It’s hard to feel sorry for anyone on the brink of a three-year university lie-in, but you’ve got to have some pity for school-leavers these days. Top-up fees, McJobs... it’s a wonder they find time for growing beards and skipping lectures.

Even picking a gap year is trickier than it used to be. According to Tom Griffiths of www.gapyear.com, only about 1,000 UK school-leavers did a gap placement 10 years ago. In those days, six months in a Mother Teresa hospital bought you bragging rights in freshers’ week and a cultural experience you – and your CV – would never forget.

Now, however, with about 5,000 school-leavers doing gap placements every year, and the big boys such as Real Gap Experience (turnover £11m) packing up to 30 “gappers” onto the same placement at a time, the gap road less travelled is a tough one to find.

The good news, if you’ve just finished your A-levels, is that small-scale projects can still be found, with bragging rights – and genuine cultural immersion – guaranteed. From a 10-day marine-conservation trip to an eight-month teaching placement in Tanzania, here are 10 outstanding adventures.

Prices are per person, including all food, accommodation, training and local support. Flights, where included, are from London. Contact the operator for regional departures

FOOTBALL COACHING, Ghana

Gap Sports has a wide programme of coaching placements, but one of its best – and furthest off the beaten track – is in Accra, where volunteers work in schools and youth clubs coaching under12s and upwards, with the option of also helping out in hospitals, orphanages, schools and care homes. No coaching experience required – enthusiasm is everything.

Details: £995 for four weeks (minimum), £1,895 for three months, £100 per week thereafter, departing on July 14, September 1 or October 13. Flights not included. Contact Gap Sports (0870 837 9797, www.gapsports.com).

TEACHING, Tanzania

Primary-school teaching is an exhausting, testing, utterly redeeming crash course in local culture, and this really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Based in the village of Mshiri in northern Tanzania, you will be staying in a house with two other volunteers but teaching alone in village schools. This eight-month placement was set up by Katy Allen, who taught here in the early 1990s. School outings to the coast and to national parks are part of the placement; Kilimanjaro – staring out from across the playground – is nearby for holiday trekking.

Details: £2,750 for eight months, excluding food, departing in January 2008, including 12-month, flexible scheduled air tickets and two weeks’ language/teacher training in Kent in November. Contact Village Education Project (01732 743000, www.kiliproject.org).

GAME CAPTURE, South Africa

This is the gap road off the map, through the bush, on your knees, capturing big game for treatment and relocation to South Africa’s national parks. With 30-strong teams of locals and usually about five UK volunteers, this is seriously hands-on – tracking and capturing a range of wildlife including antelopes, rhinos, buffaloes, elephants, giraffes and even lions.

Details: £1,950 for two weeks (minimum), £4,870 for three months, departing on Mondays from March to mid-October. The price includes flights with SAA to Johannesburg, plus all transfers. Contact African Conservation Experience (0870 241 5816, www.conservationafrica.net).

MARINE CONSERVATION, Thailand

Here’s a bite-size adventure to fit between Thai temples and Brazilian beaches: a 10-day project in southern Thailand, surveying fish numbers and coral cover on reefs in the Gulf of Thailand or the Andaman Sea, bumping into dugongs, whale sharks and turtles on your daily dives and snorkelling trips.

Details: £1,495 for 10 days, excluding flights, from November to June; some departures require an open-water diving certificate. Contact Earthwatch (01865 318831, www.earthwatch.org).

VET’S ASSISTANT, Mongolia

Teaching & Projects Abroad has a list of specialist options that read like CV gold. This one, working in a pet hospital in Ulan Bator, is typical, assisting operations, administering inoculations, helping with deliveries – even staying with a horseman and his family on the steppe. You can ask to be placed with other UK volunteers, but in winter, with temperatures around -20C, it’s probably just you, local staff and a whole world of equine flu.

Details: £1,095 for one month (minimum), £1,545 for three months, £395 per month thereafter. Flights £895. Contact Teaching & Projects Abroad (01903 708300, www.teaching-abroad.co.uk).

JOURNALISM, Honduras

Based with a local family in the capital, Tegucigalpa, you’ll be working on an English-language newspaper, reporting on politics, sport and current affairs. This is gap one-upmanship on an almost indecent scale. Basic Spanish is a must, while school-newspaper experience, though not essential, will help your application.

Details: £1,195 for six weeks (minimum), £130 per week thereafter, excluding flights. Contact i-to-i (0800 011 1156, www.i-to-i.com).

HIV WORK, Nepal

Students Partnership Worldwide has HIV projects in Africa and Asia, working with children in high-risk communities and living with your student partner’s family. The Nepal project involves one month of language and youth work training in Kathmandu, then six months in villages bordering India, teaching English, running clubs and performing street dramas to promote HIV awareness.

Details: £3,600 for seven months, including medical and travel insurance and a 12-month flexible, scheduled air ticket, departing on November 15. Contact Students Partnership Worldwide (020 7222 0138, www.spw.org).

YOUTH WORK, Bolivia

A typically challenging scheme from Project Trust, the La Paz project involves work in youth clubs, drop-in centres, even under motorway flyovers, with teenagers for whom glue-sniffing and petty theft is part of daily life. Basic Spanish is essential; an open mind a must.

Details: £4,190 for 12 months, departing in early September, including travel and medical insurance, eight weeks’ paid holiday, 12-month flexible air ticket, and a small wage to cover living costs. One-week training is at Project Trust HQ on Coll, in the Inner Hebrides. Contact Project Trust (01879 230444, www.projecttrust.org.uk).

CONSERVATION, Argentina

It’s not every conservation project that kicks off with a crampons-and-crevasse-rescue winter-survival course, but then not every conservation project is set in the foothills of the Patagonian Andes. With base camp an hour north of Bariloche, this is a six- or 12-week project broken into three parts, in groups of eight: monitoring condors on the Patagonian steppe, field research in Lanin National Park, and trekking the Northern Ice Cap across the border in Chile.

Details: £1,795 for six weeks, £2,995 for 12 weeks, including transfers from San Carlos de Bariloche but not flights, departing on September 22 and November 3. Contact Global Vision (0870 608 8898, www.gvi.co.uk).

MEDICAL TRAINING, India

This is serious stuff, with CV points and total cultural immersion almost bursting from the brochure pages. Based at a medical training college in Trivandrum, staying in a hall of residence with hundreds of Indian students, you first attend lectures, then shadow doctors on their hospital rounds. Hands-on treatment is an integral, life-changing part of the program – as is as much extracurricular orphanage work as your Mother Teresa complex can handle.

Details: £1,095 for one month (which is the minimum), excluding flights, then £595 for each additional month thereafter, up to a maximum of six months. Contact Global Volunteer Projects (0191 222 0404, www.globalvolunteer projects.org).

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