Trip itineraries, planned day by day

Five days in Paris: The Art of Slowing Down in the Capital of Speed

Enough time for the Louvre and the Orsay without running them together, a morning on Montmartre, and evenings spent walking rather than queueing.

Fifteen days across America by train: nobody who flies over it understands how big it is

Four thousand seven hundred kilometres of Amtrak from New York Penn Station to the San Francisco Bay, with three nights on board, the Rockies at breakfast on the twelfth day and the Sierra Nevada on the thirteenth.

New York City → Chicago → Denver → San Francisco

Five days in New York City: Beyond the Checklist and Into the Grid

Manhattan is thirteen miles long and two wide, which is smaller than it sounds and entirely walkable in five days if the days are grouped properly.

Four days in Rome: Ruins, popes and long lunches

Enough time to see the ancient centre, the Vatican and the baroque middle of the city properly, on foot, without spending the trip in queues.

Ten days in France: Beyond the Capital on the Rhône Line

The north-south spine of France in ten days: the capital, the country's best eating city and the Riviera, joined by two fast trains and nothing else.

Paris → Lyon → Nice

Ten days in Italy: Three Cities That Couldn't Be Less Alike

The three cities everyone means by Italy, in the order the railway puts them. Four nights in Rome, three in Florence, two in Venice, and no car at any point.

Rome → Florence → Venice

Six days in Hong Kong and Macau: Two Riverbank Stories Across the Delta

Five nights across the two places, joined by an hour on a ferry, with a full day on Lantau and enough time in Macau to eat properly and see it after dark.

Hong Kong → Macau

Five days in Berlin: History Written in Concrete

A capital rebuilt three times in one century, where the twentieth century is still legible in the street, and nothing has been tidied away.

Nine days from Berlin to Warsaw: the East Berlin nobody photographs, and a capital rebuilt from paintings

Six hundred kilometres east on one express line, from the half of Berlin that was behind the Wall to the city that was deliberately levelled and then put back stone for stone from eighteenth-century paintings.

Berlin → Poznań → Warsaw

Four days in Washington DC: World-Class Museums, Zero Tickets

Three nights within walking distance of the Mall, in a city where nearly everything worth seeing is free and the queues are for the free things.

Nine days in Berlin, Dresden and Prague: rubble, reconstruction, and the one that came through

Three capitals of three different worlds, four hundred kilometres apart on one railway, with the best two hours of the journey spent in a sandstone gorge on the German side of the Czech border.

Berlin → Dresden → Prague

Six days in Helsinki and Tallinn: Two Capitals, One Sea, Opposite Histories

Helsinki and Tallinn face each other across eighty kilometres of the Gulf of Finland, were founded as trading rivals four hundred years apart, and are now joined by more than twenty daily ferry crossings taking about two hours.

Helsinki → Tallinn

Ten days in Spain: From Mediterranean Light to Andalusian Heat by Rail

The classic first trip to Spain, done on two train tickets instead of two flights, with an evening in every city rather than a morning at an airport.

Barcelona → Madrid → Seville

Eight days in London, Bruges and Amsterdam: three countries and not one airport

An eight day trip across three countries by rail: three nights in London, two in Bruges, two in Amsterdam, with the Channel crossed underneath rather than over.

London → Bruges → Amsterdam

Ten days in China: Two imperial capitals and one city that invented itself

Nine nights across the three cities most people want on a first visit, linked by trains rather than flights, with a full day each for the Wall and the warriors.

Beijing → Xi'an → Shanghai

Ten days in Germany: Four cities that barely agree they are the same country

North to south by fast train through four cities that were separate states within living memory, and in two cases within the last century.

Berlin → Leipzig → Nuremberg → Munich

Twelve days in Scandinavia: Three capitals on one railway, and each one contradicts the last

Denmark, Sweden and Norway in one line, with the two border crossings done on the ground: five hours from Copenhagen to Stockholm and five and a half on to Oslo.

Copenhagen → Stockholm → Oslo

Five days in Istanbul: Eleven Centuries of Empires on Three Hills

Four nights is enough to see the imperial city properly on foot, cross to Galata and the Asian shore without rushing, and still have afternoons left over.

Five days in Beijing: A capital built to make you feel small

Five days is enough for the Forbidden City, a full day on the Great Wall, the Summer Palace and the old lanes around the lakes, without turning any of them into a march.

