Where to go in July

Peru

Your first hour in Cusco is spent sitting down. The altitude hits at 3,400 metres and the city doesn't apologise for it. Once you adjust, you notice the layers: Inca stone walls at the base of Spanish colonial churches, women in embroidered skirts selling coca leaves in the Plaza de Armas, and a constant smell of woodsmoke drifting down from hillside neighbourhoods where the tourist trail ends.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tanzania

Africa's highest peak and the world's tallest free-standing mountain, a dormant volcano rising 5,895 metres from the Tanzanian plains, climbable without technical gear but demanding enough to humble anyone who underestimates it.

Malaysia

The jungle makes noise you can't identify, something between a bark and a wheeze coming from a canopy so dense it filters noon sunlight into green dusk. Malaysian Borneo is orangutans and proboscis monkeys and caves large enough to swallow a cathedral. The rivers run brown with tannins, longboats cut through them at speed, and somewhere above you a hornbill crosses a clearing like a pterodactyl who missed the memo.

Iceland

A Nordic island nation of volcanoes, geysers, waterfalls, and lava fields, shaped by fire and ice. Long summer days and winter northern lights bookend a landscape that feels close to untouched.