Morris is a TV host (Treks in a Wild World, Globe Trekker), and the author of Adventure Divas. Post your questions here and they could get answered in the magazine.

Some of my most vivid memories are of bad moments with good people around the world who I inadvertently managed to shock, confuse, or insult. And all the capsizings, camel snot, and intestinal parasites? I like to think I screwed things up so you wouldn’t have to—and you won’t, as long as you heed my golden rule of adventuring: Do as I say, not as I do.

Q: I’m taking my fast food–addicted sons down the Mekong River in Vietnam. What’s the best strategy for getting surly teens to experiment with the local cuisine?

A. Food is always one of the first things I mention if I’m speaking to young travelers. I’ve found it effective to describe in gory detail how, under the watchful eyes of my hosts, I once ate a barbecued rat—piece by piece—in the high mountains of Arunachal Pradesh (tasted like clam, by the way). I like to cap these lectures off with a recipe for reindeer penis I learned in Lapland.

Meals with a gruesome backstory are big hits in the schoolyard—and earn serious cred for those who have tasted and lived.
So rest assured that when the waiter sets down a bowl of nhong tam (a Vietnamese silkworm delicacy), or some equally outrageous comestible, you’ll have your sons’ rapt attention as you explain that the sharing of food is a vital social exchange the world over—and how this will make a great story to gross out their friends back home. And if all else fails, threaten to leave them at the next village unless they stop pushing those monkey brains around their plate and eat them.

I once took three suburban American teenagers to the hinterlands of Guyana, where they lived, worked, and ate like local Amerindian families. For the first two days, the kids twitched, whined, starved themselves, and begged abjectly and repeatedly for Skittles. By day four, there was less grousing as they participated in a hunt with the indigenous men. By day seven, they ate with a new appreciation, and the oldest told me, as he gnawed on a hunk of freshly slaughtered boar, that his time in Guyana had been “awesome.”

Full disclosure: In the course of researching my response, I called my mom, who in the 1970s loaded me, my three siblings, and our reluctant father into a van for a yearlong road trip behind the Iron Curtain. “In my travels,” she said, “I’ve found there are three things you can find anywhere: Snickers, Fanta, and Johnny Walker Red. It wouldn’t kill them to live on Snickers and Fanta for a few days. If that doesn’t work, try the Johnny Walker and let them sleep.”

I do not endorse her advice.

Illustration by Jessie Ford

Beyond Green Travel With Costas Christ: In Bangkok, A $300,000 Dinner Causes Uproar

Text and photograph by Global Travel Editor Costas Christ

The pioneering ecotourism company CC Africa, whose mission is to “care for the land, care for the people, care for the animals,” hosted a summit in New York City this week to discuss if luxury travel can be a responsible form of tourism. Halfway around the world in Thailand, where I was recently, this topic has reached the tipping point.

On April 5, the posh Lebua Hotel in Bangkok invited 50 of the world’s richest travelers to a ten-course, $300,000 dinner on the hotel’s private rooftop. Six of Europe’s top chefs where flown in and paid $8,000 each for preparing the night’s menu. Guests dined on seafood risotto, scallops with truffles, and neck of Iberico pig, all washed down with prized vintage wines from France.

The only catch to this lavish feast was a requirement that the wealthy patrons also travel (by private jet) to a remote village in northern Thailand before sitting down to dinner.

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Beyond Green Travel: Cambodia's Crowd-Free Temples Offer a Sustainable Solution

By Global Travel Editor Costas Christ

To get a glimpse of what Angkor was like before mass tourism arrived, head to Koh Ker, a group of mostly unexcavated temples dating back over 1,000 years, including Prasat Thom, the highest temple pyramid in Cambodia. There is no place to overnight, so you have to day-trip it out from Siem Reap, which is about 90 miles away (you can negotiate a hired vehicle for around $50 to $75).

At Koh Ker, the jungle encrusted ruins stand much as they have for centuries—in the middle of no where. Although not as large as Angkor, they remain free from tourist crowds due to the remote location and a rough road leading to it (a new paved road is now two-thirds complete). There's another reason the crowds stay away: While exploring Koh Ker, you are likely to hear explosions from land mines unexcavated temples that still being unearthed and destroyed in a systematic process. This makes it important to keep to the well-marked trails.

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Beyond Green Travel: Who's Getting Rich at Cambodia’s Angkor Ruins?

Wandering around the temples of Angkor, arguably the most spectacular archeological site on the planet, I could not help but wonder to what degree the economically impoverished Cambodian people, who survived years of civil war, are benefiting from the tourism boom now underway in their country. It would take a detailed investigation to determine the full answer to this question. However, it was quickly clear to me that someone is getting very rich off tourism here—and it is not the local villagers.

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Beyond Green Travel: In Vietnam, Emptied Graves Make Room for Mass Tourism

In "Beyond Green Travel," ADVENTURE Global Travel Editor Costas Christ gives an eye-witness account of the ups and downs of ecotourism in dispatches from around the world.

At Vietnam’s China Beach, local villagers must dig out family members' remains from old burial grounds to make way for new resorts.

Over the last 15 years, tourism to Vietnam has grown by more than 1,000 percent, putting it among the fastest growing tourism economies in the world. The U.S. failed to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese during the “American War,” as it is referred to here, but tourism seems to be succeeding in doing just that.

Historic towns like Hoi An, which I first visited in 1994 and was taken by the beauty of its narrow streets and ornate wooden bridges, are now lined with handicraft shops, souvenir stores, restaurants, cafes, and tailors (the best in town is “Yaly” on Tran Phu Street, where 15 dollars will buy you a perfectly fitted silk shirt made on site).

Wandering Hoi An's streets, which still retain some of the charm that led to tourism's growth here in the first place, I found most of the local people I spoke with echoing Mrs. Chuong, who sells hand-carved chop sticks in the central market: “Ten years ago we had nothing and today we have jobs from tourism and can raise our families and buy food and clothes for our children.” 

The local view on all this tourism expansion in Hoi An is overwhelmingly positive. But it does come with a price, literally.

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Photograph by Costas Christ