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WHAT happens when Japan’s deeply rooted traditions and its insatiable appetite for new technology collide? The results are on show in a recent wave of hot spring hotels, or onsen ryokans, that merge ancient ideas with concepts from modern design.

Though some Japanese might shudder at the idea of tampering with their age-old retreats, the new features may help ensure the survival of onsen ryokans.

The basic aspects of the onsen ryokan experience haven’t changed in centuries. Customers can enjoy long soaks in the hot spring baths, often with a view of the outdoors, in a remote, natural setting. They stay in a simple, elegant accommodations and can savor meals composed of as many as a dozen small, seasonal courses. And the spaces where they eat, sleep and, especially, bathe have many traditional cues.

“The most essential elements of an onsen ryokan are its location and quality of onsen water,” Hiroshi Ebisawa, an architect and designer who is a specialist in hot springs, said in an e-mail interview. “An architect usually struggles with how to create a cozy and comfortable ‘yu-kukan,’ or bathing space, between its surrounding landscape and onsen facility.”

Onsen ryokans have always been constructed of natural materials, Mr. Ebisawa said, including timber, earth, paper, bamboo, grass and cloth. Together with dim lighting, he said, they combine to form an environment that encourages “traditional behavior” — the personal, relaxing rituals of the Japanese bath.

But younger Japanese may see the onsen ryokan as too stuck in the past, especially with the expansion of their travel options.

“Some people have always loved going to onsen, no matter what their age or background,” said Peter M. Grilli, president of the Japan Society of Boston, who has lived half his life in Japan. “But it’s become so much easier for people to travel outside Japan — to go to Hawaii, or to ski in Vancouver — that young people tend to go abroad.”

Moreover, he said, prices at onsen ryokans can be high enough to make an overseas trip look cheap.

Enter the modern onsen ryokan, where tradition and technology combine for an experience that is no less Japanese. Into the austerity of sparsely furnished rooms have come liquid crystal TVs and programmable toilets. Mood lighting and frosted glass that would make a New York boutique hotel proud have arrived in the hot spring baths. And don’t forget the listening rooms, private libraries and cocktail menus.

But is it possible to modernize the onsen ryokan without disrupting tradition? It helps that despite the prescriptions for materials and lighting, there’s still quite a bit of flexibility built into the experience. Mr. Ebisawa said the standard for design could be like the ideal of “an ambiguous Japanese expression” sought by Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel-winning writer; it is neither white nor black, but somewhere in between.

An example of this happy ambiguity is Otaru Ryotei Kuramure, an onsen ryokan that has welcomed guests since May 2002 west of Sapporo on Hokkaido, Japan’s large northern island. A shuttle from the train station takes guests to a group of low cement buildings with peaked roofs the color of charcoal, sitting behind wire-encased stone walls. The combination of old and new begins right away, as one heavy door of stained wood and then another slide open automatically, revealing a lobby adorned with Mies-inspired rectangular couches and rugs made of leather shreds.

In the rooms, the modern and traditional are practically indistinguishable among the rice-paper screens, pale wood staircases, tatami rugs, rough granite bathroom surfaces and austere private gardens. But there’s just enough of a high-design feel to soften the jolt of a liquid-crystal TV and Ethernet jacks.

The baths offer more contrasts and complementarities. The changing areas are as plush as those of a modern luxury hotel’s spa, with Baroque orchestral music wafting in. The outdoor bath, however, is a simple rectangular pool lined with gray-green stone. Above a half-wall of frosted glass is a timeless vista: a towering, tree-covered slope near a burbling stream, all filtered through the haze of steam rising off the hot spring water.

Besides a smooth fusion of traditional and modern in its bathing setting, said Mr. Ebisawa, who was not involved in the project, Kuramure blends sleek architecture with familiar old styles like Ito-koshi, a fine latticework characteristic of houses in the middle of Kyoto.

The same goes for Hoshinoya, a larger resort that opened in July 2005 near Nagano, on the main island of Honshu. If Kuramure is a solitary, flawless diamond, then Hoshinoya is a necklace from Tiffany — still luxurious, but bigger and a touch less exclusive. Its villas are arranged around a small creek in a style that Mr. Ebisawa said echoes Asaba, a famed onsen ryokan near Shizuoka.

At Hoshinoya, dark woods replace light, and gray stone floors stand in for tatami. Private baths look out on the water and fill with onsen water at the touch of a button.

A THICK veil of snow had settled on Kilimanjaro the morning after my group arrived in Tanzania. Over breakfast, we gazed at the peak filling the sky above the palm trees of our hotel courtyard in Moshi, the town closest to the mountain. It was as Hemingway described it: “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”

I had wanted to climb to the roof of Africa before climate change erased its ice fields and the romance of its iconic “Snows of Kilimanjaro” image. But as we trudged across the 12,000-foot Shira plateau on Day 2 of our weeklong climb and gazed at the whiteness of the vast, humpbacked summit, I thought maybe I needn’t have worried.

An up-and-down-and-up traverse of the south face of Kibo, the tallest of the mountain’s three volcanic peaks, showed us a panorama of the summit ice cap and fractured tentacles of glacial ice that dangled down gullies dividing the vertical rock faces. And four days later, when we reached 19,340-foot Uhuru, the highest point on Kibo, we beheld snow and ice fields so enormous as to resemble the Arctic.

