10 'Vacations' You Can Take From Your Desk

Want to jet off to Australia, Hong Kong, New York or Tokyo? Of course you do. Unfortunately, daily life generally forces us to sit at a desk from 9 to 5. But a few companies are helping to ease the pain by allowing you to escape from the dreariness of your cubicle. Enter virtual reality.

Whether it’s a viewing devicestrapped on your face transporting you to Australia or a 360-degree on-location video online, taking a mini journey across the globe has never been easier. Companies, resorts, and museums have developed groundbreaking technology that allows you to have totally immersive experiences ranging from birds-eye views of locations to intense intricate closeups of paintings that you can’t see with the naked eye.

For adventurous folks, Hamilton Island in Australia partnered with Samsung Electronics and Rapid VR to provide three-dimensional, 360-degree interactive vision that gives viewers a feeling of immersion. You can swim with turtles in the Great Barrier Reef and take a helicopter tour over the island.

More low-key museum types will enjoy the Google Cultural Institute’s latest: 1,000-gigapixel images of famous paintings from museums around the world. The images of works by Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and more are so detailed that you can actually see the layers of paint.

Other companies, like Lufthansa, have created several 360-degree on-location videos. Google Maps takes you on a safari through South Africa. Check out these 10 virtual reality vacations you can take from your desk.

Jordi Lippe-McGraw is a Contributing Digital Reporter with Travel + Leisure. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Offbeat

Politics, health, sports, and breaking stories are all topics that affect our daily lives in significant ways, but nothing sparks our interest like weird news. Our brains often need enjoyable pauses to get through the daily grind, and reading or learning about something funny, odd, or completely bizarre is an easy, seductive outlet. Of course, offbeat news is not necessarily need-to-know information, or information we even thought we wanted to know. In fact, bizarre news doesn’t quite fit anywhere else—it’s just too fascinating to pass by. As a trusted travel news resource, Travel + Leisure stays on the pulse of even the oddest stories.

The strange and the beautiful

Ever wondered about America’s strangest roadside attractions, or quirkiest cities? How about the world’s most unique holiday traditions, from covering Christmas trees in spider webs in Ukraine to leaving a plate of food by an unoccupied chair overnight for the ghosts of dead relatives in Portugal? Did you know that, among the world’s craziest airport attractions, you’d find a station for inhaling cinnamon-scented oxygen in Tokyo and an in-house dentist in São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport? Speaking of air travel, themed airplanes are becoming more prevalent, from Star Wars to Hello Kitty to the Northern Lights.

Meanwhile, unusual hotels—made out of salt, ice, or railway cars, built underground or on a fire watchtower—prove that guests will stay anywhere. And, when it comes to museums, if you can dream it, you can believe it. There are museums dedicated to the oddest of collections, from barbed wire to human hair to a house of some 80,000 salt and pepper shakers to art “too bad to be ignored.” There’s even one dedicated to items washed up on a beach, including two tombstones from the 19th century and an entire Harley Davidson motorcycle.

The world is a crazy, confusing, and inspiring place. Travel + Leisure’s coverage on funny, odd, and bizarre travel stories serves as a simple reminder that we are all, in fact, human, and that someone, somewhere, is interested.