where the seventeen go
Where We Book Vacation Packages
Where we book vacation packages, and why each place sits in the shape of day it does. Some of these could be run at any pace. Four of them could not.
The place usually chooses the pace
A few of these could be run at any of the four rhythms and the choice is genuinely yours. Most cannot. A country that requires a guide for the whole stay is not going to be a blank week however much you would like one, and a peninsula reached by ship is not going to hold still while you decide.
So the list below is grouped by the shape the place imposes rather than by continent, which is the grouping that actually helps you choose.
Where nothing is in the diary
- Crete
- A car, one base in the west, gorges and empty beaches. April to June and September to October
- Mallorca
- A mountain village, a car, and water. Skip July and August entirely
- Asturias
- Green Spain, cider country, an Atlantic coast that rains in every month
- Cornwall
- Coast path walking from one base, on roads that are single track between high hedges
Where one thing is fixed each day
- Istria
- A market, a cellar or a boat each day, and the rest of the hours yours
- Brittany
- The tide decides the one fixed thing, which is why it moves an hour later each day
- Bohemia
- Sandstone towers, trains between two bases, one guided walk a day
- The Yucatan
- One early start a day because of heat, then long free afternoons
Where the day has a program in it
- Oman
- A driver and a guide, wadis and one desert night. Unbearable May to August
- Kyrgyzstan
- High pastures on rough roads, and a season about ten weeks long
- South Korea
- Guided mornings, loose afternoons, fast trains between three bases
- The Bolivian Altiplano
- Above 3,600 metres from the first day, which is the whole story
Where every hour is held
- Bhutan
- A guide is required for the whole stay by the country itself, not by us
- Rwanda
- Dated permits that cannot be moved, and a schedule built around them
- Mongolia
- A convoy with its own cook, and no way to step off it in the middle
- Ethiopia
- Internal flights on fixed days set the entire timetable
- The Antarctic Peninsula
- Ice and weather decide each morning what is possible, and sometimes nothing is
When you ask about somewhere else
The answer is that it falls outside what this office knows, followed by the name of the sort of firm that does know it. No fee attaches to saying so, and nobody here will try to reshape one of these seventeen into whatever you were really after.
What this office declines to say about any of them
- Safety
- Nobody working here is competent to sell you that verdict
- What gets you across a border
- Yours to confirm for your own nationality, and not advised on here
- Cover for the trip
- Not sold, not arranged, not suggested. The reasoning is on the page of short answers
- Which company runs it
- Named in your written proposal, which is the document where knowing it helps