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.”