Explore All Destinations

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.

Maldives

An archipelago of around 1,200 low-lying coral islands scattered across the Indian Ocean, grouped into 26 atolls. Known for over-water villas, clear shallow lagoons, and some of the richest reef diving anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

Colombia

The heat hits you the moment you step out of the airport, thick and salt-edged from the Caribbean. Inside the walled city, the walls themselves are the colour of ochre and rust, and every balcony has something spilling over it: bougainvillea, laundry, a cat. Street vendors carry baskets of fruit on their heads and call out prices you'll negotiate badly the first time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Australia

The coffee arrives before you've sat down properly, and the person who made it will have opinions about the bean origin. Melbourne runs on ritual: morning flat whites in laneways painted floor-to-ceiling by people who got paid nothing, lunch at a Vietnamese place in Footscray that seats twelve, footy on the weekend. It's the city Australians move to when Sydney starts feeling shallow.

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.

Argentina

Dinner starts at 10pm and nobody thinks this is unusual. Buenos Aires runs on a schedule that makes no sense until you've been here a week and then makes all the sense in the world. Porteños argue about football and politics with the same intensity, the steak arrives on a wooden board with no apology for its size, and the city's European facades are slowly being repainted by street artists who have claimed every blank wall they can find.

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.

Chile

The granite towers appear through cloud and then disappear again, which is most of what Patagonia does to you. Wind here isn't weather, it's physics: a sustained horizontal force that leans you sideways on ridge trails and rips tent stakes from the ground. The park is raw in a way that feels less like scenery and more like a reminder that you are small and the mountains do not care.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Morocco

At 4am the cold wakes you before the alarm does. You climb a dune in the dark and by the time the sky turns orange the silence is so complete you can hear your own pulse. The Moroccan Sahara — centred around Merzouga and the Erg Chebbi dunes — is nothing like the endless flat wasteland people picture. The dunes are enormous, rust-coloured, and they shift overnight into new shapes.

South Korea

The convenience stores never close and neither does the city. At 2am in Hongdae, university students eat tteokbokki from paper cups under neon signs while a busker covers a K-pop song badly and everyone sings along anyway. Seoul is 10 million people living at full speed — ancient palaces wedged between glass towers, street food alleys running under elevated highways, and a subway system that makes every other city's look embarrassing.

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.

Portugal

Portugal's hilly, coastal capital is a city of faded grandeur and vibrant energy. Pastel-coloured buildings cling to steep hillsides, vintage yellow trams rattle through narrow streets, and the melancholic sound of fado drifts from candlelit taverns.

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.

Japan

Japan's capital, where neon-lit districts, quiet shrines, and some of the world's best food sit side by side. Each neighbourhood has its own character, from the crowds of Shibuya to the old-town calm of Asakusa.

New Zealand

New Zealand's highest peak rises to 3,724 metres in the heart of the Southern Alps. The surrounding national park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the Southern Hemisphere's premier alpine destinations, with vast glaciers and a sky so dark it's an International Dark Sky Reserve.

New Zealand

The smell hits you at the airport. Sulphur, faintly eggy, thick enough to make first-timers check their shoes. Rotorua sits on one of the most active geothermal fields on earth, where the ground steams in the rain, mud pools bubble at the roadside, and geysers erupt on a schedule that New Zealanders treat as entirely normal. The Maori culture here is not window dressing. It is the reason the town exists.

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.

Oman

The silence in Wadi Shab is the first thing you notice, broken only by water trickling between canyon walls so narrow your elbows graze the rock. Oman sits between the Gulf's excess and Yemen's instability and has somehow become neither. Frankincense smoke drifts through Muscat's old souq, the desert at Wahiba Sands swallows sound whole, and the mountain road to Jebel Akhdar is not the place to test your faith in guardrails.

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.

Chile

The moai stare inland, not at you. That detail takes a moment to register when you're standing at Ahu Tongariki at sunrise, fifteen stone figures with their backs to the Pacific. The island is small enough to drive in an hour, windy almost always, and the grass is a particular shade of green that only exists where the ocean is 2,000km in every direction.

