Trekking / Hiking in December

Acatenango is the trek people come to Guatemala for, and the reason is the volcano next door. You climb through farmland, cloud forest and finally bare volcanic sand to a high camp around 3,600 meters, and from there you look across a saddle at Volcan de Fuego, one of the most active volcanoes in the Americas. Fuego erupts every twenty minutes or so, day and night, throwing ash and glowing rock above its crater, and after dark the camp watches the orange bursts against the sky. The summit push starts before dawn on the second day for sunrise from 3,976 meters, with the whole chain of highland volcanoes floating above the cloud. It is a hard two days at altitude and in the cold, but the payoff, a live eruption seen from a facing ridge, is rare anywhere on earth.

The climb to Blue Mountain Peak is Jamaica's classic hike and one of the best sunrise walks in the Caribbean. The summit stands at 2,256 meters, the highest point on the island, inside the UNESCO-listed Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park. The route runs about 11 to 14 kilometers each way from the trailhead above Penlyne Castle, climbing through cloud forest thick with tree ferns, wild coffee and endemic birds, with a notoriously steep pitch known as Jacob's Ladder near the top. Most walkers do it in the dark, leaving the lodges around one or two in the morning to reach the peak by dawn, when on a clear day you can see across the whole island and, some mornings, all the way to Cuba before the cloud closes in. The tradition is to overnight at a rustic mountain lodge such as Whitfield Hall the evening before, then push for the summit in the small hours. It is a demanding walk of roughly six to eight hours up, but no technical skill is needed, only fitness, a headtorch and a guide.

Boquete is the trailhead for the two best walks in Panama. Volcan Baru, at 3,474 meters the highest point in the country, is a hard overnight ascent: hikers usually set out around midnight and climb through the night up a rough vehicle track to stand on the crater rim at dawn, when on a clear morning you can see both the Pacific and the Caribbean at once, a rare thing to do on foot. The gentler and arguably more beautiful option is the Sendero Los Quetzales, a cloud-forest trail through Volcan Baru National Park that links Boquete with the village of Cerro Punta. It runs along old paths beside a rushing river through moss-hung forest, and from February to May it is one of the most reliable places on earth to see the resplendent quetzal, the emerald bird with the meter-long tail feathers that the ancient Maya prized above gold. Between the two you have a big-summit challenge and a world-class birding walk within a short drive of the same town, both best tackled with a local guide who knows the weather, the transport logistics between trailheads and where the quetzals are nesting.

The Cardamoms are the largest unbroken rainforest left in mainland Southeast Asia, and trekking here funds the fight to keep it standing. This is proper jungle walking, through dense forest to hidden waterfalls, river crossings and post-Angkorian burial-jar sites, with the chance of hornbills, gibbons and, for the lucky, sign of elephant. Two models sit side by side. At Chi Phat, a village of former loggers and poachers turned guides runs multi-day treks, mountain-bike rides and river kayaking from a community base, with nights in homestays or forest hammock camps. Deeper in, a small tented camp inside a national park lets you trek with a naturalist and shadow the Wildlife Alliance rangers who patrol the trails. Either way the walking is remote, humid and genuinely wild.

Cerro Negro is a short, sharp hike with a payoff you cannot get anywhere else. The cone is the youngest volcano in Central America, born in an 1850 eruption and still active, and its slopes are loose black ash with no vegetation. You carry a board up a 45-minute to one-hour walk to the rim, taking in the raw Maribios volcano chain and the plain toward Leon, then sit or stand on a reinforced sled and slide straight down the ash face. Volcano boarding was invented here in the 2000s and remains a rite of passage on the Central American backpacker trail, with riders clocking speeds well past 50 kilometers an hour on the steepest line. The walk is manageable for anyone with reasonable fitness, and the descent takes seconds, which is the whole absurd charm of it.

