Canada
Great Bear Rainforest
Spirit bears — white black bears — ghost through the world's largest coastal temperate rainforest.
The Kermode bear — a white-furred variant of the black bear found nowhere else on Earth — moves through the undergrowth of the Great Bear Rainforest like a ghost. The local Indigenous name translates to 'spirit bear,' and seeing one feels exactly like that: a visitation.
The Great Bear Rainforest stretches along British Columbia's central and north coast, covering 6.4 million hectares — the largest intact temperate rainforest remaining on the planet. Grizzly bears fish for salmon in rivers that run crimson with spawning sockeye each autumn. First Nations-led eco-tourism means the only lodges are small, remote, and operated by Indigenous communities — Kitasoo/Xai'xais, Gitga'at, and Heiltsuk guides share knowledge of their territories that no guidebook can offer. The spirit bear (Kermode bear) is a white-coated subspecies of the black bear, occurring in roughly 1 in 10 individuals in this region due to a recessive gene. Seeing one is not guaranteed — it's a gift.
Solo
The lodge-based wildlife viewing trips let solo travellers spend days in the company of Indigenous guides, learning the rainforest's ecology while waiting for grizzlies, wolves, or — if lucky — the spirit bear.
Couple
A week in a remote eco-lodge, watching grizzlies fish at dawn and falling asleep to the sound of rain on the forest canopy — the Great Bear Rainforest is romantic in the deepest sense of the word.
- The Kermode bear — a white-furred black bear found nowhere else on Earth — is the rainforest's spirit guardian.
- At 6.4 million hectares, this is the largest intact temperate rainforest left on the planet.
- Grizzlies fish for salmon in rivers that run crimson with spawning sockeye every autumn.
- First Nations-led eco-tourism means the only lodges are small, remote, and operated by Indigenous communities.
Wild salmon cooked over an open fire by Gitga'at guides beside a rain-swollen creek.
Foraged stinging nettle tea and forest mushrooms prepared at the floating lodge.
Crab and halibut ceviche made dockside from the morning's catch.
Trollskogen (Öland)
Sweden
A forest of wind-warped oaks so twisted they look like a witch's spell gone wrong.
Millennium Cave
Vanuatu
Scramble through jungle and wade chest-deep rivers to a cave you enter walking and exit floating.
Maryang-ri
South Korea
A five-hundred-year-old forest of camellia trees bleeding red flowers against the grey winter sea.
Phong Nha
Vietnam
Hidden jungle portals opening into subterranean river systems and limestone caverns.
Tofino
Canada
Surfers in wetsuits share dawn breaks with black bears foraging the tideline.
Churchill
Canada
Polar bears patrol the streets of a subarctic town where the Northern Lights ignite the tundra.
Îles de la Madeleine
Canada
Red sandstone arches crumbling into turquoise shallows on a windswept Acadian archipelago.
Lunenburg
Canada
A UNESCO port where every clapboard house is a different colour and salt stiffens the air.