Getting away from it all used to mean booking the next flight to a Tenerife resort to lie back on a sun lounger for at least five days. But a growing number of travellers, weighed down by their day-to-day, tech-dominated urban lives, are opting instead for something far more daring and intrepid – and sometimes even scary.

“Adventure travel is easier than it’s ever been, with reasonably priced tour operators helping to organise the sorts of trips that were once out of reach of all but the most gung-ho travellers,” says Jo Caird of Forbes Travel Guide. Alongside news coverage, films and newspapers, Caird identifies social media as a factor that has influenced this growth. “It brings our friends’ exciting travels to our attention and puts such trips within our reach.”

As a result, there is now a growing number of companies ready to make these trips happen. Wild Frontiers in London, set up in 2002 by Jonny Bealby, is one travel agency that specialises in jetting people to the most remote locations available. For a beginner group, the destination will be somewhere like Turkey or Romania. For the more practised, it will be the Pakistani Hindu Kush. The company offers trips all over the world, from horse riding tours of Cuba to a Wakhan corridor trek in Afghanistan to a 28-day Congo trip that follows in the footsteps of 19th-century explorer Henry Stanley. Wild Frontiers offers tailor-made trips as well as set tours for groups and, while everything is meticulously planned, genuine opportunities to get into the wild are offered.

More and more people are interested in adventure travel and adventure travel companies are interested in increasingly remote places.

This is increasingly true of adventure travel operators. “There are two types of growth in this industry,” says Bealby. “More and more people are interested in adventure travel and adventure travel companies are interested in increasingly remote places.” For him, the travel industry as a whole has progressed from people “being thoroughly excited about going to Mallorca to it not being unusual to go to Bhutan.”

This is because going to far-flung places has become cheaper and, thanks to companies like Wild Frontiers, easier. Bealby says that over 60% of his company’s clients are women. “They’re normally between 35 and 65 and they normally travel alone. Women are more adventurous but feel safer travelling within a group.” For those who travel with Wild Frontiers, adventure is rooted in safety. They are given “experiences” and are afforded the opportunity to escape from the stress of day-to-day life in the West. Some travellers ask for a Wild Frontiers package holiday that takes them to a destination where mobile phone coverage isn’t available. Others say leaving signal range just isn’t possible.

Often this day-to-day stress is related to the increasing domination of technology, as photographer Emiliano Granado of Yonder Journal notes. “I’m sure our desire to explore and see stuff is related to our mostly two-dimensional existence in pixels,” he says. Yonder Journal does not cater to the masses heading to “Africa” (never a specific country, always the continent) in search of the perfect Facebook profile picture. It is a publication and website that documents and reports experiences in the wilderness, and is rooted in cultural anthropology and explorations of territories beyond what is commonly called “civilisation”. At its core, Yonder Journal is driven by curiosity and a belief in what the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called “self-reliance”, which means that its audience is at the intellectual end of those interested in the idea of adventure. “Some people are just born curious and need to wander,” says Granado. “The physicality of things is attractive, for sure. But the bottom line for us is curiosity – seeking out different truths and experiences and perspective.”

By disconnecting us from our devices and networks, adventure trips make us live in the real world.

Travel website Jungles in Paris is similarly driven by curiosity. It produces and presents short pieces on culture, craft, geography, and wildlife from around the world. While it shows worlds away from the grip of technology, it relies on modern camera equipment and the internet to make it “super-easy to set up our own public platform, one that’s part magazine, part TV channel,” as co-founder Darrell Hartman puts it. Jungles in Paris is a beautiful platform, one that highlights the purest motivations behind adventure travel: curiosity and wonder at the new.

Wilderness Collective, another adventure travel provider, takes curiosity and puts a distinctly masculine spin on it, providing “legendary adventures for men” to its clients. These include horse trekking in California and riding snowmobiles in Alaska. Jack Kerouac features prominently on Wilderness Collective’s website. The primal pull of the road runs through everything it does and the exclusion of women speaks to a perceived decay in traditional masculinity in the West. Fitness is stressed and, if you spend your days tapping away at a computer, Wilderness Collective can provide you with the opportunity to prove yourself in a more physical arena.

Rapha Retreats does something similar, but on two wheels, by providing specialist cycle tours across mountain ranges from California to the Alps. Experienced cyclists lead groups of between 15 and 18 on trips to places such as Majorca, Napa and Le Grand Banc in Ventoux, France. The courses are laid back and groups are joined by guides, mechanics and other cycling assistants. This level of support is matched with high-end food and accommodation, so things never get too demanding. Founder and CEO Simon Mottram, highlighting the escape and relaxation element of adventure travel, says that “every bike ride is a form of therapy, a precious sanctuary from the stresses and strains of normal life”, which sounds quintessentially Californian.

In the end, technology is behind the rise of adventure travel, in both positive and negative ways. It has left people feeling as though they need to escape, but it has also given them ideas about where they could escape to. Without the means to go anywhere, curiosity is just that: curiosity. With some means – a bit of money, a travel company who will take you somewhere – curiosity piqued by a TV show or an article on the internet can be turned into a real experience. As technology catches up, and more and more places become mapped, the desire to go further afield increases. As Darrell Hartman of Jungles in Paris notes: “The advantage of the far-flung place is that you can’t check in on Foursquare.”

Jo Caird agrees. “As we become more and more ‘plugged in’ in our daily lives, the temptation to get off grid during our holiday time gets ever stronger,” she says. “By disconnecting us from our devices and networks, adventure trips make us live in the real world.”