Beaches and islands

Maldives

An archipelago of around 1,200 low-lying coral islands scattered across the Indian Ocean, grouped into 26 atolls. Known for over-water villas, clear shallow lagoons, and some of the richest reef diving anywhere.

Italy

A 50-kilometre stretch of cliff-hugging coastline south of Naples, where pastel towns like Positano and Amalfi tumble down to the sea. Lemon groves, winding coastal roads, and seafood define the southern Italian summer here.

Colombia

The heat hits you the moment you step out of the airport, thick and salt-edged from the Caribbean. Inside the walled city, the walls themselves are the colour of ochre and rust, and every balcony has something spilling over it: bougainvillea, laundry, a cat. Street vendors carry baskets of fruit on their heads and call out prices you'll negotiate badly the first time.

Australia

You put your face in the water and the noise of the boat disappears. Below, a coral garden in colours that have no business existing: parrotfish grinding away at staghorn coral, a reef shark doing slow laps, a turtle ignoring you completely. The Great Barrier Reef is 2,300km of ocean ecosystem seen mostly from the surface, which is both humbling and, in the bleached sections, quietly devastating.

Vietnam

At dusk the lanterns come on all at once, red, orange, yellow, reflecting in the Thu Bon river while motorbike horns fade and someone nearby is grilling something on a charcoal grate the size of a shoebox. Hoi An's Ancient Town is genuinely old, a 15th-century trading port where Japanese merchant houses and Chinese assembly halls sit shoulder to shoulder on streets too narrow for cars.

Greece

A Greek island in the southern Aegean, shaped by an ancient volcanic eruption that left a deep caldera ringed by cliffs. Whitewashed villages, blue-domed churches, and clifftop sunsets define its towns of Oia and Fira.

Australia

The sand at Whitehaven Beach is 98% pure silica. It squeaks underfoot and stays cool in direct sun, which sounds like a trivial fact until you're standing on it at low tide watching the tidal swirl of Hill Inlet from above. The Whitsundays are 74 islands in the Coral Sea, most uninhabited, most accessible only by boat or seaplane. The reef here is battered but still alive.

United Arab Emirates

A fast-built city on the edge of the Arabian Desert, known for record-setting towers, sprawling malls, and beach resorts. The 830-metre Burj Khalifa anchors a skyline that rose from sand in a few decades.

Tanzania

The smell hits first, cloves and cardamom and something faintly rotten from the fish market two streets over. Stone Town's alleyways are so narrow that laundry from opposing windows nearly touches overhead, and the carved wooden doors are so ornate they look like they belong in a museum. Outside the old city, the Indian Ocean is warm enough to feel like a bath and shallow enough to walk out fifty metres.

Brazil

Brazil's seaside icon, a city wrapped around mountains, beaches, and rainforest, presided over by Christ the Redeemer and powered by samba, football, and a famously easy beach culture.

Fiji

The water off the Mamanuca Islands is the kind of clear that makes you suspicious, you can see the shadow of your boat on the seafloor from fifteen metres up. Fiji is 333 islands, most of them tiny and forested, wrapped in coral reefs that attract divers who keep coming back for years. On shore, the pace is deliberate, the kava ceremonies are serious, and the resorts eat most of your money before breakfast.

Indonesia

An Indonesian island where volcanic peaks, terraced rice fields, and cliffside temples meet world-class surf and warm hospitality. The south draws beach-goers while the inland town of Ubud is the cultural heart.