TRAVEL GUIDE 2017

UPFRONT

See the Northern Lights

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One of Mother Nature’s most spectacular sights, the northern hemisphere’s Aurora Borealis is caused by colliding electrically charged particles from the sun entering the earth’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles. The best places to view these eerily dancing lights are during the dark winters in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland and parts of Scandinavia.

Spend a week on a liveaboard

Experience gorillas in the wild

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If you’re an avid scuba diver, there’s no better way to explore the greatest dive spots in the world than by liveaboard. Many in Asia are made from traditional Indonesian pinisi boats made with teak wood, sail for up to a week at a time, and take guests to the most distant and pristine of dive sites.

There are less than 900 gorillas living in the wild today, spread over just four national parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. A Lightfoot guest recently returned from Rwanda claiming that it’s a “dream come true” for an animal lover: “You get so close to them and feel like they are observing you instead of the other way around!”

4 Balloon over Cappadocia The sight of hot-air balloons soaring over just about anything is pretty magical, but there is something almost otherworldly as you watch them float over Cappadocia’s fairylike rock formations in central Turkey.

Cruise the Galapagos Islands

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The Galapagos Islands is known to be the world’s foremost destination for wildlife-viewing. Boutique cruise ships enable guests to sail up to lesser visited areas, whose isolation has ensured a diversity of plant and animal life found nowhere else on earth. Plus, it inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution, so that in itself is pretty special.

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