The idea of a walking holiday — a long-distance journey on foot, during which you lodge overnight and carry just enough clothing, food and water for each day’s stretch — has long been popular in Europe. But within the last few years, these pilgrimage-style walks have sprung up all over the world.

As you’re preparing for your next trip, plan for spontaneous encounters. Pick a starting point and an end, line up a few stops and stays along the way, and let the rest follow. Here are seven new treks to keep in mind.

The Pekoe Trail, Sri Lanka

Before Sri Lanka became the tea capital of the world, its mist-shrouded forests were dotted with coffee plantations. In 1867, a few years before a disease largely wiped out that crop, a Scotsman named James Taylor developed the country’s first commercial tea estate. Former coffee growers soon began traveling to the estate to learn how to cultivate and process tea, starting what would become a series of trails that formed the industry’s transportation network.

More than a century later, those routes have been recovered to make the Pekoe Trail, a 186-mile path that will open in July. Its development was funded by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development to help boost Sri Lanka’s tourism industry in the aftermath of the 2019 Easter bombings, the terrorist attacks in Colombo, the capital, which led to a 70 percent drop in visitor numbers from the year before. The trail connects 80 hamlets and villages across the island’s mountainous Central and Uva provinces, some in remote areas that see fewer tourists, others near historic sites, including Taylor’s Loolecondera Estate and the famed Nine Arch Bridge, a scenic railway overpass and architectural wonder near the town of Ella.

At the route’s northern end is the Buddhist stronghold of Kandy, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Bandaranaike International Airport; at the other, the highland community of Nuwara Eliya. The journey was designed to take a leisurely 22 days, so that visitors could have half days to fill as they’d like, whether with long lunches of kottu roti, naps in restored colonial-era bungalows, or afternoons sampling teas and swimming in waterfalls.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/travel/long-walk-exercise.html