Dragon's Back is the hike that proves you can leave a city of seven million and be walking a wild coastal ridge inside half an hour. The trail runs the spine of a low mountain range at the southeast tip of Hong Kong Island, rising and falling in a series of humps that give it its name, with the surf-lined bays of Shek O and Tai Long Wan on one side and the wooded slopes of Shek O Country Park on the other. Time Magazine named it Asia's best urban hike, and the reason is the contrast: paragliders launch off Shek O Peak, the skyline of the island floats in the haze behind you, and the walk ends on the sand at Big Wave Bay where surfers ride the swell. It is a manageable half-day on a clear path, roughly four to eight kilometers depending on where you start and finish, with steady climbs rather than any scrambling, so it suits fit first-timers as much as regular walkers. The forest sections give shade, the ridge gives the views, and public transport drops you at both ends, which is why locals treat it as the default weekend escape. The cooler, drier months from October to April are the time to go, when the humidity drops and the visibility opens up.

The Edge of the World, properly Jebel Fihrayn, is the best day hike within reach of Riyadh. A wall of the Tuwaiq escarpment ends abruptly here, dropping some 300 meters to a plain that runs flat to the horizon, which is where the nickname comes from. The walk up to the rim is short and manageable, but the reward is outsized, a sheer cliff edge with nothing beyond it and, below, the traces of an old caravan route that carried trade toward the Gulf. Most people come for sunset, when the low light turns the limestone orange and the plain goes to shadow, or for sunrise and a quieter rim. Reaching the trailhead means an hour and a half of desert track, so it is a place you visit with a guide who knows the route and the rock rather than alone.

El Yunque is the only tropical rainforest managed by the US Forest Service, and it packs a huge range of walking into a compact, accessible massif just an hour east of San Juan. Warm rain falls almost daily on the Sierra de Luquillo, feeding rivers, natural swimming pools and waterfalls like La Mina and La Coca, and cloaking the higher slopes in dwarf cloud forest. Trails run from paved fifteen-minute strolls to the exhaust of your legs on the climb to El Yunque Peak at over 1,000 meters, where the vegetation shrinks to wind-stunted palms and the views open over the coast on a clear morning. The forest is loud with the two-note call of the coqui, the tiny frog that is Puerto Rico's unofficial mascot, and it is one of the last strongholds of the critically endangered Puerto Rican parrot. Guided walks, especially after dark, turn a wet green blur into a legible ecosystem, and a permit system now manages the busiest northern trailheads.

The Fouta Djallon is one of West Africa's great walking landscapes, a cool green highland of sandstone plateaus that break away in cliffs and gorges and pour off the edge in waterfalls. This is the water tower of the region, the source of the Niger, the Senegal and the Gambia, and its terraced hillsides are farmed by Fula herders and villagers whose way of life gives the trekking its character. Trails link village to village across the plateau around Labe, Dalaba and Pita, past the falls of the three cascades, through gallery forest and along escarpment rims with long views over the highlands. You walk between guesthouses and family compounds, sharing meals and paths with the people who live here, in a form of slow community trekking that has become the country's signature journey. The climate is mild by West African standards, the birdlife is rich, and the sense of a place still largely outside mass tourism is complete. For a traveler who wants real village-to-village walking in a corner of Africa few reach, the Fouta Djallon is the reason to come to Guinea.

Ometepe is one of the great volcano treks in Central America, two very different climbs on a single island in the largest lake between the Great Lakes and Titicaca. Concepcion is the harder, taller line: a roughly ten-hour round trip that starts before dawn, opens onto huge lake views, then turns steep and loose near the active summit where cold wind and scree test your nerve. Maderas is the greener, more forested option, an eight-hour climb from Balgue up through farmland and cloud forest, past pre-Columbian petroglyphs, to a crater lagoon inside the summit, with howler monkeys and parrots along the way. A local guide is mandatory on both, which is a good thing, because the trails are muddy, unmarked in places and seriously steep. For hikers who want a real objective rather than a viewpoint stroll, Ometepe delivers two.

