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Adventure Travel and Great Food: Why the Best Trips Have Both
On the best trips, the meal is as much the destination as the mountain. Here’s how four EF Adventures destinations get food and adventure exactly right.
In Girona, professional cyclists don’t start their training rides from a parking lot. They start from a café. A double espresso, something small to eat, and then the road. Somewhere mid-ride, they’ll stop again—lean the bike against a wall, order another, and keep going. The café stop is part of the ride, and it always has been.
At EF Adventures, every itinerary combines active experiences—hiking, biking, kayaking, and more—with included meals, local tastings, and optional cooking classes that are as specific to the destination as the trails themselves. Here’s what that looks like across four of our most popular destinations.
Catalonia, Spain: The mid-ride stop
Girona is the adopted training ground of professional cyclists from around the world, and not just because of the climbs. The city has a particular relationship with the café stop—a coffee ordered mid-ride, a few minutes of stillness before the next ascent. On our Spain Biking tour through Catalonia and Costa Brava, you roll out of Girona and into the same roads the pros train on. The café stop comes with the territory.
Later, in Girona’s Gothic Quarter, there’s the xuixo: a deep-fried, cream-filled pastry connected by local legend to a traveling circus performer who invented it here. It’s been sold on these streets for a century. You’ll eat one after a walking tour through the same medieval alleys. Context makes things taste better.
Japan: The meal that earns its moment
On our Japan Multi-Adventure tour, one day involves climbing 1,368 stone steps to reach Konpira Shrine—a sacred site that has protected seafarers and travelers for over a thousand years. That evening, at a traditional ryokan in the remote Iya Valley, dinner is kaiseki: a multi-course meal where seasonal ingredients are prepared and presented across small plates, each one deliberate. The whole thing is organized around attention—to the season, to the ingredient, to the person at the table. After a day like that, it lands differently.
Osaka, later in the trip, is the counterpoint: Japan’s undisputed street food capital, home to the philosophy of kuidaore—eating yourself into bankruptcy, more or less. Takoyaki, okonomiyaki, the neon chaos of Dotonbori at night. The food culture here runs on joy and volume, and deserves your full commitment.
The Alps: Altitude, fontina, and a vineyard above the lake
On our Alps Hiking tour through Switzerland, Italy, and France, the food shifts with the landscape as you move between countries. In Switzerland, you walk the terraced Lavaux Vineyard above Lake Geneva, then taste the wines from the vines you just hiked through.
Crossing into Italy’s Aosta Valley, the evening welcomes another wine tasting with a sommelier and a spread of local charcuterie. The next morning you’re back on the trail for Stage 5 of the Tour du Mont Blanc, with lunch at a mountain rifugio—fontina cheese and polenta, eaten at altitude with Mont Blanc overhead.
These meals wouldn’t taste the same anywhere else. Fontina eaten at altitude after six miles pounding the trail on the Tour du Mont Blanc is a different experience than fontina eaten at a restaurant. The altitude helps—and so does that appetite.
Portugal: The farm at the end of the ride
On our Portugal Multi-Adventure tour, the last full day takes you through Alentejo—Portugal’s rural interior, where vineyards, olive groves, and cork oak forests stretch across gentle rolling plains. You’ll e-bike the Ramal de Reguengos, a former railway line converted to trail, pedaling through the landscape before stopping in Monsaraz, a medieval hilltop village with views over Europe’s largest artificial lake. The ride ends at one of Portugal’s oldest and most celebrated wineries, where your farewell lunch includes an olive oil and wine tasting from the land you just rode through.
It’s an unforgettable last day. The kind where the meal makes sense because of everything that came before it.
Every EF Adventures tour is built around this—the right meal, in the right place, at the right moment in the day.
If you’re looking for active group tours that combine great adventures with exceptional local food and dining experiences—in Europe, Japan, or beyond—we’d love to show you what we’ve put together.
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