Four days in Los Angeles: How to Love a City Without a Centre

Three nights in a metropolis the size of a small country, arranged so that each day belongs to one district and one drive.

Eight days in Israel: two cities an hour apart that barely speak the same language

The classic first trip: the Old City quarter by quarter, the Mount of Olives at first light, then Bauhaus streets, Jaffa and a beach at the end of every afternoon.

Jerusalem → Tel Aviv

Four days in Chicago: The city that invented the skyscraper and still does it best

Three nights in the Loop, an easy walk from most of it, in a city built flat on a grid beside an inland sea.

Four days in Madrid: A capital with no river and four centuries of paintings

A capital that keeps its best paintings in three buildings on one boulevard, and its evenings outdoors until well past midnight.

Ten days in England and Scotland: the whole country out of one window

Ten days from the Thames to the Firth of Forth on a single railway: four nights in London, two in York and three in Edinburgh, with no leg longer than an afternoon.

London → York → Edinburgh

Four days in Hong Kong: Vertical, crowded, and greener than anyone tells you

Three nights covers the harbour at night, a full day on Lantau, the Taoist temples and street markets of Kowloon, and the new museums at West Kowloon.

Four days in Helsinki: An imperial capital that behaves like a small town

Finland's capital is a city of 690,000 spread across a peninsula and several hundred islands, with a white neoclassical centre built for the Russian empire, a gold domed Orthodox cathedral over the harbour, and a working sea fortress twenty minutes offshore.

Nine days from Vienna to Budapest: three capitals, one river, and an empire that used to run all of it

Three capital cities within three hundred kilometres of each other, all on the same river, all run from the same desk until 1918, and now in three different countries with three different currencies.

Vienna → Bratislava → Budapest

Ten days from Toronto to New York: two big cities that agree on almost nothing, and a waterfall in between

Two of the largest cities in North America, seven hundred kilometres apart, with almost nothing in common except the lake system that made both of them rich, and the most famous waterfall on the continent sitting on the border between them.

Toronto → Niagara Falls (Ontario) → New York City

Five days in Rio de Janeiro: Where the rainforest comes down to the beach

A five day plan for Rio, grouped so each day stays on one side of the mountains, with the two great viewpoints, the rebuilt port district, the hill neighbourhood and the long walk from Copacabana to Ipanema.

Nineteen days from Berlin to Budapest: five countries down one railway line, and not a single long day

Twelve hundred kilometres and five countries between the Baltic watershed and the Hungarian plain, taken in six train journeys of which the longest is two hours and forty minutes.

Berlin → Dresden → Prague → Brno → Vienna → Bratislava → Budapest

Ten days in Poland: Kraków to the Baltic, and the century in between

Poland's three best cities stand almost in a row up the middle of the country, and the trains between them are fast, cheap and frequent, which makes this the easiest big trip in central Europe.

Kraków → Warsaw → Gdańsk

Nine days in northern Italy: What you see when you skip Rome and Florence

The Po valley from end to end: a working city with a Leonardo in a monastery, a Roman amphitheatre that still sells out, and a republic built on mud.

Milan → Verona → Venice

Four days in Warsaw: not a beautiful city, and much the more interesting for it

Warsaw was destroyed street by street in 1944 and put back together from photographs and paintings, and the result is a capital that is far more absorbing than it is pretty.

Five days in Jerusalem: the weekend depends on which street you are on

Four nights is enough to walk the Old City quarter by quarter, take the Mount of Olives at first light, and still reach the Israel Museum before flying home.

Eleven days in eastern Canada: four cities on one railway line, getting more French as you go

Ten nights along the Quebec City to Windsor corridor, the one stretch of Canada where the train beats the car, moving from an English-speaking city of three million to a walled French one of half a million.

Toronto → Ottawa → Montreal → Quebec City

Four days in Kyoto: two thousand temples, and time for eight

Four days in Kyoto arranged so that each day sits in one quarter of the city: eastern Higashiyama, the southern shrines, Arashiyama in the west, and the northern temples on the way out.

Fifteen days from Warsaw to Vienna: four countries south, ending on the hill a Polish king came down

A thousand kilometres south through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria, taking in the capital that was flattened, the one that was not, an eastern Slovak city that has been in three countries without moving, and the two on the Danube.

Warsaw → Kraków → Košice → Budapest → Vienna

Ten days in Brazil: Rio for the view, Sao Paulo for the food, and Iguacu for the noise

A first trip to Brazil in ten days: Rio de Janeiro for four nights, both sides of Iguacu Falls for two, and Sao Paulo for three, linked by two short domestic flights.