Kakum is Ghana's best rainforest walk, and its canopy walkway is unlike anything else in West Africa. Seven rope-and-plank suspension bridges run 350 meters from tree to tree at up to 40 meters above the forest floor, level with the crowns of ebony and mahogany giants. The park protects a rare surviving block of the Upper Guinean rainforest, home to forest elephants, bongo, several primates and more than 250 bird species, including the rare white-breasted guineafowl that draws birders from around the world. Beyond the walkway, guided ground trails take you into the forest for birding and tree identification, best in the early morning when the canopy is loud with activity. Paired with the Cape Coast castles half an hour away, it is the classic combination of Ghana's coast: heavy history in the morning, high forest in the afternoon.

Kpalime is the heart of Togo's small but lovely hill country, the greenest and most walkable corner of a mostly flat nation. From the town you can climb Mount Agou, at 986 meters the highest point in Togo, with views that reach across the border into Ghana, or take the forest paths around Mount Klouto, famous for its butterflies and its old German-era plantation trails. Between the peaks lie waterfalls such as Kpime and Wome, coffee and cocoa smallholdings, and villages that keep the Akpesse dance and a strong craft tradition of carving and batik. The walking ranges from a steady road-and-trail ascent of Agou to gentle forest loops around Klouto, all in a cool, misty upland that feels a world away from the coast. For a traveler it is Togo's outdoors at its best, easy to reach from Lome and rewarding on foot with a local guide who knows the plants and the paths.

Luang Namtha is the home of community-based trekking in Laos. The Nam Ha National Protected Area begins a few kilometers south of town, more than two thousand square kilometers of jungle-covered hills, rivers and ethnic-minority villages, and the model of guided treks that share their income with those villages was pioneered here in the early 2000s. Trips run from a single day walk to four-day crossings that overnight in Akha, Khmu, Hmong or Lanten hamlets, eating and sleeping in the village and walking with guides drawn from those communities. The forest is genuine, with gibbons, hornbills and dense bamboo, and many operators combine the walking with kayaking on the Nam Tha river or cycling between villages, so the trek doubles as a slow way into the cultures of the northern uplands.

Middle Caicos is where the flat, beachy Turks and Caicos turns rugged and wild. The island's north shore rises into limestone cliffs cut with blowholes, sea caves and hidden coves, and the Crossing Place Trail runs along it for miles, retracing the old footpath islanders once used to cross between settlements. The walk links Mudjin Harbour, a cliff-ringed beach that is one of the most striking spots in the country, to secret beaches and rolling green headlands, with the open Atlantic crashing below. Inland lies Conch Bar Caves, the largest cave system in the Turks and Caicos and one of the largest in the region, a mile and a half of dark passages hung with stalactites and columns, home to four species of bat and tidal pools, once mined for bat guano and used by the Lucayans before that. A national park managed by the National Trust, the caves can only be entered with a guide. Between the cliff trail and the caves, Middle Caicos offers the country's best walking and a rare, quiet look at its natural and human history, far from the resorts of Provo.

Mount Cameroon is the biggest single climb in West and Central Africa, an active volcano that lifts from sea-level rainforest to a bare 4095 meter summit in one continuous ascent from the town of Buea. Local people call it Mongo ma Ndemi, the mountain of greatness, and it is one of the most active volcanoes on the continent, with lava flows from its 1999 and 2000 eruptions still crossing the standard route. The classic climb is the two to three day Guinness route, named for the beer company that long backed the mountain race that runs the same ground: up through farmland and montane forest to alpine grassland huts, then across black lava and ash to the crater rim and Fako summit, with the Gulf of Guinea far below. Guides and porters are compulsory and arranged in Buea, and the reward is a genuine equatorial big-mountain traverse that few outside the region have heard of.

Pico Duarte is the roof of the Caribbean, a 3,087-meter summit that surprises people who think of the Dominican Republic as only beaches. The standard climb leaves from La Cienaga near Jarabacoa, a two-day walk up through pine forest to the high camp at Comparticion, then a pre-dawn push to the summit for sunrise above the clouds. The Cordillera Central is cool and green, with river crossings, ferns and the burnt-pine paramo near the top, and nights at altitude drop below freezing. Park rules require a licensed local guide and mules carry the gear, so this is a supported trek rather than a solo scramble. Longer routes add the Tetero Valley or link the neighboring peaks of La Pelona and La Rusilla.

