Online - December 10, 2005

World Class

The Globe’s Best Educational Trips

The type A vacation: an oxymoron if there ever was one. You can’t even take a break from your accomplished life without looking for something to accomplish. The solution? A class at your dream destination to jump-start your learning wanderlust.

Dirty Girls
Feel the need to sharpen your gardening tools? The Bath Priory Hotel’s fall Gardening Master Class is led by award-winning head gardener Jane Moore. (Send inquiries to mail@thebathpriory.co.uk.) Or get even dirtier in Dinosaurs of the Gobi, a sixteen-day trek under the auspices of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and noted paleontologists — including eight nights in expedition-style tents and three at the luxury Three Camel Lodge near the Altai Mountains.

Art Attack
Next spring, the Hacienda de los Santos Resort and Spa in Mexico offers a weeklong workshop in digital photography with professionals Jack and Rikki Swenson. And sailing the Caribbean gets even more colorful than usual March 12-18 aboard the private charter Arabella with painters Ted Tihansky and Alison Hill. Choose your medium — pastels, oils, or watercolors — and capture the pristine beaches and coral reefs.

Brains and Brawn
A two-week French language immersion class in gorgeous Biarritz (Southwest France, land of hot dudes) is already pretty appealing. But add surf lessons to break up the classroom monotony and it sounds like the perfect mind/body trip. Rather be living your own version of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights? Look into the Spanish and Dance program offered in Cuba through the British company Languages Abroad.

Call of the Wild
The Anantara Golden Triangle Resort and Spa in Thailand offers three-day camps in which guests learn to bathe, feed, command, and care for an elephant. Not your idea of fun? Then there’s full-on cultural immersion with the Maori in New Zealand, a crash course on carving, weaving, bush medicine, dance, and organic brewing.

Drink to Think
Yes, Virginia, there is an art to drinking beer. And you’ll have a blast learning it from chef Peter Gobin in his Craft Beers Are Better class at the Chamberlain West Hollywood. Rather observe the fine points of drinking tequila? The Four Seasons Punta Mita Resort offers a lecture and tasting aptly titled Tequila: a Gift from the Gods.

Partake in any of the above and you’ll have accomplished yet one more thing: learning to travel by the seat of your smarty pants.

  Adventure Travel, Break a Sweat, Do-Gooder, Help My Life Sucks, Scenesters