Travelers might remember the fate of Tom Hanks' character in the movie "Castaway" and his friendship with Wilson the Volleyball and his eventual rescue and appreciation for modern technology. All kinds of outrageous vacations now exist, but survival vacations are off most people's bucket lists because it is lesser known even to backpackers.
Docastaway is a professional desert survival company that can introduce the feeling as Hanks did in the movie, but with the travel guides providing some basic amenities. According to the company, the "castaways" would stay overnight in different shelters. While the supervision of travel guides are unavoidable, the company's guides are responsible for your safety -- and the experience does introduce some feelings of isolation and learning about survival in a secluded desert region.
Education is the vital goal of most survival vacations. The "castaway" experience is all about seeing how one can survive without equipment and creating makeshift tools. Docastaway specializes in desert survival while Guyana's Bushmasters doubles as a survival vacation and education program for jungle survival. The program lasts for two weeks.
According to The Telegraph, two guides oversee all activities from the first week of improving crafting and detection skills to the second week which is an examination-type week where travelers -- alone or with a partner, would live in the wild with nothing but the skills they have learned. Just like "Survivor" or other survival game shows, the company guides would pull out travelers who might not have what it takes to survive a week.
Other types of survival vacations, including English snow forest survival in Sussex and Namibia's mountain-ridge survival, focus travelers in developing core skills supervised by professional survivalists under the employ of companies. Most skills learned are building fires without lighters, crafting tools and weapons including a bow and arrow, tracking animals and even building huts.
As it is an education course on survival doubling as a vacation, the rates for these vacations are quite expensive. Individually, each survivalist-in-training must have at least around $2,000. But a week -- or even two weeks -- of learning about survival skills and surviving on them alone is a once-in-a-lifetime experience worth the premium.
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