Santa Ana Volcano, or Ilamatepec, is the classic day hike of El Salvador, a steep climb to the country's highest summit that rewards you with one of the more surreal crater views in Central America. The trail starts high in Los Volcanes National Park, near the Cerro Verde lookout, and climbs through cloud forest and open lava fields to the 2,381-meter rim in around ninety minutes to two hours. At the top the crater drops to a milky turquoise lake, its color set by dissolved sulfur and minerals, sometimes steaming and occasionally rumbling; this is an active volcano that last erupted in 2005. The panorama takes in the perfect cone of Izalco next door, forested Cerro Verde, and the wide blue circle of Lake Coatepeque in its own collapsed caldera below. The hike itself is manageable for anyone with reasonable fitness, and national-park rules require a guide on the mountain, which keeps groups organized and safe on the exposed upper slopes.

Semuc Champey is one of those places that looks invented. In a fold of Alta Verapaz jungle, the Cahabon river disappears underground into a limestone cave, and over the top runs a 300-meter natural bridge holding a staircase of pools in every shade of turquoise and green. The classic day combines a short, steep hike up to the El Mirador viewpoint, where the whole ladder of pools opens up below the forest, with hours of swimming and pool-hopping down the terraces. Most people add the K'an Ba caves, a river cave explored on foot and by swimming with only a candle in hand, plus a rope swing and tubing on the river outside. It is remote and takes effort to reach, which is part of why the pools stay so clear and the crowds stay small.

Sipi Falls is the best day-hiking country in Uganda that most visitors never reach. Three linked waterfalls drop off the western wall of Mount Elgon, and a half-day loop on foot takes you between all three, through smallholder farms and along cliff edges with the plains of Karamoja opening below. This is Bugisu Arabica country, so most walks fold in a coffee farm visit, following the bean from picking and pulping to roasting over a fire and a cup at the end. The bolder cascade can be abseiled on fixed ropes. For longer legs, Sipi is a common staging point for treks up into the Mount Elgon caldera, one of the largest volcanic calderas in the world. Sipi Falls Tours and Sipi Falls Explorers are both locally owned guiding teams born on the mountain.

Gros Piton is the great walk-up summit of the Caribbean, the larger of the two lava spires that make the Pitons a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the emblem of Saint Lucia. The trail starts at the village of Fond Gens Libre, named for the freed people and escaped slaves, the Brigands, who used the mountain as a stronghold in the 18th century, and every ascent goes with a local guide from the interpretive center at the base. The climb is about 798 meters of gain over roughly two hours up, easy at first around the mountain's skirt and then relentlessly steep on rooty, rocky steps through changing forest, from dry woodland to cloud-brushed summit scrub. The reward is a 360-degree view over Petit Piton, the town of Soufriere, the reefs of the marine park and, on a clear day, the neighboring island of Saint Vincent. It is a genuine challenge rather than a technical climb, no ropes or scrambling, and finishing it is the classic Saint Lucian achievement.

Cerro Chirripo is Costa Rica's high point at 3,821 meters, and the trek to it is the country distilled: a 14-kilometer first day climbing from San Gerardo de Rivas's coffee farms through cloud forest into paramo, a night at the Crestones Base Camp hut system, and a pre-dawn push to a summit where, on the right morning, both the Caribbean and the Pacific sit in view at once. SINAC's permit cap keeps the trail quiet and sells out months ahead, which is exactly why the local guiding cooperatives matter: they hold permits, pack horses, and pre-trek lodging in the village. No altitude anywhere else in Central America's tourist circuit compares.

Jebel Shams gives Oman its most spectacular walking. The mountain's rim drops sheer into Wadi Ghul, a canyon deep enough to earn the name the Grand Canyon of Arabia, and the classic hike, the Balcony Walk (route W6), threads a ledge partway down the cliff with the void falling away on one side the whole way. It is about four hours there and back over uneven rock, ending at the abandoned terraced village of Sab Bani Khamis tucked under an overhang, where a hidden pool still holds water. There is no summit scramble required and the exposure is manageable, so it suits fit walkers rather than technical mountaineers, yet the drops are real and the path is unfenced. Higher up, the plateau near the summit sits above 2,900 meters and can be bitterly cold, with the occasional dusting of frost in winter. Add village walks between old stone hamlets and terraced fields, and the mountain is a two- or three-day base rather than a single stop. It is best from October to April, when the heat down in the wadis has broken.