Rio de Janeiro → Foz do Iguaçu → São Paulo

Eleven days from Munich to Vienna: down the Danube, past Salzburg without stopping

The Danube corridor from Bavaria into Austria, taking the two river cities that almost every Munich to Vienna traveller passes through at ninety miles an hour without getting off.

Munich → Regensburg → Linz → Vienna

Four days in Athens: a classical city with flats looking into it

Three nights is enough to see classical Athens properly on foot, with the afternoons free, and still leave with a sense of the modern city underneath it.

Sixteen days in the British Isles: six cities and one crossing of the Irish Sea

Sixteen days from London to Dublin the long way round, by train up the west coast and through Scotland, then by ferry across the North Channel and down into Ireland.

London → Liverpool → Edinburgh → Glasgow → Belfast → Dublin

Three days in Tirana: the grey city that painted itself

A capital that spent forty five years sealed off from the world and has spent the last twenty five painting over it, with bunkers, mountains and very good coffee.

Eight days in the Low Countries: a canal city, a rebuilt one and a port that never stopped

Eight days across the Netherlands and Belgium by rail: three nights in Amsterdam, two in Rotterdam, two in Antwerp, with no journey longer than an hour.

Amsterdam → Rotterdam → Antwerp

Ten days from Ankara to Antalya: Turkey without Istanbul, down the middle to the sea

Ankara for three nights, Konya for two, Antalya for four, connected by a high speed train and a bus across the Taurus.

Ankara → Konya → Antalya

Ten days in Finland: from the Baltic to the Arctic Circle on one railway line

Finland is long, thin and joined up by trains, and ten days is enough to go from the neoclassical capital on the Gulf of Finland to the Arctic Circle, stopping at the medieval capital it replaced and the mill town that industrialised the country.

Helsinki → Turku → Tampere → Rovaniemi

Four days in San Francisco: seven miles square, and none of it flat

Three nights on a peninsula the size of a large town, arranged so that each day climbs one set of hills rather than four.

Four days in Singapore: the best eating in Asia happens in a food court

A four day city break built around hawker food, the old shophouse quarters and the reclaimed bay, at a pace that leaves room for the heat.

Four days in Vienna: still dressed for an empire

The capital of a vanished empire, kept in working order: imperial apartments, one of the great picture collections in Europe, and a coffee house culture built on sitting still.

Sixteen days from Paris to Bologna: south by train, and the food gets better at every stop

One railway from the Seine to the Apennine foothills, through a capital, a ducal town, a lake city, a walled hill town and the two places Italians go to eat.

Paris → Dijon → Lausanne → Bergamo → Parma → Bologna

Five days in Mexico City: a sinking city with an empire underneath it

Enough time for the Aztec and colonial centre, the country's greatest museum, a day at the pyramids and an afternoon in Coyoacan, without crossing the city twice a day.

Four days in Amsterdam: 1,500 bridges

A four day Amsterdam trip built around two museum days, one long walk through the western canals, and a last morning in the oldest corner of the city.

Nine days in Prague, Wroclaw and Krakow: one road east, and every city on it changed hands

Four hundred and fifty kilometres east across Bohemia and Silesia, taking in three cities that have each been ruled from somewhere else, and one of which changed its entire population in a single year.

Prague → Wrocław → Kraków

Eight days in the Baltic capitals: three countries on one bus ticket, south to north

The three Baltic capitals sit in a line about two hundred and seventy kilometres apart, connected by comfortable coaches several times a day, and they are close enough in geography and far enough apart in character to make a week of travelling between them worth doing.

Vilnius → Riga → Tallinn

Fifteen days from Osaka to Seoul: the whole way by train, and one boat across

Western Japan end to end on the shinkansen, the strait crossing that Japanese and Korean traders have used for fifteen centuries, and two of the best cities in Asia at either end.

Osaka → Kyoto → Hiroshima → Fukuoka → Busan → Seoul

Four days in Santiago: the Andes at the end of every street

A four day plan for Santiago that takes the centre on foot, gives the dictatorship and its museums a day of their own, and finishes on the two hills the city is arranged around.

Four days in Cairo: the pyramids are the short half of the trip

The pyramids in one morning, the medieval city in another, and enough time left over to sit down. Three nights in the middle of Cairo, with the two great museums split across the trip rather than stacked into one exhausting day.

