Travelers who consider nature and wildlife adventures the ultimate in luxury have a few new options for their bucket lists.
In Norway’s Polar Park, the world’s northernmost wildlife park, the recently opened Wolf Lodge enables guests to literally spend the night with wolves and interact with the socialized animals for a supervised wolf kiss.
The lodge is set inside the park’s wolf enclosure, with guests separated only by the wooden walls and oversized windows. This means guests can spend the night safely tucked inside the lodge and watch the wolves in action.
The stay includes the company of a wolf expert and guide, who during the day takes guests outside and introduces them to socialized wolves, where they can also get a supervised face-to-face wolf kiss.
The pine lodge’s design is like that of a modern Norwegian farmhouse, featuring an open floor plan that includes five guest rooms, a fully equipped kitchen and handcrafted dining table and a living room that looks out on the wildlife. In addition to the wolves, the park is home to a variety of native Arctic animals, including wolverine, Arctic fox, bear, lynx and reindeer.
Polar Park is located about 45 miles from the harbor town of Narvik, in the heart of the Salangsdalen Valley.
A four-day, three-night “Night with the Wolves” itinerary to Narvik with Off the Map Travel is priced from $3,150 per person, excluding airfare. The package includes transfers, one night at the Wolf Lodge with dinner, the guide, two nights in a four-star hotel with breakfast, a boat trip along the fjord to search for wildlife and a “Lights at the Lodge” gondola trip up Narvik Mountain to view the northern lights.
Unusual Expedition offers a trip to Kamchatka, Russia, where brown bears and active volcanoes will be the main sights.
Prefer bears to wolves?
A Singapore-based exotic tour operator, Unusual Expedition, offers a chance to watch brown bears in action on a September trip to Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East that also offers dramatic landscapes. Known as the “Land of Fire and Ice,” the peninsula has a magnificent mingling of volcanoes and glaciers. The area has a total of 160 volcanoes, 29 of which are currently active.
The area is also home to the Unesco World Heritage site of Lake Kuril, a freshwater crater lake teeming with salmon and home to brown bears.
The luxury on this 18-day adventure is in the experience of traveling across a region that was only first opened to tourism in 1990 and today remains far off most travelers' paths.
Most of the accommodations are in campgrounds during the September trip, which covers Tolbachik, Mutnovsky, Uzon and Lake Kuril by helicopter and six-wheel-drive trucks. Prices start around $10,000 per person.