Where to go in May

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.

Hungary

The Danube splits the city in half and at night both banks glow, the parliament building lit gold on the Pest side, Buda Castle floating above the river like something left over from a grander era. Budapest smells like chimney cake and cigarette smoke near the ruin bars, and every third building is either crumbling beautifully or mid-renovation. It is the most dramatic city in Central Europe and it knows it.

Mexico

The altitude hits first, 2,240 metres, then the smell of corn tortillas on a comal somewhere just around the corner. Mexico City is a capital that operates at full intensity from 7am until 3am: baroque churches sinking into soft lakebed, street tacos that cost less than a newspaper, a metro system carrying five million people daily, and contemporary art museums that would embarrass most European cities.

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.

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.

Japan

Japan's ancient imperial capital is a city of extraordinary temples, traditional wooden machiya townhouses, and meticulously maintained Zen gardens. With over 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines, Kyoto is the spiritual heart of Japan.

Morocco

A former imperial city at the foot of Morocco's Atlas Mountains, built around a walled medieval medina of souks, palaces, and gardens. The main square, Jemaa el-Fnaa, shifts from market to open-air food court each evening.

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.

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.

Italy

Italy's capital, where nearly 3,000 years of history layer together in plain sight. Ancient ruins like the Colosseum and Forum sit among baroque piazzas, fountains, and some of the country's most beloved food.

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.

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.