Gary Beeck’s island had all the basic ingredients of a tropical daydream: swaying palms, epoxy-clear water, a blond frill of sand fading to jungle. But a surge of trepidation hit when Beeck, a retiree from Perth, Australia, neared the uninhabited island off Sumatra’s volcano-pocked coast in May. Later that day, the boat and crew that carried him would return to shore; Beeck would stay behind, alone.
“When I saw it, I thought: ‘What am I doing?’” Beeck says. “Do I really want to be left?” He did, though. Beeck had booked a “castaway” stay on the island though the travel company Docastaway. For 12 days and with just a few basic survival supplies, he planned to live off wild coconuts, plus whatever food he could catch and forage. During the drive to the boat launch that morning, a local guide had offered a final chance to purchase provisions before leaving civilization behind—there were ripe mangoes, sweetly starchy bananas. He said no. Later, and only when it was too late to change his mind, Beeck would reconsider. He should have bought the mangoes.
Beeck, 67, doesn’t shy from adventure. He’s explored the Himalayas by motorbike and steered his own sailboat through the Mediterranean, South China Sea, and Malacca Straits. His gaze sometimes lingered on the desolate-looking islets he passed. “I’ve always wanted to sort of plow my boat into a desert island, and just see if I can survive,” he says. Docastaway, then, offered a relatively sensible alternative to that fantasy: castaway-lite, with the option to call for help if things went sideways.
Untold Story Travel sends people to places like Fiji.
When Docastaway began in 2010, the company says, it was the first place to specialize in sending travelers to fend for themselves on desert islands. Since then, the castaway business has grown. In 2013, No Limit Journeys launched survival-style island trips it calls “the hardest and most real” available, with destinations in Tonga, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and Chile. Offering bushcraft classes and trips to the Philippines, Tonga, Indonesia, and Panama, the U.K.-based Desert Island Survival was founded in 2016 by Tom Williams, who outlasted 10 other DIYers in the northern Canadian wilderness to win the first season of Alone UK. In 2018 another British company debuted, Untold Story Travel, combining survivalist training with individual sessions in which travelers test their endurance and fishing prowess.
“We have found there to be a continually increasing number of solo stays and couples who want the experience of complete isolation with no other human contact,” writes Mark Allvey, an Untold Story Travel cofounder, in an email. In 2017, luxury travel company Black Tomato launched a service, “Get Lost,” which deposits travelers in remote locations from polar tundra to jungle, where they rely on their own navigation and survival skills as a support team keeps watch from a distance. It’s “all designed around being in a profound state of disconnection,” says the company’s head of product, Carolyn Addison. “We’ve certainly seen an increased interest in that.” A number of travelers, it seems, are dreaming of profound solitude in the world’s most remote places.
That very sentiment inspired Docastaway founder Álvaro Cerezo. In photos, the 43-year-old Spaniard has deeply bronzed skin; not the fleeting tan of a scorched vacationer, but a mahogany cast from a life spent mostly outdoors. Cerezo grew up on the resort-choked Málaga coast, and, at eight years old, began slipping away from home, paddling a kayak or inflatable boat along the shore until he found a place he could have all to himself.
“I am a loneliness-seeking person,” he says. “I used to go to remote coves, with no people, to be alone. The feeling of isolation was really powerful. It was something that I really liked. Just to feel like there’s no one else.” Though the allure of solitary places was strong, it was sometimes elusive. In Málaga’s leftover tatters of coastal wilderness, the buzz of a passing plane and the blink of offshore lights could easily break the illusion of solitude. In a world whose population doubled between 1960 and 1999—the year Cerezo turned 18—just how alone can a person hope to be?
Throughout history, the promise of elbow room has drawn travelers to desert islands, a term referring not to Sahara-like conditions, but to a lack of people. (The Latin desertus means “uninhabited.”) Genomic evidence suggests that Polynesia was settled, over several centuries, by Austronesian-speaking voyagers, who covered thousands of miles of ocean in double-hulled sailing canoes in search of fresh islands. More recent adventurers have riveted the public. In 1952, 50-year-old New Zealander Tom Neale moved from Rarotonga to a mile-long islet in Suwarrow Atoll, where he would live, some 200 miles from the nearest neighbor, for a series of stints totaling 16 years. The book he wrote about his solitary life, An Island to Oneself, remains a cult favorite. In her 1983 book, Castaway, British writer Lucy Irvine described her time on the Torres Strait island of Tuin after she, at 25, answered a newspaper ad reading: “Writer seeks ‘wife’ for year on tropical island.”