Argentina & Chile

A vast, windswept wilderness at the southern tip of South America, Patagonia spans both Argentina and Chile. It is home to dramatic granite spires, massive glaciers, turquoise lakes, and some of the world's finest trekking routes.

United States

The Going-to-the-Sun Road crests at Logan Pass and you pull over because you have to, not because there's a sign telling you to. Mountain goats stand on a snow patch twenty feet from the car, indifferent. The glaciers that named this park are mostly gone now, which the rangers will tell you plainly. What remains is jagged, vertical, and green in a way that feels almost aggressive after the flatness of Montana below.

Thailand

Thailand's frenetic capital — a city of gilded temples, canal-side markets, street-food stalls, and rooftop bars, where ancient ritual and round-the-clock modern life collide.

Greece

A Greek island in the southern Aegean, shaped by an ancient volcanic eruption that left a deep caldera ringed by cliffs. Whitewashed villages, blue-domed churches, and clifftop sunsets define its towns of Oia and Fira.

Australia

The sand at Whitehaven Beach is 98% pure silica. It squeaks underfoot and stays cool in direct sun, which sounds like a trivial fact until you're standing on it at low tide watching the tidal swirl of Hill Inlet from above. The Whitsundays are 74 islands in the Coral Sea, most uninhabited, most accessible only by boat or seaplane. The reef here is battered but still alive.

United Arab Emirates

A fast-built city on the edge of the Arabian Desert, known for record-setting towers, sprawling malls, and beach resorts. The 830-metre Burj Khalifa anchors a skyline that rose from sand in a few decades.

Netherlands

A compact canal-laced city where 17th-century merchant houses lean over waterways, world-class museums sit minutes apart, and locals move through it all on bicycles rather than cars.

Singapore

A city-state that punches absurdly above its weight — a seamless blend of Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Western cultures packed into an island smaller than most national parks, with food that rivals any capital on Earth.

Zambia / Zimbabwe

The mist hits you 500 metres before you see the water. Then the ground shakes, and you understand why local people call it Mosi-oa-Tunya — the smoke that thunders. The falls are a kilometre wide and drop 108 metres into a narrow gorge, and in peak flood season the spray soaks you completely before you reach the first viewpoint. It is louder than you expect and wetter than you dress for.

United Kingdom

The capital of the United Kingdom, where two thousand years of history sit beside world-class museums, royal landmarks, and one of the most diverse food and culture scenes on the planet.

United States

The silence hits you first. Not quiet, actual silence, broken only by a glacier calving into grey water a kilometre away with the sound of a cannon shot. Alaska is the lower 48 states turned sideways and multiplied: moose in supermarket parking lots, brown bears fishing ankle-deep in salmon streams, and highways that simply end where the wilderness begins. It does not feel like the rest of America.

Brazil

The Amazon is the world's largest tropical rainforest, covering over 5.5 million square kilometres and harbouring an estimated 10% of all species on Earth. A journey into the Amazon is a humbling encounter with nature at its most raw and magnificent.

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.

South Africa

At 5am the camp gates open and everyone drives in silence, windows down, scanning the grey-pink light for shapes in the thornveld. Kruger is the size of Wales and holds more large mammal species than almost anywhere else on Earth. A leopard sleeping in a marula tree is not unusual. Neither is a traffic jam of hire cars parked around a lion pride doing nothing but breathing.

Tanzania

The smell hits first — cloves and cardamom and something faintly rotten from the fish market two streets over. Stone Town's alleyways are so narrow that laundry from opposing windows nearly touches overhead, and the carved wooden doors are so ornate they look like they belong in a museum. Outside the old city, the Indian Ocean is warm enough to feel like a bath and shallow enough to walk out fifty metres.

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'.

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.

Brazil

Brazil's seaside icon — a city wrapped around mountains, beaches, and rainforest, presided over by Christ the Redeemer and powered by samba, football, and a famously easy beach culture.

