Six challenges we think deserve more attention than they get

Every January, the same handful of countries top every "where to go next" list. We wanted to write the opposite one.

Not the loudest places; the ones worth the detour. The quieter route over the obvious one. The trail that still runs through someone's home village rather than past a coach park. None of these six are the easy option, and that's rather the point: the effort is part of what makes them worth it, and so is what your being there puts back into the places you pass through.

These are ones for the adventure first - the sort of trip you pick because the place won't leave you alone, or because you fancy testing yourself. You can fundraise for a cause you choose on any of them, as on every Discover Adventure challenge; but here the destination is the draw. (The whole trip is carbon-offset too, flights included.)

A few of them have small groups forming for early 2027 with space to join — so if one of them makes you look twice, now's a good moment to look properly.

Cycle Rajasthan, India

Dawn on a back road in Rajasthan. A camel cart creaks past in the half-light, a fruit-seller lifts a hand from his stall, and the only other traffic is a motorbike and a wandering herd of goats. This is the India the Golden Triangle tours never slow down for - and from a saddle, you're seeing it at exactly the right speed.

You still get the headline acts: Jaipur, the Pink City, with its clifftop Amber Fort and the honeycomb façade of the Hawa Mahal; the abandoned Mughal capital of Fatehpur Sikri; and, at the very end, the Taj Mahal at sunrise, turning from grey to gold as the light climbs. But the real trip happens in between: pedalling past blue-painted Brahmin houses and banyan trees, through Ranthambore National Park, home to the Project Tiger programme, and into the Keoladeo bird sanctuary, where only bikes and electric rickshaws are let in to protect the wetlands. Some nights you sleep in a former maharaja's palace.

It's mostly flat, so the challenge here isn't the climbing; it's the heat and the dust, and the way 75km feels longer at midday than it looks on paper. Ride it in the cool of the morning, and it's a joy.

"People often book this ride for the Taj Mahal. What they talk about on the way home is the village they rolled through at seven in the morning, and the farmer who flagged them down to share his chai." - Jonathan, MD of Discover Adventure

Grading: Yellow 2 Challenge Factor: Hot

· 10 days · cycle: ~70–75km/day on quiet, potholed country roads
Good for: cyclists who'd rather have culture and colour than big climbs.

Trek to the Lost City, Colombia

There's a moment, somewhere past the last of the 1,200 mossy stone steps, when the jungle finally opens, and the green terraces of Teyuna rise out of the trees - a city the world forgot for centuries, and one most people still haven't heard of.

This is the quiet answer to the Inca Trail. Teyuna predates Machu Picchu by a long way, sees only a tiny fraction of visitors, and the route climbs through the rainforest of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta - a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve - past the villages of the Kogui and Wiwa, the living descendants of the people who built it. You trek with a local crew, sleep in riverside camps, can swim in cold, clear rivers at the end of each day, and, if you're lucky, hear some of the site's stories first-hand from a Mamo, a Kogui spiritual leader.

Be honest with yourself about the walking: this is proper jungle terrain, steep and often muddy, humid, with almost no flat ground and days that run nine to twelve hours. There's no road in and no road out - you walk both ways. That remoteness is exactly what's kept it special. Afterwards, the walled old town of Cartagena is your reward.

"The steps are the easy part to explain. The harder part is that you're a guest in someone's home the whole way up - and the Kogui remember which groups treated it that way." - Greg, Discover Adventure Leader

Grading: Orange 2 Challenge Factor: Terrain 

· 10 days · trek: 9–12hr days, steep jungle, 1,200 stone steps, no vehicle access
Good for: experienced trekkers who want genuine remoteness and a strong cultural thread.

Trek Northern Thailand

You wake on a wooden platform to mist burning off the rice terraces and breakfast cooking somewhere below, in a Karen village a good few hours' walk from the nearest proper road. There's no rush to leave - that's the whole idea.

From Chiang Mai, the "Rose of the North" with its three hundred–odd temples, this trek heads up into the forested hills to stay in a string of Karen and Lahu villages, each with its own language, beliefs, food and weaving. You're a guest in people's homes, and the days are deliberately short so you have time to be there: watch the scarf-makers, share a meal, sit out the heat of the afternoon. It ends the best possible way: drifting back down the Mae Taeng River on a bamboo raft.

This is our gentlest challenge on this list - graded Yellow 1 - which makes it a lovely first adventure. The hills aren't steep, and the distances are modest; the heat and humidity do the work, and the paths turn slippery after rain. Nights are simple: a sleeping mat on the floor of a village home. That simplicity is exactly why the money you spend here lands where it should.