Ten days in Austria: the cities get smaller and the mountains get bigger

One railway line, three cities and a steady climb: an imperial capital, an archbishop's baroque town, and a Habsburg court with a two thousand metre wall behind it.

Vienna → Salzburg → Innsbruck

Ten days on the Pacific Coast Highway: the slow road, taken slowly

Nine nights and about 500 miles down the California coast, on a road that takes six hours to cover ninety of them and is worth every minute.

San Francisco → Monterey (California) → Big Sur → Santa Barbara → Los Angeles

Four days in Buenos Aires: built with Paris money, run on Italian hours

A four day plan for the Argentine capital, grouped so each day stays in one quarter, with the belle epoque centre, the old southern barrios, Recoleta and a last morning in La Boca.

Four days in Shanghai: the Bund on one side, the future on the other

Four days is enough to walk the Bund, see the old Chinese city, go up the tallest building in the country and still have a morning under the plane trees.

Ten days in Japan: Tokyo to Hiroshima, all of it by shinkansen

Ten days across Japan's three essential cities: Tokyo for four nights, Kyoto for three and Hiroshima for two, with a day on Miyajima and two shinkansen legs between them.

Tokyo → Kyoto → Hiroshima

Five days in Munich: Bavaria first, Germany a distant second

Six breweries, a palace the size of a district, the first concentration camp on the doorstep, and a river with surfers in it. Bavaria's capital does not think of itself as a German city.

Nine days from Geneva to Turin: over Mont Blanc, into the Italy nobody queues for

Three countries in a straight line, joined by one mountain: a Protestant banking city on a lake, the valley where alpinism was invented, and the baroque capital that made Italy.

Geneva → Chamonix → Turin

Seven days in Belgium and Luxembourg: a capital that argues, and a capital on a cliff

A seven day trip between two small capitals: three nights in Brussels for the guild square, the old masters and the beer, then three in Luxembourg City for the fortress, the gorge and a castle in the Ardennes.

Brussels → Luxembourg (city)

Ten days from Strasbourg to Bern: choucroute in France, and a capital you can swim through

Two French towns that look and eat German, the Rhine city where three countries meet, and a Swiss capital of arcades where office workers float home down the river.

Strasbourg → Colmar → Basel → Berne

Three days in Curitiba: the city urban planners fly in to look at

A three day plan for Curitiba, taking the colonial old town, the buildings and parks that made the city famous among planners, and the Italian quarter, with the mountain railway as the obvious extra day.

Five days in Stockholm: they raised a sunken warship whole and built a museum round it

The Swedish capital sits where a lake meets the Baltic, spread over islands joined by short bridges, with the archipelago beginning at the end of the quay and the old town still on its original rock.

Four days in Bogota: cold, high, grey, and far better than its reputation

A four day plan for Bogota, covering the colonial quarter, the two great free museums, the mountain above the city and the salt cathedral north of it, with what to know about altitude and getting around.

Ten days in Chile: the desert that has never seen rain, and the port that never recovered

A nine night route through the three parts of Chile that are worth a first trip, with the capital, the Atacama desert in the far north and the great Pacific port, joined by two short flights.

Santiago → San Pedro de Atacama → Valparaíso

Ten days in Sweden: south down the country until Denmark is across the water

The three biggest cities in Sweden, all on the same line, running from the archipelago capital down the west side to the Oresund, where Copenhagen is thirty five minutes away.

Stockholm → Gothenburg → Malmö

Eight days in the Golden Triangle: India's busiest route, and still its best

Three cities, two short train rides and eight days. Mughal Delhi, the Taj at Agra, and the Rajput forts above Jaipur, in the order the railway already runs them.

Delhi → Agra → Jaipur

Nine days from Nice to Genoa: the Riviera keeps going after France stops

The same coastline under two flags: a French resort city that was Italian until 1860, a lemon town on the border, and the working port that built half the Mediterranean.

Nice → Menton → Genoa

Four days in Barcelona: a medieval knot and the grid built around it

Two medieval quarters, one grid of modernista architecture and a hillside park, walked in an order that keeps the ticketed things early.

Four days in Boston: a revolution you can walk in an afternoon

Three nights in the oldest and most walkable big city in America, where the founding documents happened in a square mile you can cover in a morning.

