Top 10 Extreme Vacations

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We've found ten extreme vacations to get your heart racing:


1. Drag Racing
Doug Foley's Drag Racing School offers several dates in Atco, New Jersey (plus a trio of options in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Maryland); for the highest HBM (heart beats per minute), opt for the Super Comp Dragster package, a two-day program that includes safety instruction and step-by-step familiarization with your car.

2. Gorilla Safari
No more than 700 mountain gorillas remain, but Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, Africa is still the best place on the earth to spot – and maybe even touch – one of these gentle herbivores. Their distinctive personalities are endearing, while the ruins of the Karisoke Research station where Fossey was murdered and buried are themselves quite moving.

3. Heli-Skiing
Lured by the promise of untouched slopes, wilderness solitude, and challenging terrain, those who dare to get airborne access otherwise inaccessible peaks. Valdez Heli-Camps operates tours to the Chugach mountain range in Alaska; serious extremists book the four-day Sound to Summit package that tackles Chugach's 13,000-foot peak and offers accommodations on a ship anchored in the Prince William Sound.

4. Mountain Climbing
Mount Everest looms large in travelers' minds, and with good reason: risking passage through the "death zone" (which takes lives every year) and reaching the summit is the achievement of a lifetime. If you're an accomplished climber, Adventure Consultants offers summit expeditions from Nepal that will set you back about $60,000 and come with no guarantees of summiting.

5. Sandboarding
Sandboarding is a four-season extreme sport that's recently gained in popularity with snowboarders looking for a similar rush and surreal, desert landscapes. Sure, you could try surfing the dunes at your local beach, but for the real deal, head to Cerro Blanco near the Andes mountain range in Peru to find the world's tallest sand dune.

6. Shark Diving
Pack your gear and go deep-sea diving with the sharks off the coast of Cape Point, South Africa. Apex Shark Expeditions runs day trips into False Bay (some 30 minutes from Cape Town) between November and June, inviting you to swim for over an hour with Mako and blue sharks without anything but your wet suit between you and their fins.

7. Space Travel
The 10-day space journey offered by Virginia-based Space Adventures blasts you from a launch pad in Kazakhstan into the actual orbit of the Earth, where gravity itself becomes obsolete as you circle the globe every 90 minutes. But if the thought of piggybacking on a Russian rocket for a cool $25 million grounds you, wait for a comfy chair on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, set to launch as early as 2009 with suborbital flights that will set you back $200,000.

8. Spelunking
Rappel down the side of a limestone cliff, squeeze through damp crevices covered with luminescent glow worms, leap from a subterranean waterfall, and go "black-water rafting" in the underground rapids at Ruakuri Cave, part of the otherworldly Waitomo cave system in New Zealand. The five-hour Black Abyss adventure offered by The Legendary Black Water Rafting Co. is the most challenging of the region's guided tours, with a mix of climbing, rappelling, and cave tubing.

9. Stunt Vacations
For a taste of the car chases, burning buildings, and free falls seen in high-octane action movies, head to Las Vegas. Thrillseekers Unlimited offers hear-pounding adventures taught by working SAG stunt professionals; book the five-day Stunt Experience and you'll stunt fight, set yourself on fire, and bungee jump from the AJ Hackett Tower on the Strip.

10. Titanic Dive
You don't have to be an oceanographer to get a look at the shipwreck of all shipwrecks, either – head to Newfoundland, where The Great Canadian Adventure Company runs expeditions aboard the Akademik Keldysh, a Russian research vessel capable of descending nearly 2.5 miles underwater to reach the ship's resting place. The privilege of seeing the Titanic up close costs nearly $40,000 but, for fanatics, it's a small price to pay to be one of the first non-scientists to make the dive.

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