Where To Go
34 destinations across 10 categories — the ruins, the cities, the coastlines and the long walks, with the seasons and permits that decide whether any of it is possible when you want to go.
Ancient Wonders
Petra, Machu Picchu, Angkor and the pyramids — the places built so long ago that nobody alive can fully explain how, and what it is like to stand in them now.
Machu Picchu
An Inca estate on a ridge between two peaks, abandoned within a century of being built and never found by the Spanish. Now ticketed by circuit, by hour, and capped.
Petra
A Nabataean trading capital carved into rose sandstone, entered through a kilometre-long crack in a cliff. Far larger than the one facade everyone photographs.
Angkor
The capital of the Khmer Empire, a thousand square kilometres of temples and hydraulic engineering in the jungle, of which Angkor Wat is one building.
The Pyramids of Giza
The only survivor of the seven wonders of the ancient world, on the edge of a city of twenty million, and about 4,500 years old.
Great Cities
Kyoto, Marrakesh, Mexico City, Hanoi, Lisbon — the cities worth flying for, and what each one is actually like to walk around.
Kyoto
Imperial capital for a thousand years, 1,600 Buddhist temples, and a tourist load that the city itself now describes as a problem. Still worth every day you give it.
Marrakesh
A thousand-year-old walled medina with a square that turns into an open-air kitchen every evening, three hours from Europe and a world away from it.
Natural Wonders
The Grand Canyon, Iguazú, Victoria Falls and the aurora — the landscapes that are worth crossing a planet for, and the seasons that decide whether you see them.
Iguazú Falls
275 separate waterfalls across nearly three kilometres of jungle escarpment. Two countries, two national parks, and you need both.
Victoria Falls
A mile-wide sheet of the Zambezi falling into a hundred-metre crack in the basalt. The local name means the smoke that thunders, and both halves are accurate.
Islands & Coasts
The Faroes, Palawan, Zanzibar, the Amalfi Coast — where the sea is the reason to go, and which of them survive their own popularity.
Mountains & Trails
Everest Base Camp, the Inca Trail, Torres del Paine and the Camino — the walks worth training for, with the permits, the seasons and the altitude that govern them.
The Inca Trail
Four days on an original Inca road over a 4,215m pass, arriving at Machu Picchu through the Sun Gate. Capped at 500 people a day and booked six months out.
Everest Base Camp
Twelve days walking to 5,364 metres, sleeping in lodges the whole way. Not a climb, not technical, and entirely governed by how your body handles altitude.
Torres del Paine
Three granite towers above a glacial lake, in a park where the wind is the main character and every bed for the trek is booked a year ahead.
Deserts & Plains
Wadi Rum, the Atacama, the Namib and the salt flats of Uyuni — the places where there is almost nothing, which is the entire point of going.
Wadi Rum
Sandstone and granite mountains rising straight out of red sand, where Lawrence fought and where every film that needs Mars is shot. Sleep in it.
Salar de Uyuni
Ten thousand square kilometres of salt flat, flat to within a metre across its whole width, which in the wet season becomes the largest mirror on earth.
Wildlife
The Serengeti migration, Borneo, Antarctica and the Pantanal — where to see animals living rather than performing, and how not to make it worse by turning up.
The Serengeti
Thirty thousand square kilometres of grassland carrying the largest land mammal migration on earth, plus the highest lion density anywhere.
The Galápagos Islands
Nineteen volcanic islands on the equator where nothing has learned to be afraid of people. The animals do not move when you approach, and that is the entire experience.
Antarctica
The only continent with no permanent population and no government, reached by two days across the roughest sea on earth, in a season four months long.
Sacred Places
Varanasi, Lalibela, Bagan and Lhasa — places of worship that are working places of worship, and how to visit without treating them as a set.
Varanasi
One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, where Hindus come to die because dying here is said to end the cycle of rebirth. Confronting, and unlike anywhere.
Bagan
More than two thousand Buddhist temples and stupas across forty square kilometres of dry plain, built in two centuries and abandoned for six.
Modern Marvels
Tokyo, Singapore, the Panama Canal, Bilbao — what the last hundred years built that is worth a journey, and what is only worth a photograph.
Tokyo
Thirty-seven million people in the largest metropolitan area on earth, rebuilt twice in a century, and the best-functioning city anywhere.
Singapore
A city-state the size of the Isle of Man that went from a colonial port to one of the richest places on earth in sixty years, and engineered its own weather-proof greenery to prove it.
Regions
Southeast Asia, the Andes, the Balkans, East Africa and the rest — what each region is like to travel in, when to go, and how the pieces fit together.
Southeast Asia
The region that taught a generation how to travel cheaply and is still the easiest place on earth to do it. Warm, connected, and far more varied than the circuit suggests.
The Andes
The longest mountain range on earth, running the length of a continent, with the altitude that shapes every decision you make about travelling in it.
East Africa
The Serengeti and the Mara, Kilimanjaro, the Rift Valley lakes and the Swahili coast — and the safari industry that sits on top of all of it.
The Mediterranean
Twenty-two countries around one sea, with three thousand years of everybody conquering everybody else layered into the same towns. The easiest great region to travel and the hardest to see freshly.
Western Europe
The most travel-dense region on earth, where the trains work, the borders barely exist, and the main constraint is money rather than logistics.
South Asia
India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan — the most intense travel on earth, and the region that rewards a long slow trip more than any other.