Nature and wildlife

United States

The ground hisses. Steam rises from cracks in the earth between patches of snow and pools the colour of boiled candy. Old Faithful is the famous one, but the smell of sulphur and the bubbling mud pots of the Norris Basin are what actually stay with you. This whole landscape sits on a supervolcano, and the park makes no effort to let you forget it.

Guatemala

The cobblestones are uneven enough to turn an ankle if you're looking at your phone instead of your feet, which is understandable because Volcán Agua sits at the end of nearly every street like someone placed it there deliberately. Antigua is a colonial city kept intact by earthquakes that destroyed it and a preservation law that keeps it that way: yellow and ochre facades, bougainvillea spilling over ruined convents, and a central park where shoe shiners and schoolchildren occupy the same benches.

New Zealand

A lakeside town on New Zealand's South Island, ringed by the jagged peaks of the Remarkables and set on clear Lake Wakatipu. A year-round base for adventure, from bungee jumping and skiing to scenic hikes and wineries.

Thailand

You smell it before you see it, incense and grilled pork and jasmine, drifting out of temple compounds and night market stalls in equal measure. Chiang Mai is northern Thailand's old walled capital, ringed by a moat and backed by forested mountains. Inside the old city, 300 temples compete for attention between coffee shops and massage parlours. Outside it, rice terraces step up into hill-tribe country. The pace is slower than Bangkok, the food is arguably better, and everything costs half as much.

Canada

The water really is that colour, an impossible turquoise that looks photoshopped until you're standing at the edge of Lake Louise watching glacial silt catch the morning light. Banff is the Canadian Rockies compressed into a national park: valleys that dead-end at blue-white glaciers, elk wandering through town like they pay rent, and a two-lane highway (the Icefields Parkway) that might be the best drive on the continent. The town itself is touristy and expensive, $9 craft beers, souvenir shops selling moose plush toys, but step onto any trailhead and within 20 minutes you're alone with mountains that make you feel appropriately small.

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.

Australia

The air is cold and smells like rain and eucalyptus even in summer. Tasmania is an island that didn't get the memo about tourist infrastructure: roads narrow to single lanes through ancient rainforest, dolerite columns rise out of sea mist on the southwest coast, and the silence in the interior is the kind that makes city people uncomfortable at first. Give it a day. Then you won't want to leave.

Argentina / Brazil

The mist hits you before the sound does, then the sound hits you before you see anything, and then you round a corner on the Argentine side and 275 waterfalls are just there, spread across nearly 3km of jungle-lined horseshoe. A coati will try to steal your lunch while you stand there getting soaked. The Devil's Throat drops 82 metres straight down and the noise makes conversation impossible.

Madagascar

The baobabs at Morondava glow orange at dusk and the lemurs start calling before dawn, a sound somewhere between a dog and a foghorn that carries across the spiny forest. Madagascar smells like red laterite dust, vanilla on the east coast, and rain on dry earth. Ninety percent of the wildlife exists nowhere else, which sounds like a marketing claim until a ring-tailed lemur sits on your shoulder to steal your lunch.

Switzerland

A landscape that somehow exceeds every postcard you've ever seen, jagged peaks, glacial lakes the colour of liquid turquoise, and mountain railways engineered into cliff faces that would be reckless anywhere else.

Peru

A 15th-century Incan citadel perched on a ridge high in the Peruvian Andes, above the Sacred Valley. Abandoned for centuries and wrapped in cloud forest, its mortar-free stone walls and terraces remain remarkably intact.

Canada / United States

Three waterfalls on the US-Canada border where 750,000 gallons of water per second drop over a 50-metre cliff, a spectacle of raw natural force surrounded by, admittedly, a somewhat tacky tourist town.