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Coasteering with TYF Adventures

When You Can’t Scramble Anymore, Jump!

Pembrokeshire Coast, Wales

Coasteering is adrenaline-fueled entertainment. Don a wetsuit, helmet, and life jacket, then begin scrambling up the rocky walls that make up the Pembrokeshire coastline. Keep climbing or traversing along the rugged shore until you can’t go any higher. Then jump! You crash into the ocean, then bob up again (thanks to the life jacket) and get washed around in the whitewater until you get your bearings and swim back to shore. Each time you try it you get a bit more aggressive and climb a bit higher.

Coasteering has been informally practiced for decades, but TFY Adventure claims to be the first commercial coasteering operation, opening in 1986. Since then it’s become a fast-growing adventure sport. Today, TFY takes people on many different routes, each specifically chosen to reflect the adrenaline surge desires of the participants. Each day, the routes are chosen based on the group, the swell, and the tide. There are routes that require endurance for adrenaline junkies, and easier choices for families and people who just want to see the Welsh coastline from a different angle. Each adventure, which lasts about a half-day, includes a combination of scrambling, climbing, cliff jumping, and swimming.

Pembrokeshire Coast National Park ( 44/845-345-7275;www.pcnpa.org.uk), on Wales’s southwestern shore, is the United Kingdom’s only truly coastal park. It encompasses the jagged, often cliff-fringed coastline backed by green, cultivated fields. Look offshore and you’ll see kayakers paddling in sheltered coves. Onshore, walkers are hiking along parts of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path National Trail, which twists and turns for 300km (186 miles), mostly in the park, passing the cliffs, open beaches, and winding estuaries.

Within Wales, the best places for coasteering are the Pembrokeshire coast, the North Wales coast, and the Gower Peninsula. This is an increasingly popular sport, and you may find it in other coastal cities from France and Spain to Croatia and South Africa.

Coasteering encompasses an array of adrenaline-inducing activities including hiking, rock climbing, cliff jumping, and swimming.

TYF Adventure, which is based in historic St. David’s and Freshwater East, offers other adrenaline activities such as rock climbing, surfing, and kayaking. In this region of Wales, you can also go jet-boating to explore the coves and beaches along this wild coastline, or head out to sea for a day of whale and dolphin watching. Wales has an extensive system of mountain biking trails, a mix of single track, fire roads, and natural trails along mountainsides. Throughout Wales, there are some 4,000 geocaches that geocaching fans can try to find. —LF

TYF Coasteering ( 44/1437-721633;www.coasteering.com). Visit Wales ( 44/8701-211851;www.godo.visitwales.com).

Cardiff.

$$ Laphey Court Hotel, Laphey, near Tenby ( 44/01646-672273;www.lapheycourt.co.uk). $$ Coach House Hotel, 116 Main St. ( 44/01646-684602).

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SwimTreks

In the Swim of Things

Locations Worldwide

Imagine a long swim surrounded by scenery that takes your breath away. You’re getting lots of exercise and visiting a new pocket of the globe, too. It’s a tropical island vacation, it’s a great workout, and it’s culturally rewarding. Impossible? Not on a “swimcation,” which takes you to exotic locations and gets you in touch with the natural splendor of each by getting you into the water. Led by SwimTrek, a British tour operator, these holidays take avid swimmers out of the pool and into the open waters of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and other regions to swim from one shore to the next, or in some cases from island to island, while accompanied by a support boat.

Swimmers should be in good enough shape to handle the activity levels specified for their trip; some trips are longer and more rigorous than others, but each assigns swimmers to a group based on their swim speed.