There comes a point in every holiday when you find yourself standing in a queue behind 57 other tourists, all trying to photograph exactly the same thing, and you begin to wonder whether this is really what travel was supposed to be about. You have travelled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kilometres, spent a small fortune on flights and accommodation, and yet somehow you are spending your afternoon waiting for strangers to move out of your camera frame.
This may explain why nature-based tourism has become one of the fastest-growing trends in travel. More and more people are swapping crowded city breaks for forests, mountains, beaches, national parks and wilderness experiences. They are choosing birds over billboards, rivers over roads and sunsets over shopping malls. Nature has a remarkable way of making us feel both insignificant and important at the same time. Stand beneath a waterfall, gaze across a mountain range or watch a whale breach the surface of the ocean, and many of the concerns that seemed so urgent back home suddenly shrink to a more manageable size.