Ecuador

A marine iguana sneezes salt water on your shoe and then ignores you completely. That is the Galapagos in a sentence. Animals here have no fear of humans, which means a blue-footed booby will land a metre away and go about its business while you stare. The islands are volcanic, raw, and not particularly beautiful in a conventional sense. The wildlife is the landscape.

Fiji

The water off the Mamanuca Islands is the kind of clear that makes you suspicious — you can see the shadow of your boat on the seafloor from fifteen metres up. Fiji is 333 islands, most of them tiny and forested, wrapped in coral reefs that attract divers who keep coming back for years. On shore, the pace is deliberate, the kava ceremonies are serious, and the resorts eat most of your money before breakfast.

United States

El Capitan appears before you're ready for it, a vertical mile of grey granite filling the windshield as you round the tunnel bend into Yosemite Valley. The scale is disorienting in the best way. Waterfalls thread down sheer walls, black bears wander through campgrounds with professional indifference, and at dusk the valley floor goes golden in a way that makes people stop mid-sentence.

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.

France

France's capital, where grand 19th-century boulevards follow the curve of the Seine past landmark museums, cafés, and monuments. A city built for wandering, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

Indonesia

An Indonesian island where volcanic peaks, terraced rice fields, and cliffside temples meet world-class surf and warm hospitality. The south draws beach-goers while the inland town of Ubud is the cultural heart.

Canada

You round a bend on the Icefields Parkway and the road just stops making sense. A glacier hangs off a cliff that shouldn't exist, a lake sits below it in a colour that has no business being that blue, and there are no buildings, no towns, nothing. The Canadian Rockies operate at a scale that makes most other mountain ranges feel like suggestions. The elk near Jasper townsite don't flinch when you slow down.

Bhutan

The prayer flags arrive first — hundreds of them strung across mountain passes, snapping in thin air at 3,000 metres. Bhutan smells like pine resin and incense, and its towns look like someone decided architecture should be mandatory art. There are no traffic lights in the country. Monks outnumber tourists on most days, and the government has structured things to keep it that way.

Spain

By 9pm the tapas bars are four people deep and nobody's eating dinner yet. Seville operates on a schedule that makes no sense until suddenly it does — churches that take an hour to walk around, an orange-tree-lined river you can cycle along at midnight, and a cathedral so absurdly large that Columbus is buried inside it almost as an afterthought. The heat in August is a physical object.

Austria

Coffee arrives on a small silver tray with a glass of water, and nobody rushes you. Vienna's cafes operate on a different clock — one where sitting alone with a newspaper for two hours is considered civilised. Outside, the Ringstrasse loops past palaces that were built to impress empires, and the U-Bahn connects it all with Germanic precision. The city is formal, occasionally stiff, and completely sure of itself.

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.

Costa Rica

The howler monkeys start before sunrise, a sound somewhere between a roar and a foghorn rolling through the canopy. Costa Rica compresses cloud forests, active volcanoes, Pacific surf breaks, and Caribbean mangroves into a country smaller than West Virginia. You can stand at the crater of Arenal at dusk watching orange lava glow while hot springs bubble a kilometre downhill. Then it rains, hard, because it always rains.

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.

Czech Republic

You cross Charles Bridge at 6am and it belongs to you: stone saints, fog off the Vltava, and a busker somewhere tuning up badly. By 10am the same bridge is a slow-moving wall of selfie sticks and tour groups. Prague is that tension constantly. Medieval towers and Baroque palaces on every corner, and a stag-do pub crawl moving past them like a river that doesn't know what it's flowing through.

Portugal

The city tilts down toward the Douro River at an angle that suggests it's in a hurry to get there. Azulejo tiles peel off facades in layers, pigeons own the cathedral steps, and by mid-afternoon the wine cellars of Vila Nova de Gaia are open and the light on the river turns the colour of the port they pour you. Porto is scrappy, beautiful in a worn-in way, and completely unbothered by the crowds it keeps attracting.

