Spice Up Your Life: 7 Awesome Adventure Ideas

While you might be content with your current life situation, it’s never a bad idea to ‘spice things up a little’ and create some great memories. I’m constantly looking for adventure ideas that are quite unique and pack a “whole lot of awesome”.

Some of these will obviously be a bit more difficult to experience than others, but I think everyone can apply at least one of these to their lives this year and get a great adventure in return.

• Take a Road Trip with No Planned Destination
  At 18 I moved from the UK to South Africa, on my own, in pursuit of my dream job. And whilst I was in one of the most beautiful countries in the world I had never really gotten to see much of it. Therefore when my brother came to visit for two weeks, we decided to take a road trip with no real destination in mind and ended up covering around 1000km.

Funnily, about 500km from my home in Cape Town I met some people I had seen in some nightclubs a week earlier, and proceeded to meet more amazing people from around the world. Luckily we didn’t have any problems with accommodation, so depending on how long you are planning to drive, keep some important phone numbers with you just in case.

• Sleep Under the Stars
  If you’re looking for a simple adventure but one packed with beauty, this could be right up your street. Sleeping under the stars can be as simple as setting up a tent in your back garden or visiting a nearby camp site to gaze on the world’s beauty.

If you want to go extreme and take a planned ‘sleeping under the stars trip’, supposedly one of the best places to visit is Petra in Jordan, where they organise this with a tour guide and you sleep around a camp-fire.

• Go Bungee-Jumping
  Another exhilarating and relatively cheap adventure idea is bungee jumping, excellent for those adrenaline junkies out there. This was something I got to try about 6 months ago, hurling myself off a bridge and reaching 120mph. The experience was nothing short of amazing.

It did feel like I was falling for a lot longer than it appears, and while it is scary you definitely won’t regret taking the plunge.

• Drive the Nürburgring
  If you are a car fanatic, simply turning up to this place can feel like you’ve arrived in heaven. The Nürburgring is a 13-mile race track in Germany which anyone can drive (at racing speeds!) for only 15 Euro’s.

The track is a popular testing ground for brand new cars, and you’ll often see people who have some money to spend racing around in their Ferrari’s, Porsche’s and Lamborghini’s.

• Take a Safari
  Definitely one of the most amazing, but expensive items on this list is taking a safari. I’ve had the luxury of doing this twice and loved the experience. There’s nothing quite like seeing the likes of Lions, Elephants and Buffalo in their natural environment, giving you a greater perspective on the world around us.

South Africa and Namibia are two of the most popular places to visit for a trip like this. You might like to know that in Port Elizabeth (South Africa) there is also a public offering which means you can take your own car and literally drive alongside a lot of the wild animals.

• Swim with Dolphins
  This is one item I haven’t done myself but it’s definitely on my list. Swimming with dolphins is an adventure goal that is planned by many, and it’s no surprise. For those of you that live in America there are quite a lot of opportunities to do this, for European travellers one of the cheapest places to go for this experience has to be the Dominican Republic.

Then again, you might be lucky enough to have this happen in a natural environment as well.

• See the Northern Lights
  The Northern lights, also known as aurora borealis, occur when solar wind particules meet with air molecules and turn their energy into light. The result is often a green, sheet-like light that covers large areas; other common colors of this light include yellow, blue and purple.

The best time to see them is between November and February, and the light tends to be most visible in Canada, Iceland and Greenland.

If you have any more awesome adventure ideas, I would love to hear them.

Written on 3/11/2009 by Glen Allsop. Glen writes on the subject of Personal Development at PluginID. His sites main aim is to help people Plug into their Identity, be who they want to be and live the life they want to live.

Photo Credit: JeffChristiansen