Overland Journeys: On the Roads Less Traveled

Your time aboard The World promises a lifestyle built around adventures on the most coveted shores and tailor-made comforts that welcome you Home after exhilarating discoveries. At the heart of every Journey is a shared desire to explore further, experience more, and delve deeper into the local cultures of the places The World visits. Overland Journeys complement The World’s global itinerary by extending exploration far beyond the coastline, offering Residents the opportunity to venture deeper inland and experience places, cultures and landscapes that cannot be reached from the Ship alone.

Designed by experts and guided by locals, each Overland Journey reflects a sense of place and promises rare access found nowhere else, the kind that turns a destination into a memory rather than a photograph.

In Argentina, Residents & Guests crossed into one of the world’s great natural wonders at the Iguazú Falls, where 275 cascades thunder across the border of Argentina and Brazil, more than twice the width of Niagara Falls. From the Brazilian side, a mile-long trail wound through dense rainforest, home to over 95 percent of the Iguazú River basin, to a panoramic elevator, the air growing thick with mist long before the falls came into view.

The hotel itself, a hacienda-style property steeped in 1950s charm, sat close enough that the falls became a constant soundtrack, heard from the halls, the gardens, even the pillow. Evenings brought a picnic in the orchid-filled grounds, champagne in hand as a thousand tiny rainbows danced in the spray and the sound of rainforest birdsong mixed with the roar of falling water. The following day, the group crossed to the Argentine side for the Devil’s Throat, the most powerful of all the falls, tracing upper and lower circuits past cascades with names like the Three Musketeers before slipping away to the quiet village of Jasy Porá to browse market stalls tucked into the tropical forest.

Some chose to see it all again from above, by helicopter across three borders at once, the falls reduced to a silver thread stitched through green. The Overland Journey closed with an interactive dinner in the sculpted gardens, the estate’s executive chef preparing a menu built around the flavors of Brazil while the falls murmured somewhere in the dark.

Halfway around the world, in the south of France, Residents traded rainforest for vineyard on an Overland Journey through southern Rhône and Provence, based at the art-filled estate of Château La Coste, where architecture, wine, and gastronomy share equal billing. Guided by The World‘s own wine expert, the group moved between celebrated vineyards, some accessible only by invitation, and lavender fields turning gold in the late afternoon light, tasting elegant rosés and bold reds poured by the winemakers themselves at estates like Château Simone and Domaine Tempier.

Access came through relationships built over years, not brochures. Conversations with vineyard owners went well beyond the usual tasting room script, drifting into terroir, family history, and the particular stubbornness required to farm this corner of France for generations. It was the kind of experience that reveals a region’s soul rather than its highlight reel, where the wine in the glass came with the story of the hands that made it.

And in Chile’s Atacama Desert, Residents & Guests traded coastline for altitude, descending into the driest place on Earth to find it anything but empty. Days began with guided hikes past towering cacti and ancient ruins, winding down through a lush canyon alive with birdsong to the Puritama hot springs, where two rivers meet and merge into one beneath the desert sun. By night, Atacama’s famously clear skies, among the clearest on the planet, opened up above Explora Lodge, where a private observatory and its own SmartScope brought the cosmos into sharp, startling focus.

Guests chose their own way through the days that followed: horseback across the red-earth farmland of the ayllu of Solor, past adobe homes and a small desert library, e-bikes through canyon walls the color of rust en route to a centuries-old church, or a quiet afternoon watching flamingos wade through the mineral pools of Laguna Chaxa, volcanoes rising in the distance like sentinels. At 8,200 ft/ 2,499 m, even the air felt different, thinner, sharper, somehow more honest.

From the mist of the Iguazú Falls to the vineyards of Provence to the stargazing skies of Atacama, every Overland Journey is designed around a singular truth: the deepest way to know a place is to be led into it by those who know it best. These are not itineraries so much as invitations, each one a door opened by relationships The World has spent years building, leading to tables, vineyards, and landscapes that remain closed to nearly everyone else.

Residents interested in charting a path entirely their own may also inquire about Design Your Own Journeys, personalized independent excursions created by The World Concierge around the Resident’s individual interests and preferences. But whichever path is chosen, the destination is all your own: this is what it means to call the world Home, not to pass through a place, but to be welcomed into it.