Benjamin Wong has found peace — at 8,530 feet.
As a high school teacher in Singapore, he gets long summer breaks, but he struggles to find places to travel to that aren’t as unbearably hot as where he lives.
This summer, he is camping out at a luxury mountain lodge in Yunnan, a region of southwestern China that has become more popular with tourists looking for places to escape the heat. Dali and Lijiang, well-visited cities in Yunnan, can be as cool as 59 degrees Fahrenheit at night in the summer — a major deciding factor for Wong.
“Other than weekend getaways to neighboring Southeast Asian cities, all my other holidays are always to places cooler than Singapore,” says Wong of the humid city-state, where temperatures routinely hover above 80 F. “Europe is unpredictable of late, and the last thing I want is to fly 13 hours and suffer in a heat wave with temperatures higher than Singapore’s.”
Wong’s decisions may be personal, but they underscore a deeper trend around the world. Some travel experts have been using the buzzword “coolcations” to describe a vacation location chosen for cooler weather. And it isn’t only the tourists coping with the dangerous weather. About 75% of workers in Asia are exposed to extreme heat, including employees like food vendors and delivery drivers, who often cater to tourists, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