Cerezo went looking for his own desert island when he was 19. On holiday from university, he traveled to the Andaman and Nicobar island group in the Bay of Bengal. Of its 836 widely scattered islands and outcrops, just 31 are permanently inhabited. The region is home to the Sentinelese, who the nonprofit Survival International considers the most isolated tribe in the world. They inhabit a squarish, forested island that’s roughly the size of Manhattan and are prone to greeting outsiders with volleys of iron-tipped arrows.
A tantalizing geography, for a loneliness seeker like Cerezo. He searched online for a company that would take him to one of its quieter corners. There wasn’t one. “I wanted to be a castaway, and no chance,” Cerezo says. “I decided to do it myself.” While the two islands he visited were not precisely deserted—fishermen stopped by, he wasn’t far from a village—the month he spent in the Andamans was transformative. He passed summer days fishing and eating coconuts; he bartered surplus catch with locals. “It was beautiful. I have amazing memories,” he says.
From then on, he visited a different island with each holiday, exploring increasingly remote places in Indonesia, Africa, and the Caribbean. He was pursuing a master’s degree in economics, but an office job was starting to seem unlikely. Instead, Cerezo sought to make a life of his knack for finding islands.
In 2008, Cerezo began trial runs for the company he hoped to found. He sent his friends to islands he’d found while exploring, which didn’t always go smoothly: Fishermen showed up repeatedly, and, in one case, day-tripping tourists interrupted his idyll. Cerezo adapted, seeking new destinations and building relationships with local fixers. Traveling from island to island with a backpack, laptop, and camera, Cerezo created the Docastaway website in 2009—but it wasn’t until October of 2010 that he found a paying customer willing to book with the brand-new company. Since then, he’s sent more than 1,000 people to experience desert islands of their own, in Asia, the Caribbean, and Oceania. Indonesia, which is both vast and accessible, is by far the most popular.
They’re not all die-hard survivalists. Docastaway offers “comfort mode” trips ($103-210 USD/night) featuring a private villa, kitchen, and provided food. Even travelers who choose “survival mode” ($98–414 USD/night) can dial down discomfort by requesting additional supplies such as bottled water and snacks. While some castaways come prepared with survival skills, Cerezo doesn’t encourage it. “I advise them to go with no training at all, because this is the real castaway experience,” he says. Only after paying a deposit do travelers learn the precise location of “their” islands, and sign a waiver acknowledging the panoply of risks desert islands present, from falling coconuts to rogue waves. To mitigate that risk, everyone gets an “emergency button” to call for assistance from Docastaway staff, usually the only point of contact with the outside world—often the point.
“I felt like I just needed to free myself from the existing status quo of society,” says Urara Takaseki, who was 20 years old when, in 2018, she did a seven-day survival-mode Docastaway trip on an island in Indonesia. “It was this feeling of ‘I just want to leave everything behind.’”
Today, Takaseki is a PhD student at the University of Tokyo, and the CEO of femtech startup Omotete. But before her trip, she was an undergraduate with multiple jobs, overwhelmed and overworked. Takaseki, who spent part of her childhood in Maryland, enjoyed camping and had taken some bushcraft classes. She watched YouTube videos of people surviving in remote areas and fantasized about doing it herself.
For her first few days on the island, she foraged and fished. But eventually, she opted to live entirely on coconuts. No cook fires; no fishing duties. “You’re kind of sitting there like ‘Hmm, what’s on my schedule?’” Takaseki says. “I have nothing to do. Just the calm . . . kind of like meditating.” She felt empowered to live differently once she returned to Tokyo. She decided to work less, focusing only on things that really mattered to her. “My outlook on work and my lifestyle really changed,” she says.
