Wildlife safaris top the list of adventure vacations. Though certainly ubiquitous in Africa, it is also available in many locations such as Alaska, Ecuador, Croatia, Costa Rica, Peru and a few others. What could be more adventurous than spending the night in a tent under the same sky as lions, leopards, and rhinos? The last thing you hear before you doze of would be the deep throated growls denoting a feeding frenzy and the first thing you see in the early dawn might be pug marks just outside your tent.

No adventure vacation is complete without a spot of bungee jumping or tandem skydiving. Conquering that extreme dread that paralysis, you go for it, and come away a stronger, more confident person than the erstwhile quivering mass of nerves. This should surely spur you on to more exciting things in life. Sometimes climbing a mountain gets you the same ecstatic feeling as falling off an aircraft while skydiving. As you eventually scale the heights and stand on a peak, you know you’ve conquered more than a mountain. Adventure vacations have their moments.

Adventure vacations do not have to be confined to the land or air. You can take it to the water as you go swimming with sharks, jet boating, or even deep sea fishing with gritty real life fishermen for whom rough seas are simply a minor annoyance. For pure, unadulterated fright, there’s nothing to beat whitewater rafting. This sport has its moments of sheer panic that deliver quite an adrenalin surge to your adventure vacation. White water rafting vacations are quite the rage in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and many European countries. The Grand Canyon in the US is quite a well loved venue for this activity and makes for a spectacular adventure vacation in combination with the other attractions available at this natural wonder.

At least for some, an adventure vacation would be visiting a really alien culture where no one speaks your language. Everything from the food, the weather, public transport, and the law of the land would be something you have no thought about or had just read about. You are in for an adventure vacation of the senses that can deal lusty blows just as surely as whiplash from a terrible bungee dive.