Masada is the great set-piece walk of the Judean Desert, and it pairs with the springs of Ein Gedi to make one of the finest desert hiking days in the country. The classic route climbs the Snake Path, a switchbacking trail up the eastern face of the mesa in around 45 minutes, timed to reach the summit as the sun lifts over the mountains of Jordan and floods the Dead Sea below. On top spread the ruins of Herod's first-century palace-fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where a Roman siege ended the Great Revolt in 73 CE and the earthworks of the besieging legion still ring the rock. A short drive north, the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve cuts green canyons of waterfalls and pools into the cliffs, where ibex and rock hyrax come down to drink and trails run from a short family loop to a demanding day. Add a float in the mineral-heavy Dead Sea, the lowest point of dry land on Earth, and you have desert, history and water in a single walk.

Makhtesh Ramon is the largest erosion crater on Earth, a 40-kilometer gash in the Negev highlands that is not a meteor or volcanic crater at all but a landform found almost only in this desert, carved as water stripped away a soft core and left a steep-walled amphitheater of colored rock. Trails drop from the rim town of Mitzpe Ramon into a floor of rainbow sandstone, volcanic dikes, ammonite fossils and the strange prisms of the Carpentry, and the Israel National Trail threads the length of it. Nubian ibex pick along the cliffs, and the crater sits inside one of the darkest reserves in the region, so a night in the makhtesh brings a sky thick with stars. This is desert walking at its most elemental, from a two-hour rim-to-floor descent to multi-day treks that link the crater to the springs of Ein Avdat and the Nabataean ruins along the ancient Incense Route. Spring brings brief desert blooms, and the light at dawn and dusk turns the walls gold and rust.

Mount Roraima is one of the world's great treks and one of the strangest landscapes on the planet. From the savanna of the Gran Sabana the tepui rises as a two-kilometer wall of rock, and the only walkable way up is a natural rock ramp on the southwest face, the route the Pemon have always used. The standard trip is six days from the village of Paraitepui: two days across open grassland and river crossings to a base camp under the wall, a hard climb up the ramp into the cloud, and two days exploring a summit world of wind-carved black rock, crystal-strewn valleys, quartz pools and tiny endemic plants and frogs found nowhere else. Nights are cold and camps are basic, tucked into rock overhangs called hotels. A licensed guide is mandatory and independent trekking is not allowed, so you go with a Pemon crew who carry, cook and read the mountain's fast-changing weather. Few places reward the effort like this one, and almost no one is up there with you.

The Simien Mountains are the great trek of Ethiopia, a UNESCO World Heritage range of thousand-meter escarpments, pinnacles and afro-alpine moorland that earns the local name Roof of Africa. You walk the rim from Sankaber to Geech to Chennek across several days, camping or using huts, with gelada monkeys grazing in troops a few meters away, walia ibex on the crags and, with luck, an Ethiopian wolf on the high plateau. Longer routes push up to Ras Dashen at 4,550 meters, the summit of Ethiopia and one of the highest points in Africa. National park rules require a licensed guide and an armed scout, so this is a place you trek with local people who know the escarpment and its wildlife.

Chinguetti is the classic starting point for a camel caravan trek into the Erg Ouarane, one of the great sand seas of the Sahara. The town itself is extraordinary, a thousand-year-old ksar of stone and mud on the desert's edge, but the reason to walk from here is the emptiness beyond it. On a multi-day mehariste trek you follow old caravan routes with a local guide and camels carrying the camp, walking through the cool of the morning and evening across dune fields, gravel plains and the occasional palm grove, and sleeping out under some of the darkest skies anywhere. There are no roads, no crowds and no noise, just the rhythm of the caravan and the shift of the light on the sand. It is a slow, physical way to travel that connects you to how the desert was always crossed, and it ends back among the libraries and lanes of Chinguetti. For a traveler after real remoteness and a taste of nomad life, this is the Sahara at its purest.

