We can understand wanting to get away from it all but this student took it to the extreme when she marooned herself on a remote island for 19 days.
Reikko Hori, a 22-year-old from Japan, was dropped off on Amparo, an Indonesian island, 4,200 miles north west of Australia, with nothing but a magnifying glass for starting fires and a spear gun for catching her dinner.
And, weirdly, she actually paid for the experience!
Hori booked her survival experience with Docastaway, a travel company which bills itself as the first business in the world to specialise in holidays and experiences in remote desert islands around the planet, the Daily Mail reports.
The firm offer a wide variety of island escapes with differing levels of comfort and difficulty. Tough Hori decided to test herself and chose their most extreme category – ‘adventure mode’.
Alvaro Cerezo of Docastaway, who organised the project, spoke to MailOnline Travel and confessed he was worried about Hori at first.
He said:
When she arrived at the airport on the first day I saw that she hadn’t prepared proper luggage and didn’t bring adequate clothing, only jeans. We needed to go to a local shop and buy trousers for her.
Then when I found out that her knowledge of survival was non-existent, I got more worried.
But what was distressing for me was the fact that Reikko had serious difficulties in detecting danger and in feeling pain.
She walked barefoot on the sharp coral, just is if she was walking barefoot at home. She slept on the floor in the jungle without it even crossing her mind that an animal could walk over her in the middle of the night.
Hori was a tough cookie though and, after her harsh introduction to the wild, she soon got to grips with the challenge ahead of her. The student managed to use her spear to catch fish, a rock to break open coconuts, a magnifying glass to make fire, and made it to the very end of her trip.
Speaking to MailOnline Travel, she said:
I thought the island was smaller than I previously imagined but I was scared to see I had to be 18 more days without being able to escape.
There was a big lonely feeling, like being the only person in the sea, but at the same time it was really exciting.
We’ll stick to the Costa Del Sol, we think!
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.
He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.