Sri Lanka

The train from Kandy to Ella rattles through tea estates so green they look painted, with Tamil women in bright saris moving between the rows. You smell cloves before you reach Galle. The south coast beaches have warm water and no current warnings, the ancient cities rise out of flat jungle with no obvious reason for being there, and everything is slightly chaotic in a way that keeps you alert.

Egypt

The heat lands on you before you leave the airport. By the time you reach the Karnak temple complex — columns wider than a car is long, carved with hieroglyphs that still hold paint after 3,000 years — the scale of the place becomes almost difficult to process. Luxor is an open-air museum that hasn't been cleaned up or sanitised; donkey carts share the road with tourist coaches, and the smell of the Nile drifts through everything.

Norway

You come around a bend on the E10 and the road just ends at water, with jagged peaks rising straight out of the fjord like someone snapped them off and forgot to smooth the edges. The fishing villages — red and yellow wooden rorbu cabins on stilts — look like a painting someone was careless enough to make real. In winter, the northern lights occasionally flood the whole thing in green.

Tanzania

One of Africa's greatest wildlife sanctuaries, the Serengeti is home to the world's largest terrestrial mammal migration. Over 1.5 million wildebeest and hundreds of thousands of zebras thunder across the plains each year in a dramatic cycle of life.

Scotland

The rain comes sideways and the road narrows to a single track with passing places every half mile. Somewhere between Glencoe and the Cairngorms, the landscape stops being scenery and starts being weather. Heather turns the hillsides purple in August, lochs reflect nothing because the sky is never the same twice, and the midges arrive at dusk like they have a personal grievance.

New Zealand

New Zealand's largest national park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of breathtaking fjords, ancient rainforests, and cascading waterfalls. Milford Sound, carved by glaciers over millions of years, is often called the eighth wonder of the world.

Spain

The seaside capital of Spain's Catalonia region, where Gaudí's curving modernist architecture meets Gothic alleyways and a Mediterranean beach. The still-unfinished Sagrada Família remains its defining landmark.

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.

Australia

Australia's largest city, built around one of the world's great natural harbours. The sail-roofed Opera House and Harbour Bridge anchor a coastline of ferries, beaches like Bondi, and easygoing outdoor life.

Mexico

The cenotes smell like cold stone and jungle. You lower yourself into water so clear you can see your feet twenty metres down, surrounded by tree roots and stalactites. Above ground, Tulum splits into two places: a genuine Maya cliff-top ruin with Caribbean views that earns every visitor, and a tourist strip that has turned a fishing village into a wellness brand selling $18 cocktails and mediocre vegan bowls.

Italy

The houses are stacked in colours that shouldn't work together — terracotta, mustard, faded pink — climbing cliffs that drop straight into the Ligurian Sea. In the villages, the streets are too narrow for cars and barely wide enough for two people with bags. The smell is anchovy paste and sunscreen, and by 10am in July the pathways between villages are single-file queues of people in inappropriate footwear.

Denmark

The harbour smells like salt and rain even in summer, and cyclists outnumber cars on every street. Copenhagen is a city of low buildings and high prices, where the light in June hangs until 10pm and everyone seems to be eating open-faced sandwiches on a canal-side bench. The old coloured warehouses of Nyhavn are genuinely lovely and genuinely packed with tourists drinking overpriced Carlsberg.

Cambodia

At 5am, tuk-tuk engines idle outside guesthouse gates while guides check their phones and tourists pull on long sleeves in the dark. Angkor Wat's silhouette comes before the sunrise, a reflection rippling in the moat, then the sky turns pink and several hundred people collectively go quiet. The rest of Siem Reap is a chaotic grid of temples, tourist bars, massage shops, and excellent cheap food.

Cuba

Cuba's vibrant capital is a living museum of colonial architecture, vintage American cars, and revolutionary history. The colourful streets of Old Havana — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — pulse with salsa music, and the Malecón seafront promenade is the city's beating heart.