It looked nothing like the photographs of Kibo nearly denuded of ice and snow in the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Nor did it seem to jibe with the film’s narrative: “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

As it turned out, we had simply been lucky.

This was the last week of January — nearly a year ago — and the middle of the dry season. But several weeks of heavy rain and snow preceded the arrival of our group, 10 mountaineering clients and a professional guide from International Mountain Guides, based near Seattle. That made for a freakishly well-fed snow pack and the classic snowy image portrayed on travel posters, the label of the local Kilimanjaro Premium Lager and the T-shirts hawked in Moshi’s tourist bazaars. But to many climate scientists and glaciologists who have probed and measured, the disappearance of the summit’s ice fields is inevitable and imminent.

Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University who has studied Kilimanjaro’s ice fields for years, photographed the summit a year to the week, coincidentally, before we were there. He found only a few, isolated snow patches in shaded areas, a drastic difference from what we encountered. Even on the world’s highest free-standing volcano, seasonal snow doesn’t remain on a peak so close to the Equator.

One of our Tanzanian guides, John Mtui, a tall, bespectacled and soft-spoken Chagga — the people who inhabit Kilimanjaro’s southern foothills — began climbing the mountain as a porter 25 years earlier, when he was 18. “When I first started climbing, we had big snow, big glaciers,” Mr. Mtui said. “The glaciers were bigger and taller than now. And also, the weather changed. We had heavier rain than we have now.”

Like other exotic destinations widely believed to be threatened by degradation from climate change, the mountain’s precariousness has become a marketing opportunity. The adventure travel industry sends about 30,000 climbers a year toward Kilimanjaro’s summit. Scientific and outdoor magazines mention the imminent loss of the ice fields. So do guide services and outfitters on their Web sites. Our climb leader, Justin Merle, a mellow 6-foot-4 man in his late 20s who has a world-class mountaineering résumé, said of the typical adventure-travel article: “It’s like, ‘See Kili Before the Snow Is Gone.’ That’s almost a catchphrase.”

Given Kilimanjaro’s snow, glaciers and volcanic upbringing, it didn’t look all that different from peaks I’ve climbed in my native Northwest. From my living room in Seattle, I can gaze at Mount Rainier, which I’ve climbed a dozen times. Even in the dead of summer, it retains a mantle of ice that makes it seem like a hulking life form. Kilimanjaro is almost unimaginably bigger: nearly a mile higher, it covers 1,250 square miles abutting Kenya.

And yet, unlike Rainier, climbing Kilimanjaro required no real mountaineering skills, no ice axes, ropes or crampons, merely strong legs, hearts and lungs for trudging more than three and a half vertical miles above sea level. That, and a supply of Diamox, to fend off altitude sickness.

Our approach was on the Machame, the most scenic and second-most heavily traveled — a distant second — of the six designated routes to the summit. Even so, our six camps along the way, five on the ascent and one on the descent, were 200-tent metropolises.

The most heavily congested approach is the Marangu, called the “tourist” or “Coca-Cola” route, a reflection of its overcrowded, touristy ambience and the ubiquitous soft drink, which is sold at camps along the way. Our longer, more macho Machame is known as the “whiskey route.”

The trip to the summit and back down again covered 39 miles. Most of my companions were seasoned hikers and backpackers but had scant mountaineering experience. Two exceptions were Todd Ziegler, an orthopedic surgeon from an Atlanta suburb, and his friend, Julie Nellis, a physical therapist from Atlanta, a diminutive but tireless, multisport athlete and the only woman on the trip. Both had climbed Rainier and major summits in the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, Mexico and elsewhere.

Mr. Merle had already guided expeditions to four of the Seven Summits — Aconcagua, Everest, McKinley and Vinson Massif in Antarctica. Kilimanjaro was his easiest. We 11 Americans were the pampered tip of a human iceberg that included three Tanzanian guides and 38 porters and cooks, all Chaggas. They cooked and served our meals, boiled our water and carried much of our individual gear along with cook pots, food, our sleeping tents and a walk-in dining tent. As we’d trudge with our day packs up the mountain, the porters — some in their midteens — would overtake us while hauling on their backs our duffels containing our sleeping bags and extra clothing, tents and plastic armchairs. “Jambo,” they’d murmur, Swahili for “hello”; it was a polite way of saying, “Coming through. Step aside.”

BEYOND the sunbathers, cervezas and spring break debauchery so conspicuously on display in Cancun and Cozumel, Mexico offers a lesser-known adventure experience — the kind that is found deep in the jungle or near small fishing villages and offshore reefs.

The same country that possesses one of the world’s most polluted capital cities also ranks as one of the richest in species diversity. Twenty-two biosphere reserves and nearly 50 national parks offer hiking and wildlife-watching opportunities; mountain chains and interior canyons are chockfull of biking trails; fertile warm-water upwellings attract pods of whales and glittering fish.

Adventurous tourists — particularly those focused on a specific outdoor sport or activity — have much to discover along the coast and on the country’s ruggedly varied interior terrain.

Almost by definition, some of these unexplored gems are in remote areas, so travelers will need to be vigilant about safety. That’s where knowledgeable outfitters are key — they can take you to little-touristed places where you’ll feel comfortable exploring the backcountry forests and secluded beaches that you might not visit alone. Regions like Chiapas and Oaxaca, while still extricating their reputations from recent political unrest, have become more stable. Before you book, consult the United States State Department for travel advisories.