Sea Kayaking / Canoeing

The Lesse is Belgium's best-loved river descent, and paddling it is the classic way into the Ardennes. From spring to autumn, outfitters at Anseremme ferry you upstream to Houyet or Gendron and set you loose to float and paddle the 12 or 21km back down to the confluence with the Meuse below Dinant, through a steep wooded valley that is a Natura 2000 reserve. This is not big whitewater: the Lesse is mostly gentle, quick-flowing water with a scattering of small rapids, weirs and shallow chutes that keep it lively without demanding real skill, which is exactly why it works as a first river trip and a family day out. The scenery does the heavy lifting, with the cliff-top Chateau de Walzin rising straight from the water and kingfishers along the banks. Levels depend on rainfall, and the river can close in a high-summer drought or run fast after storms, so the descent is seasonal and weather-dependent rather than a sure thing on any given day.

Ganvie is one of the most remarkable inhabited places in West Africa, a whole town raised on stilts over Lake Nokoue and reached only by dugout canoe. The Tofinu people built it centuries ago as a refuge: Dahomey's warriors were forbidden by custom from following people onto the water, so a community grew up living entirely on the lake, and it never came ashore. You cross from the landing at Abomey-Calavi by pirogue, gliding out to a town where every journey is by canoe, property is measured in stilts, and a floating market gathers each morning as women trade fish and produce boat to boat. Around the houses stand the acadja fish-fences the Tofinu use to farm the shallows. Going by pirogue with a Tofinu guide, ideally paddling the quieter channels away from the main route, turns a sightseeing trip into a slow read of a genuine water culture. It is a half-day from Cotonou that stays with you.

Matka is a limestone gorge on the dammed Treska river half an hour from Skopje's center, and the kayaking is flat-water paddling on jade-green lake past medieval cave monasteries and Vrelo Cave, one of the deepest underwater caves surveyed in Europe. The paddling pedigree is real: Matka's slalom course hosted the first world wildwater championship in 1975 and remains the home of Macedonian kayaking, with rental singles and doubles by the hour and guided small-group trips from the capital. It is the rare capital-city canyon where an after-breakfast decision puts you on the water by ten.

The Upper Sure Lake is Luxembourg's inland sea and the best flat-water paddling in the Grand Duchy. The reservoir, formed by a dam on the Sure in 1960 to supply the country's drinking water, winds for several kilometers between steep wooded slopes in the Ardennes, its arms and inlets making a sheltered, low-traffic paddling ground with no current and, on most of the lake, no motorboats. From the base nautique at Lultzhausen you can push off in a kayak, a canoe or on a stand-up paddleboard and spend a morning exploring quiet bays, forest shoreline and the drowned side valleys, with swimming beaches to stop at along the way. It sits inside the Natur- & Geopark Oewersauer, so the paddling comes with a nature-reserve calm rather than a resort buzz. For a first multi-hour paddle, a family outing or a supervised group session, this is the country's natural home for it, warm and protected all summer.

Bohuslan is Sweden's sea-kayaking heartland and one of the great paddling coasts anywhere, a 150-kilometer chain of glacier-polished granite running from Gothenburg to the Norwegian border. The rock here is the draw: bare pink and gray islands worn smooth by ice, thousands of them, with sheltered sounds, narrow passages and open crossings that let you plan a route to any weather and skill level. At the northern end lies Kosterhavet, Sweden's first marine national park, a cold, clear sea holding some six thousand marine species, where paddlers thread between the Koster and Vaderoarna islands past seals, seabirds and Sweden's westernmost lighthouse. You camp freely on the skerries under the right of public access, land at old fishing villages like Grebbestad and Fjallbacka for fresh oysters and shrimp, and paddle the long light of a Nordic summer evening. The water is calm and tide-free but genuinely open to the sea, so a guide adds real safety on the exposed stretches. For clean granite, wild camping and world-class archipelago paddling, Bohuslan sets the standard.

From the beach at Cape Maclear you can paddle out to islands almost no one else reaches. Kayak Africa runs a three-day sea-kayak trail across Lake Malawi National Park, tracing the shore and then striking out to Domwe and Mumbo, an uninhabited island ten kilometers offshore covered in baobab and fig. The water is clear and calm, cichlids flicker under the hull, and fish eagles work the shoreline. You sleep in walk-in tents on the islands, swim straight off the rocks and cover about 25 kilometers over the trip. It suits paddlers of any level, since the boats are stable and the days are unhurried.

The Exuma Cays are one of the finest sea-kayaking grounds on earth, a string of tiny uninhabited islands laid across shallow banks so clear and calm that you can paddle for days from cay to cay. At the heart of the chain is the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, established in 1958 as the first land-and-sea reserve in the world and a no-take marine sanctuary, where the reefs, turtles and fish have been protected for generations. Paddling here you camp on empty beaches, snorkel coral heads and the grotto made famous by a James Bond film, meet the endangered Bahamian rock iguanas that bask on their own cays, and pass the beach where the islands' swimming pigs wade out to visiting boats. Because the water inside the banks is sheltered and warm, this is expedition paddling without big seas, as suited to a first multi-day trip as to seasoned kayakers. Doing the cays by kayak, at the speed of a paddle stroke, is a completely different experience from the day boats that buzz between the highlights.

