The spa is top-notch. While you're enjoying an outdoor massage and an ocean breeze, guests can ponder the resort's biodiesel plant, composting area, herb and vegetable garden, nursery, wastewater treatment plant and fresh-water reservoir.


Rates start at about $250 per night.

Hapuku Lodge & Tree Houses, New Zealand

Two decades ago, when the local whaling industry was outlawed, the small city of Kaikoura, on New Zealand's South Island, found itself in difficulty.

Since then, it has been reinvented by Maori locals who have learned to sustain local marine life and appeal to tourists by nourishing the natural beauty of the land, with its dramatic mountains and surf-washed beaches.

The lodge, 7 miles north of Kaikoura, is surrounded by an expansive deer farm and a 1,000-tree olive grove. Lodge rooms offer views across the deer paddocks to the mountains, plus there are five treehouses nestled 30 feet above ground in the canopy of a native Manuka grove.

Rates start at about $350 per night.

Al Maha Desert Resort & Spa, United Arab Emirates

Forty-five minutes from Dubai, this ultra-luxurious resort offers 40 spacious bungalows set in 90 square miles of pristine desert landscape, with unobstructed views of the undulating sand dunes, dotted with palms, and the mountains beyond.

There are numerous opportunities for watching indigenous desert wildlife --the resort is on a reserve that protects several species -- and sightings of gazelles and oryxes (white antelopes) are common.

Al Maha's importance is global: Much of the region's desert habitat is rapidly disappearing amid the Gulf region's rapid development.

Rates start at about $1,100 per night.