I’ve been looking for a good location for summer meditation retreats or dance retreats for some time now but the trouble is there are just too many people in the world. Just about every little secluded beach has been discovered and developed, or else it’s national park land and we can’t get permission to camp there, or else it’s occupied by free campers who would take offense at anything organised happening on their favourite summer haunt.

I found an amazing beach only accessible by boat in South Turkey, not too far away from Fethiye but the people who owned it saw me coming and wanted a fortune to rent their space. It’s still a possibility but it’s also more expensive to get there so the retreat might end up being too expensive for some people.

I had a look at some of the beaches in Albania as well where the atmosphere is anarchic enough for the authorities not to care less if 30 of us were to gather on one of the hidden beaches backing onto canyons there. But how many people would want to go to Albania? For seasoned travellers it probably sounds great but for first-timers the reputation of the country would hardly seem like safe place to make a yoga retreat…

There are any number of nice places in the mountains and forests across Europe where we could get together but I’ve seen that part of the reason people come on the Sahara Retreat is because of the amazing location. They’re looking forwards to the dance workshops, doing a bit of yoga and meditation, but they’re also going to the SAHARA DESERT and that’s really something to tell their friends. I learned to my cost when I tried to make the Road Junky Oasis in the mountains of Bulgaria that a beautiful forest isn’t enough to bring people in.

So I think it has to be somewhere amazing like our organised hike through the mountains of Norway in midsummer, or a lake or best of all a beach. I have a couple of leads for beaches that might work; the Danube Delta in Romania has some remote beaches and it seems like we can get permission there without too much trouble. And the Golden Beach in Northy Cyprus is also a possibility I’m following up on – the great thing about making an ecstatic dance retreat there is we could be dancing in the moonlight on soft, golden sand even in the winter.
But it all takes a lot of time and energy to find locations, not to mention luck.