Under $1,500 per person

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.

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.

India

The walls really are pink, a warm terracotta that deepens at dusk until the whole old city glows like an ember. Auto-rickshaws horn their way past camel carts on roads that predate traffic lights, and somewhere inside the bazaars of Johari Bazar, a tailor is threading a needle while negotiating a price without looking up. The palaces are enormous, the crowds are real, and the chai is non-negotiable.

Malaysia

The Petronas Towers appear around corners when you least expect them, framed between colonial shophouses, rising above a wet market, reflected in a puddle after the 4pm downpour that arrives like clockwork. KL is a city of overlapping worlds: Malay, Chinese, Indian, colonial British, and gleaming glass towers, all compressed into a skyline that makes no visual sense but somehow works. The food is the real reason to come.

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.

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.

India

The air is noticeably thinner the moment you step off the plane, most people need a day just lying down before they can walk uphill without seeing spots. Leh sits at 3,500 metres in a high-altitude desert that looks borrowed from Central Asia: monasteries balanced on crumbling ridgelines, poplars lining irrigation channels cut through barren rock, and a sky so dark at night that the Milky Way feels architectural.

Vietnam

Motorbikes come at you from every direction. The pavements are occupied by tiny plastic chairs where people sit knee-to-knee over bowls of pho at 6am. French colonial buildings peel gently behind banyan trees, and somewhere in the Old Quarter a woman is grilling bun cha over charcoal in what appears to be her living room. Hanoi doesn't try to impress you, it just goes about its business, and you either fall into its rhythm or you don't. Most people fall.

Vietnam

The motorbikes don't stop, not at midnight, not at 6am, not ever. Ho Chi Minh City moves at a frequency that feels like the city is running a fever. Banh mi carts park next to glass-tower lobbies, French colonial facades peel behind neon signs, and in District 4 a woman ladles bun mam from a pot that's been on the boil since before reunification.

Bolivia

In the wet season, a thin film of water turns 10,000 square kilometres of salt flat into a mirror so perfect you lose track of where the ground ends and the sky begins. In the dry season, the surface cracks into hexagonal tiles that stretch to mountains you can't quite reach. The altitude hits at 3,656 metres. Your first day here, you move slowly and drink water and stare.

Nepal

Marigold garlands and incense smoke hang over Pashupatinath's cremation ghats while motorcycles queue three-deep on the streets behind you. Kathmandu is ancient and chaotic in the same breath, medieval temple squares that survived earthquakes sitting next to concrete rebuild, sadhus painting their foreheads in orange light, and a city that never fully quiets because someone always has a puja to run.

China

The pillars rise out of cloud so thick you can't see the ground below them. Hundreds of sandstone columns, some over 200 metres tall, wrapped in sub-tropical green and half-dissolved in mist. Zhangjiajie is what happens when a landscape looks genuinely implausible. The Avatar comparison is inevitable and accurate and slightly annoying, but it doesn't stop you from staring.