"You arrive as a stranger and leave having been taught to weave or cook. The walking just carries you from one very warm welcome to the next." - Phil, Discover Adventure Leader

Grading: Yellow 1 Challenge Factor: Hot 

· 11 days · trek: forested hills, short days, village homestays
Good for: first-time adventurers and anyone who travels for the people they might meet.

Wild Atlantic Coast Trek, Portugal

The Atlantic doesn't do calm on this coast. Waves stack up against cliffs the colour of rust and honey, the wind pushes at your back, and every headland you crest hides another empty, golden beach below.

This is the Algarve without the resorts. You follow the old Fishermen's Way south along the wild, west-facing Vicentina coast - past the surf beach at Monte Clérigo, the ruined Muslim fort at Ponta da Atalaia, the improbable sea-stack of Pedra da Agulha - through small farming and fishing villages that have nothing to do with the crowded south coast an hour away. It finishes at Cape St Vincent, the very south-western tip of mainland Europe, where sailors once believed the world simply ended.

The walking is honest: 19–24km a day, and every single day is hilly; up and over the headlands, down into the bays, on sand and stone, with the wind making the distances feel longer. Short-haul, low-footprint, and a real leg-stretch of a week.

"Every headland looks like the last one until you're standing on top of it. By Cape St Vincent, people have stopped counting the climbs and started trusting their legs." - Terri, Operations Manager at Discover Adventure

Grading: Yellow 3 Challenge Factor: Terrain

· 6 days · trek · ~20km/day, clifftop coast path, steep and windy
Good for: coast-lovers after a wilder edge of Europe, close to home.

Trek South Africa

Orange sandstone, weathered into arches and cracks barely a foot wide, glowing in the late sun - and not another soul in sight. The Cederberg is the South Africa the safari brochures skip, and it's all the better for it.

A few hours north of Cape Town, this is real wilderness: San rock art tucked into the Stadsaal caves, the great monolith of the Maltese Cross, and the Wolfberg Cracks, where you squeeze up through the rock to a thirty-metre natural arch and a lunch stop with a view over half the range. You're based in eco chalets in the heart of it all. And then the trip flips the usual script entirely - instead of starting at Table Mountain, you finish over it, walking up through Platteklip Gorge to Maclears Beacon and down to Kirstenbosch, having earned that famous view rather than queued for the cable car.

It's terrain-led and warmer than you'd expect - rocky, boulder-strewn, steep in both directions under a strong sun. The Wolfberg day is the big one, nine to eleven hours, and the one everyone talks about afterwards. Add a Lalibela safari at the end if you want the Big Five as a grand finale.

"The Cederberg humbles people - big country, small group, no crowds. Then they walk over Table Mountain on the last day and realise how far they've come." - Rob, General Manager at Discover Adventure

Grading: Yellow 3 Challenge Factor: Terrain 
· 9 days · trek: rocky sandstone wilderness, biggest day 9–11hrs, finishing over Table Mountain
Good for: trekkers who want wide-open wilderness and a landmark finish.

Cycle PortugaL

One road. Seven hundred kilometres. A white-and-red N2 marker every so often, quietly counting you down from the top of a country to the bottom.

Portugal's answer to Route 66 runs from historic Chaves in the north all the way to Faro on the Algarve coast, and cycling it end to end is one of those rare trips where the shape of the thing - a single line drawn the length of a country - is half the appeal. You climb through the terraced vineyards of the Alto Douro, the oldest demarcated wine region in the world, cross the Douro and the green shoulder of Montemuro, then roll south through the cork oaks and olive groves and whitewashed hill-towns of the Alentejo before a long, sweeping descent drops you into Faro and the smell of the Atlantic.

The challenge is in the distance, not the gradient: most days run 60–80 miles, with one big 176km push on long, steady climbs that rarely get steep. It's achievable, but it's day after day - a proper endurance week. We eat and buy along the way, so your ride puts money into the small towns you pass through. (E-bikes are an option if you'd like the extra help.)

"It's a whole country under your own steam. The N2 markers become a countdown, and by the end the group's cheering every single one - stopping to take photos." - Duncan, Discover Adventure Leader

The facts: Orange 3 Challenge Factor: Long Day 

· 8 days · cycle: 700km+ point-to-point, rolling with long climbs
Good for: cyclists chasing a big, satisfying line across a whole country.

Fancy one of these?

None of these are the obvious choice, and that's exactly why we love them. Quieter trails, a genuine reason to be there, and the kind of week you come home a little changed by.

You travel as a small, friendly group with our crew handling the details, wherever in the world you are - and if you'd like to raise money for a cause while you're at it, you can, as on any of our challenges. Several of these have space on their early-2027 departures right now, so it's a good time to get in early.

Have a proper look, or give us a call - we've been doing this for over thirty years, and we're rather good at helping people find the adventure with their name on it.

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