Sea Kayaking / Canoeing in July

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.

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 kilometres 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-kilometre chain of glacier-polished granite running from Gothenburg to the Norwegian border. The rock here is the draw: bare pink and grey 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 kilometres 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 kilometres over the trip. It suits paddlers of any level, since the boats are stable and the days are unhurried.

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.

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 colour, 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.