The Overland Track is a 65km, six-day traverse from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair through the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, run under one of the world's most structured trekking permit systems: in the booked season walking is one-way north to south, capped at 34 independent departures a day, and the summer permits sell out within hours of their July release. The discipline is the point; the track never feels crowded, and side trips to Mount Ossa, Tasmania's highest point, and a string of waterfalls stretch the fit. Licensed operators run parallel guided models from full-pack camping treks to the only private-hut lodge walk on the track, which is as close as trekking gets to first class.

Socotra is one of the most biologically isolated places on earth, an island cut off from the mainland for so long that about a third of its plant species grow nowhere else, which is why people call it the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. The signature is the dragon blood tree, Dracaena cinnabari, a slow-growing umbrella of a tree that bleeds red sap and forms whole forests on the misty Diksam plateau and at Firmihin. Alongside it grow bulbous bottle trees and desert roses clinging to bare rock. The way to see it is on foot, over several days, walking the plateau and the wadis and sleeping in simple camps, with side trips to the white sand and turquoise of the Detwah lagoon near Qalansiyah, the limestone chambers of Hoq Cave, and the freshwater pools and frankincense of the Homhil reserve. There are almost no other tourists, the guiding is entirely local, and the landscape looks like nowhere else. It is a hard place to reach and a harder country to enter, but for its own sake Socotra is one of the most extraordinary trekking destinations anywhere.

The Tadrart Acacus is one of the great open-air galleries of prehistoric art on earth, and you reach it on foot and by 4x4 across some of the most beautiful desert in the Sahara. Over thousands of years people painted and carved these canyon walls with herds of cattle, elephants, giraffe and hippo, with hunters, dancers and later the horses and camels that arrived as the land dried into desert. Walking among the panels near Ghat, camping under enormous skies with Tuareg guides, and crossing to the nearby engravings of Wadi Methkandoush and the dune-ringed lakes of the Ubari Sand Sea, is a way to feel the depth of that history rather than glance at it. The rock forms alone would justify the journey, natural arches and pinnacles weathered out of orange sandstone, but it is the art at eye level on the rock that makes the Acacus extraordinary. It is remote, permit-bound and hard-won, and for those few who reach it now, unforgettable.

Tassili n'Ajjer is the greatest open-air gallery of prehistoric art in the world, and the only way to see it properly is on foot. Across a high sandstone plateau the size of a small country, weathered into forests of rock, natural arches and slot canyons, are many thousands of engravings and paintings made over roughly twelve thousand years. They show a Sahara that was green: herds of cattle, elephants, giraffe and hippo, hunters with bows, dancers, and later the horses and camels that came as the land dried. Walking among them for several days, sleeping out under the plateau's enormous skies with Tuareg guides and camels carrying the camp, is a way to feel the depth of that history rather than glance at it. The landscape alone would justify the trip, with ancient cypresses that have survived millennia of drought and dunes running up against black rock, but it is the art, at eye level on the canyon walls, that makes this one of the most extraordinary treks anywhere. It is remote, hard-won and unforgettable.

Tsehlanyane is the most accessible good walking country in Lesotho, a national park in the northern Maloti with a proper network of marked trails rather than the open cross-country navigation the highlands usually demand. From the valley floor on the Hlotse River, routes range from the gentle Lower Trail to the Black Pool, an easy riverside walk, up to the demanding 16-kilometer Circular Route that climbs above 2,600 meters for long views over the Maluti range and down onto the che-che bush, one of the last indigenous woodlands left in a country that is otherwise almost treeless. The park is quiet, the air is thin and clean, and you share the paths with little more than the odd herd boy and his dogs. Most walkers base themselves at Maliba Lodge, Lesotho's only five-star mountain ecolodge, which sits at the trailheads and provides local guides who know the routes and can arrange the same trails on horseback. It is an easier, greener introduction to the Mountain Kingdom than the abseils and passes elsewhere, and a good base for multi-day walks deeper into the range.