Cooking Vacations: Off the Beaten Path
Off the Beaten Path Travel
Many foodie travelers contact us because they want a culinary tour that is off the beaten path. But what is an off the beaten path food tour?
Certainly, our culinary tours that are in a remote location or that are difficult to get to we consider “off the beaten path.” Sometimes examples of off the beaten path culinary tours are dramatic. If you have to ride a camel to get to your luxury camp in the Sahara, that is off the beaten path! Similarly, if you have to float down a river in Vietnam, or hike through the cloud forest of Peru, we would consider it an off the beaten path culinary tour. But even if you can arrive there in a car, there are plenty of remote destinations for our cooking vacations.
Some countries are themselves off the beaten path. Most of our travelers look for a culinary vacation in Europe, so for our clientele, a destination not often-traveled by tourists can automatically be considered as off the beaten path. This includes most of our trips in Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and India, which we classify as off the beaten path.
But we also count as off the beaten path any culinary vacations that are in a destination that is for some reason unusual. This might be in a popular country – Italy, for instance – but in a town or region that is almost unknown to most tourists. For example, an agriturismo in the countryside of Abruzzo, or a farm in Emilia-Romagna, would be considered off the beaten path. A small town in northern Lombardy, or anywhere in the little-known Friuli-Venezia-Giulia can be considered off the beaten path to our culinary travelers. Quite simply, if you are traveling to a country that is a popular destination but you are going someplace most tourists have never heard of, let alone thought to visit, then we would call it off the beaten path, including Scotland, Greece, France, and Spain, which are themselves some of our most popular destinations.