French Polynesia

The lagoon is the thing. Every photo you've seen has undersold it: a ring of water that shifts from pale mint in the shallows to deep cobalt where the reef drops away, with a volcanic peak rising black and green from the middle. You spend most of your time floating, snorkelling, or staring out from an overwater bungalow at water that does not look real. It is extremely expensive and absolutely quiet.

Croatia

The walls are what stops you short. Pale limestone, blinding in July sun, enclosing a city so intact it feels theatrical. Inside, the Stradun is a marble runway worn glass-smooth by feet and time, flanked by cafes where a coffee costs three times what it does one street back. The Adriatic sits below everything, improbably blue, and cruise ships sit below that, blocking the view.

United States

Hawaii's second-largest island is a paradise of diverse landscapes — from the lunar summit of Haleakalā volcano to the lush Road to Hana rainforest and the golden beaches of Kaanapali. Maui consistently ranks among the world's best islands.

Malta

The streets are so steep and narrow that a parked car and a balcony above it nearly form a tunnel. Valletta is one of Europe's smallest capitals — twenty-three streets wide — built entirely by crusader knights in the sixteenth century and showing its age in the best possible way. Limestone facades the colour of dry honey, baroque churches that swallow entire city blocks, and a harbour so photogenic it looks like it was designed for the postcard first.

Greece

The Parthenon appears at the end of random streets when you least expect it, framed between a pharmacy and a grilled corn stand. Athens is loud, crumbling in the right places, and serious about its coffee. The Monastiraki flea market smells like old leather and frying oil on Saturday mornings, and every neighbourhood seems to have its own hill with a view back at the Acropolis.

Botswana

The mokoro glides silently through papyrus reeds and a hippo exhales somewhere close, invisible. The Okavango is a river that never reaches the sea: it flows inland from Angola and fans out across the Kalahari desert into a labyrinth of channels, lagoons, and palm islands that exists only because the water gets lost. Elephants wade chest-deep through lily pads. At night the sky is absolute.

Norway

The water is so still in the morning that the cliffs above are perfectly doubled below the surface — you're looking at 1000 metres of rock and its reflection simultaneously. Small wooden villages cling to the shoreline like they're holding on for dear life, the ferry horn echoes for thirty seconds between walls of stone, and the clouds sit low enough that waterfalls appear to fall from nowhere.

Cambodia

A vast 12th-century temple complex near Siem Reap, Cambodia, and the largest religious monument in the world. Built as a Hindu temple and later turned Buddhist, its towers and bas-relief carvings draw crowds at sunrise.

United States

The largest city in the United States, a dense, fast-moving collection of distinct neighbourhoods across five boroughs. Home to landmark skylines, major museums, Broadway theatre, and food from every corner of the globe.

Colombia

The cable cars glide up over rooftops so densely packed they look like terracotta scales on a hillside. Down in El Poblado, brunch spots and coworking spaces have colonised what used to be a narco neighbourhood. Medellín sits in a valley at 1,500 metres, which keeps it cooler than you expect. The people are almost aggressively friendly, and the flower festival will stop traffic for a week.

Georgia

The old town leans over the Mtkvari River like it forgot to stop. Carved wooden balconies, slowly rotting in the best possible way, hang over narrow lanes that dead-end at sulfuric bathhouses steaming in the open air. Someone is always grilling meat somewhere. The wine comes from the region that arguably invented it, and it costs almost nothing.

Scotland

The castle sits on volcanic rock above the city like it's daring the rest of Edinburgh to try harder. Below it, the Royal Mile drops through layers of history — close alleys branching off into courtyards where people lived ten families to a staircase for centuries. The wind smells like rain and malt from the distilleries, and the light in summer stays until 10pm, which makes the whole city feel slightly unreal.

South Africa

Nestled between the iconic Table Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Town is one of the world's most spectacularly situated cities. It blends stunning natural scenery with a vibrant cultural scene, world-class cuisine, and a complex, fascinating history.