Rwanda, Madagascar or the mountains of Oman: reserve a $4,190 vacation package

The $4,190 rung, and the three or four departures standing on it

Everything below is priced at $4,190 a head with two of you sharing a room. They are set out in no order of merit, because there is none to give.

Three trips, set out side by side

Rwanda is eight nights, most of them at the edge of old montane rainforest with thirteen primate species in it. Madagascar is twelve nights across two very different places, a limestone forest of blades in the west and an eastern rainforest that calls at dawn. Oman is eight nights on a dry range, in villages sitting on terraces above water channels older than any record of them. One is short and green. One is long and hard to move around in. One is dry, warm in winter and easy underfoot. The office does not tell people which to take, and it will not put the three in an order. What it will do is describe the driving days honestly, because in Madagascar those days are the trip as much as the forests are. Reserve the one whose month you can actually take off work.

Where $4,190 stops

This figure does not reach Guyana, Alaska or the Yukon. Those three sit on the next rung, at $5,260, where a light aircraft leg or several hundred miles of gravel is part of the arrangement. It does not reach the Kimberley, east Greenland or the Santa Cruz steppe, which are further up again. Inside $4,190 the limits are ordinary. International flights sit outside every figure on this site. The office arranges no carriage by air or by sea and holds a contract with no carrier. Where a trip needs a domestic flight, the operating company arranges and prices it, and the confirmation states it. Rooms in Madagascar are simple once you leave the capital, because that is what exists. Park fees and permits in Rwanda are set by the government and change without much warning, so the operator passes on the current figure. Single occupancy costs more everywhere on this rung.

Check the season before you check anything else

Seasons on this rung hardly overlap, which makes the choice for most people. Rwanda runs June to September and again December to February, around the two wet seasons. Madagascar runs April to November, and the cyclone months are simply closed. Oman runs October to April, because the range is unbearable in summer and nobody pretends otherwise. So a request in July has one obvious answer, and a request in January has two. Deposits differ as well. Oman asks ten percent at reservation, Rwanda fifty, Madagascar the full amount, because vehicles, drivers and the western road are committed a long way ahead. Those shares are set by the operating companies, not by this office. Send your dates, a room preference and any walking limits. The office puts the reservation to the operator and comes back with a written price and a cancellation deadline. Nothing is held before that.