The 5 most expensive wilderness locations you can visit

If you live in the UK like I do, then you’ll have to travel quite far to get to what can be considered “wilderness” as no matter where you are in the country, you’re never more than a few miles from a house or small village.

A plane can take you anywhere you want to go, with global travel becoming cheaper and more accessible, but if you want to go somewhere truly wild then you’re going to have to pay substantially more than a quick trip to Canada. Here’s a list of the 5 hardest to get to and most expensive wilderness locations you can visit.

1) Antarctica 

£8000 for 10 nights

Certain trips to the continent start from as little as £2500 per person, but these are cruises and merely sail around the coastline, not to mention being in cramped triple cabins. If you actually want to walk on the land and meet the animals while camping there each night, it’s going to cost you much more.

For the £8000 you can expect to cruise around a large section of coastline as well as see some of the small surrounding islands, but the main feature is the land experience. On at least half of the nights you can camp on the ice in a special tent, and during the day walk round some of the hilly coastal areas, escorted by a guide of course.

2) Central Amazon

£5000 to £15000

Anyone can fly to an airport in the Amazon and start exploring, but if you want to go to the areas that are very remote, you’ll need a substantial lifeline that doesn’t come cheap. A flight to Brazil shouldn’t cost more than £1000, and a cruise of the Amazon River is around £3000 if you go for the holiday experience, but these cruises won’t take you very deep into the jungle for safety reasons.

Since progress through the jungle is so slow you’ll need to be constantly re-supplied by the river, which involves paying people to travel up and down to where you are in order to deliver your supplies. You can only use a certain sized boat on the river systems and carry a certain weight on your person, so if you’re in the jungle for any length of time then you’ll be forced to pay the locals to travel many miles with things you’ve paid for just to keep yourself in supplies.

3) Central Greenland

£10,000 to £15,000

A one-week holiday in Greenland normally costs around £3500, but getting to the central area is near impossible, and very expensive as specialist equipment is required. The center of the country is nothing but a huge mass of slowly moving glaciers. There are no trees or vegetation of any kind, not to mention the complete lack of roads and anywhere to land an aircraft.

The extra cost would come from hiring a group of professionals along with the arctic-capable vehicles and enough supplies to last all of you for at least a couple of weeks. This one would be a bit of a waste though as there’s literally nothing to see in the middle of the country except snow and ice.

4) Coco Island

£3000 for 2 nights

Flying from the UK to Costa Rica will cost around £800, but Coco Island is just over 300 miles from the coast and can only be reached by boat. There is no airstrip of any kind on the island, nor is there any accommodation or services for tourists. The only buildings on the island are to accommodate the dozen or so rangers who watch over it.

You can only go to Coco Island with permission from the establishment that governs it, and you would have to provide everything for yourself, including renting a boat for a 600-mile round trip.

5) The North Pole

£30,000 to £50,000 per person

If you wanted to go to the central point of the North Pole, then you’d be in the middle of a huge area surrounded by nothing but ice for several hundred miles, which means everything you’d need for the journey would have to be carried with you in one go. Specialist snow-cat vehicles would be needed to traverse the frozen wasteland, and with the amount of things you’d need you wouldn’t be able to go alone. There would have to be a small team of people to help with the different aspects of the journey, meaning that it’s almost impossible to do alone as you simply couldn’t carry everything, not in a single vehicle at least.

If you want to go by dog sled and camp along the way, then the specialized sled will cost you about £15,000 on its own, after which you have to pay for a team of dogs and all the food you and them will need for the whole trip.