The Leeward wetlands are the quiet counterpoint to the Turks and Caicos beach scene. Behind the resorts of Providenciales lies a shallow labyrinth of red-mangrove channels, seagrass flats and tiny cays that no motorboat can enter, so the only way in is by kayak or stand-up paddleboard. Gliding through the narrow mangrove tunnels, you pass juvenile reef fish, lemon and nurse sharks, rays, conch, turtles and wading birds using the roots as a nursery, part of the Ramsar-listed wetland system that spreads across North, Middle, East and South Caicos. The water is glassy and clear, the paddling is easy and sheltered even when the coast is windy, and a good guide reads the ecosystem for you, from the way the mangroves build the islands to the creatures hiding in the shallows. This is minimum-impact travel in a place that pioneered it, a slow, close-up way to understand the banks that make the country's diving and fishing so rich, and a welcome contrast to a week spent only on the sand.

Nan Madol is the only ancient city in the Pacific built out over the sea, and the best way into it is by water. Off the southeast coast of Pohnpei, on and around Temwen Island, some ninety-two artificial islets were raised from the reef out of stacked columns of black basalt, laid like giant logs into walls up to eight meters high. Built by the Saudeleur dynasty from around the twelfth century as a ceremonial and political capital, it earned the name Venice of the Pacific for the tidal canals that run between its islets. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site in 2016. You reach the core islets, including the royal mortuary compound of Nandauwas, by paddling or boating in on a high tide through mangrove channels and open canals, threading between basalt walls with the jungle closing overhead. It is a quiet, humid, half-drowned ruin that almost no visitors see, as haunting from a kayak as any temple in Asia.

Sai Kung is where Hong Kong stops looking like Hong Kong. Twenty minutes by boat from the seafood restaurants that line the town waterfront, the coast breaks up into a maze of green islands, clear bays and some of the most dramatic volcanic rock in Asia. This is the Sai Kung Volcanic Rock Region of the Hong Kong UNESCO Global Geopark, where a super-eruption around 140 million years ago left cliffs of neatly stacked hexagonal columns, and the sea has since carved arches, caves and stacks into them. A kayak is the right tool for it: you can slip inside sea caves, paddle under arches and land on the white sand of bays like Long Ke Wan that no road reaches. The water is warm and usually calm in the sheltered channels, the geology is world-class, and marine life from sea urchins to the occasional green turtle turns up in the shallows. Guided trips out of Sha Ha beach and the town pier pair the paddling with snorkelling over coral and a stop for lunch, and the guides read the wind and tides that decide which of the arches and open crossings are safe on the day. The best window is the cooler, calmer stretch from autumn through spring, outside the summer typhoon season.

Upi Bay is one of the great canoe journeys of the Pacific, crossed the way the Kunie people have always crossed it: by traditional outrigger sailing pirogue. From Saint-Joseph Bay a Kanak piroguer raises a small sail and glides you across water so shallow and clear that eroded limestone stacks, each crowned with pandanus and pine, seem to float like buoys, in a scene endlessly compared to Ha Long Bay. Along the way you pass over turtles, eagle rays and a natural shark nursery in the seagrass, the boat silent but for the wind and the paddle. The crossing lands you for a walk through to Oro Bay, where a channel in the reef forms a sheltered natural swimming pool of astonishing color, fed by the tide. Doing it by pirogue rather than by motor is the point: it is slow, quiet, guided by islanders, and it connects you to a living Kanak seafaring tradition as much as to the scenery.

The Lower Zambezi is one of the few great parks you explore from the water, drifting the river's channels by canoe past drinking elephant, buffalo and pods of hippo while crocodiles slide off the banks. The park runs along the northern side of the Zambezi beneath a steep escarpment, facing Zimbabwe's Mana Pools across the river, and its floodplain of winterthorn and acacia holds large elephant and buffalo herds, lion prides, leopard and packs of endangered African wild dog. Game drives and walking safaris cover the woodland and floodplain, but the signature experience is a guided canoe safari down the Chifungulu and other channels, watching wildlife from the water rather than above it. The river is also one of Africa's premier tigerfishing waters, and the dry-season game viewing along its banks is exceptional.

Paddling the Sava and Danube under Kalemegdan fortress and around Great War Island, which is a nature reserve in the middle of a capital city.

The southwest coast is roadless for long stretches, so a kayak reaches beaches and sea caves you cannot walk or drive to.

Paddling the Mirabello coast to Spinalonga, the Venetian island fortress and later leper colony, which you can reach under your own power instead of on a tour boat.

The start of the Wilderness Waterway, ninety nine miles of mangrove tunnel and open bay to Everglades City, plus day paddling in Florida Bay. This is the Everglades without an airboat.

Paddling the Uvac meanders under 100 metre limestone walls, with griffon vultures overhead and the Ledena Pecina ice cave reachable from the water.