No one keeps an official list of uninhabited islands worldwide. If they did, it would be long. Norway and Sweden alone have hundreds of thousands of desert islands, including some that are astonishingly remote. One glacier-covered Norwegian island, Bouvetøya, is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest point of land. Desert islands conjure isolation so effectively they’ve become our go-to metaphor for it. We have desert island books, desert island discs, and desert island foods. The New Yorker Cartoon Bank includes nearly 400 hits for “desert island,” perhaps because with just a few lines—a horizontal parenthesis of sand, a few palm trees—an artist can conjure a scene that’s both instantly recognizable and totally self-contained.
Reality is more complicated; the experience of arriving upon an “untouched” island requires a surprising amount of curation. Plastic swirls to the ocean’s farthest shores, so the Docastaway team cleans islands before each traveler’s visit, picking up stray fishing gear, water bottles, and anything else washed up with the tide. In just a few weeks, the beach fills with freshly accumulated litter. When Cerezo secures permission, either from government or private landowners, to rent an island for Docastaway clients, he’s fiercely protective of its location, wary of interlopers, and asks past clients to refrain from posting identifying information online.
The world keeps pressing in, inexorable with its boats and development and plantations. Small islands are among the places most vulnerable to climate change, exposed to hypercharged storms and rising sea levels. It’s also not as easy to disconnect as it once was. In the years since he founded the company, Cerezo has watched cell coverage expand across the world’s archipelagos. A modern-day Robinson Crusoe could live off coconuts while binge-watching old seasons of Naked and Afraid.
But many of the discomforts and delights available on desert islands remain refreshingly technology-proof. In his recent book, De l'île déserte à la mer de sable (From the Desert Island to the Sea of Sand), retired entrepreneur Gauthier Toulemonde recounts a 40-day solo stay on an Indonesian island that Cerezo organized in 2013. Toulemonde couldn’t miss work, so he brought a laptop, solar panels, and satellite connection. He also borrowed a dog named Gecko and three cats for the trip, in hopes they’d provide a little companionship—and help keep the island’s resident rats at bay. Even with the internet and hand-me-down pets, the solitude felt extreme. He connected with nature; he savored the silence between rainstorms.
“Every day it was like the first morning of the world,” says Toulemonde, 65, who lives outside of Lille, France. “You feel stronger,” he says. “You learn many things about yourself, you learn to be alone—if you have a problem, you just have to solve the problem alone. There is nobody to help you.”
During his time on an island off Sumatra, Gary Beeck strung up a hammock for sleeping and a tarp for shade and shelter.
Photo by Gary Beeck
During Gary Beeck’s stint off Sumatra, conditions fluctuated between sweltering highs and nighttime tempests that left him shivering. Storms soaked all the wood, so it was hard to get a fire going. Though Beeck boiled hermit crabs and caught some fish, after a week he had hunger pangs. By the end, he was thinking obsessively about nasi goreng and a bright-green Swedish confection called princess cake. “It’s got a lot of marzipan and custard and jam, and it’s the best cake ever,” he says.
But he found the experience thrilling, too. Like Takaseki and Toulemonde, he relished long stretches of beautifully unaccounted-for time. Each morning, he woke up, brushed his teeth, and walked around the island, which only took an hour. After drinking a coconut, he had the whole day ahead. There was only so much to do. He combed the beach for flotsam. He watched a mainland volcano leak streamers of smoke and ash. He moved sea turtle eggs to safety and wondered when they’d hatch. Darkness comes early in the tropics, so he lay awake in his hammock for hours each night before falling asleep.
“Your mind just turns to the things that are most important to you, your family, some friends,” Beeck says. It’s like those survival-style reality shows on television, he says. Participants start out talking tough, then break down in tears after three days, crying about how they miss their families. “I thought they were weak, just weak—but it’s absolutely true,” he says. “You try to sort out your life and fix it.”
The experience changed him. Beeck returned home feeling calmer, slower to judge, a better listener, more reflective. “I had all that time to sit and think, and I loved it. So why can’t I bring a bit of that back with me?” he says. When friends wonder about the trip, he simply tells them to try it themselves.
In fact, Beeck is considering a second round. The daily routines of life at home exert their own tidal pull, and he can sense how easy it will be to lose sight of those desert island insights. Each of us has just so many years in which to get lost; Beeck knows he’s not getting younger. “I’m probably looking to Álvaro to give me another island somewhere,” he says.
