| Last Updated: Jun 21, 2008 - 1:56:50 PM |
Not sure what to do with your summer vacation yet? If you’re weighing sand and mai-tais versus seeing the sights somewhere, consider one of the multitude of new millennium travel alternatives instead. Here, the latest vocabulary that’s shaking up the traditional tourism world this century:
SUSTAINABLE TOURISM
: Travel that supports environmental conservation and protects cultural heritage while bolstering cross-cultural understanding and local economy.
AGRITOURISM
: Travel to rural areas to explore food production and country life via tours and hands-on activities, such as picking produce, riding horses, feeding pigs, tasting honey, learning about wine production, meeting farmers, or shopping for antiques and hand-crafted gifts.
Examples
: Wineries, dude ranches, farms, orchards, state parks, dairies.
VOLUNTOURISM
: Get yourself to a destination, then spend your time volunteering to help the eco-system and/or people of the local community.
Examples
: Post-Hurricane Katrina, post-2004’s Indian Ocean Tsunami. (Both events propelled large increases in this travel trend.)
DISASTER TOURISM
: Travel to places of natural disaster just to be a voyeur.
Example
: A guided bus tour through still-wrecked neighborhoods in New Orleans.
DARK TOURISM
: Travel to sites associated with death, tragedy, and suffering.
Examples
: New York’s Ground Zero, battlefields, former Nazi concentration camps, Chernobyl, L.A.’s Manson Murders site.
STAYCATION
: A vacation where one stays close to home. These vacations may be comprised of
daycations
, where each day is spent “vacating,” doing something fun, then returning home to sleep in one’s own bed.
Examples
: Local hikes, BBQs at friends’ houses, touring nearby museums, spa days, architectural tours, or just exploring new shops and restaurants.
GEOCACHING
: An outdoor treasure-hunting game in which players use GPS to hide and find containers (i.e., “caches”) anywhere in the world.
Examples
: Consult one of the numerous guidebooks or websites out there to guide you through/to the 800,000+ web-registered geocaches that have been placed around the globe since 2000.
FLASHPACKING
: Backpacking with flash
—
not only in terms of style, but also budget; more electronics and comfy hotels, less hostels and overall “roughing it.”
NAKED HIKING
: What better way to experience nature than to hike it au naturale? Just be sure to put on extra sunscreen and bug spray, and watch for prickly thorns.
Example
: Anyplace remote where you won’t get arrested.
MUSIC TOURISM
: Travel to a city for multiple days just for the town’s local music festival.
Examples
: Glastonbury, Coachella, EXIT.
SACRED TRAVEL
: Travel to “spiritual hotspots” to connect to the locale’s spiritual/metaphysical energy, heal one’s body or soul, or participate in some ritual.
Examples
: Machu Picchu, Egyptian Pyramids, Sedona, Mecca.
MEDICAL TOURISM
: Travel across international borders to obtain more cost-effective healthcare, often followed by recoveries in spa-like facilities.
Examples
: America (for foreigners), Mexico (for plastic surgery), India (for knee replacement), Israel (for in-vitro fertilization).
EXTREME TOURISM
: Extreme sports culture, gone tourist.
Examples
: Diving, climbing, snowboarding, spelunking, or hunting in the Amazon Jungle, Northern Pakistan, or North Pole.
SPACE TOURISM
: Got an extra $20 million lying around? Try a vacation in space.
Example
: The Russian Space Agency is currently the only outer space tour operator.
About the Author:
A former Hollywood producer and now 2nd-generation travel professional, Susan Michelle travels the planet as the “face” of the fashion-forward Compass travel lifestyle brand.
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