Weekend getaways (1 to 3 days)

Egypt

The last surviving wonder of the ancient world, three monumental pyramids and the Great Sphinx on the Giza plateau, built over 4,500 years ago on the edge of Cairo and the Western Desert.

India

You walk through a red sandstone gateway, past hawkers and security checks, and then it's just there, white marble framed by dark cypress trees, reflected in a long pool that never seems to ripple. It's smaller than you expect from the photos but the detail is overwhelming: semi-precious stones inlaid petal by petal, calligraphy carved so fine it looks printed. The colour shifts through the day, pinkish at dawn, blazing white at noon, golden at sunset. Agra around it is chaotic and charmless, which somehow makes the Taj more startling. One building, built for grief, that stops traffic 400 years later.

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.

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.

United States

A mile-deep, 277-mile-long chasm carved by the Colorado River through layered red rock in northern Arizona, one of the most staggering landscapes on Earth and a US national park icon.

Jordan

A 2,000-year-old city carved directly into rose-coloured sandstone cliffs in southern Jordan, once the capital of the Nabataean traders. Reached through a narrow canyon that opens onto the towering facade of the Treasury.

Belgium

The canals are narrow enough that you could almost lean out of a window and touch the tour boat passing below. Bruges smells like waffles and horses and slightly damp stone, and the medieval centre is so intact it occasionally feels like a stage set. Cyclists outnumber cars inside the ring road, church bells mark each quarter-hour, and by 9pm the day-trippers have gone and the city exhales.

China

A vast defensive wall winding more than 13,000 miles along China's northern hills and ridgelines, built and rebuilt over centuries. Sections near Beijing range from fully restored stone ramparts to crumbling, overgrown 'wild wall'.

Australia

The rock changes colour as the sun drops, moving through orange into deep red into something close to purple before the light disappears entirely. Nothing about standing in front of Uluru feels like looking at a rock. It rises 348 metres from completely flat desert scrub with the logic of a dream object, outsized and ancient, and the silence around it at dawn is the kind that asks you to stop talking.

Turkey

A surreal region of central Anatolia where wind and water carved soft volcanic rock into 'fairy chimneys', and where early Christians cut homes, churches, and entire underground cities into the stone.