Four days in Sao Paulo: the city Brazilians move to, not the one they photograph

A four day plan for Sao Paulo, grouped by district so the traffic never decides the day, covering the art museums, the founding square, the great park and the neighbourhoods people actually eat in.

Nine days in Provence: down the Rhone to the sea, from the popes' fortress to a Greek port

Three towns an hour apart and nothing like each other: a walled papal capital, a rich little painters' town, and the oldest and roughest port in France.

Avignon → Aix-en-Provence → Marseille

Ten days in Tuscany: no hire car, and you will eat better without one

The Renaissance in Florence, the Middle Ages in Siena, and a walled republic that nobody ever conquered, all reachable without touching a steering wheel.

Florence → Siena → Lucca

Four days in Lisbon: the sunniest capital in Europe, and most of it uphill

Three neighbourhoods, one day trip and a lot of walking uphill, arranged so you are never crossing the city twice in a day.

Four days in Oslo: a capital where the metro ends in a forest

Norway's capital sits at the closed end of a hundred kilometre fjord with forest on three sides, and it has spent two decades building museums on the waterfront it used to hide behind a motorway.

Fourteen days from Madrid to Lisbon: the old road west

Overland from one capital to the other across the empty middle of Iberia: a university town, the best Roman city in Spain, a walled Alentejo town with a stone circle outside it, and four nights at the far end.

Madrid → Salamanca → Mérida (Spain) → Évora → Lisbon

Nine days on the Deep South music trail: country, soul, blues, jazz, in that order

Eight nights and about 570 miles down the middle of the South, following the road every one of these traditions came up.

Nashville → Memphis → Clarksdale → New Orleans

Four days in Hamburg: red brick, grey water and money that does not shout

A merchant republic on a river a hundred kilometres up from the sea, built in brick, rebuilt after fire and firestorm, and still making its living from the water.

Four days in Venice: everyone leaves at six, and the city comes back

Long enough to stop navigating and start wandering: the basilica, the lagoon islands, the Jewish Ghetto, Titian at the Frari, and three evenings in a city that empties after the last day boat.

Four days in Milan: not pretty, and the best evening in Italy

The cathedral roof, the Last Supper, two of the oldest churches in Italy, and the evenings that make people move here.

Sixteen days from Istanbul to Cappadocia: Turkey is much bigger than it looks

A sixteen day arc across Turkey by bus, from Istanbul down the Aegean to Pamukkale and Antalya and inland to the rock valleys of Cappadocia.

Istanbul → Çanakkale → Izmir → Pamukkale → Antalya → Göreme

Ten days from Seattle to Banff: the Pacific Northwest does not stop at the border

A coastline shared by two countries, crossed by a morning train, and then the mountain wall that closes the whole region off to the east.

Seattle → Vancouver → Banff

Four days in Mumbai: the city the rest of India moved to

Four days in a city built on seven islands and reclaimed mud, where the British left a Gothic skyline, the 1930s left an Art Deco one, and everybody who lives there arrived from somewhere else.

Nine days in Israel and Jordan: cross the river and everything changes

The two great destinations of the region are half a day apart by road, and nine days does both properly with one land border and no backtracking.

Jerusalem → Petra → Amman

Ten days in Belgium: four cities, one railway, no car at all

A ten day Belgian trip by rail: three nights in Brussels, two in Ghent, two in Bruges and two in Antwerp, with the longest journey between them lasting 75 minutes.

Brussels → Ghent → Bruges → Antwerp

Ten days in Turkey: three places with almost nothing in common

The classic first trip to Turkey, done at a pace that leaves afternoons free: an imperial city, a volcanic landscape full of cave churches, and the best preserved Roman ruins on the Aegean.

Istanbul → Göreme → Selçuk

Three days in Philadelphia: where the arguing was done that made a country

Two nights in a walkable grid laid out in 1682, holding the buildings where the Declaration and the Constitution were both argued into existence.

Twelve days in the Caucasus: three countries, three alphabets, one road

Three small countries that share a mountain range and almost nothing else: a Shia oil capital, an Orthodox wine capital, and the oldest Christian state on earth.

Baku → Sheki → Tbilisi → Yerevan

Three days in Miami: the northernmost city in Latin America

Two nights split between a mile of 1930s hotels on the sand and a mainland city where the first language is Spanish.

Three days in Ottawa: a lumber town made capital, with the museums to prove it

Two nights in a capital that was picked as a compromise between Montreal and Toronto, and spent the next century and a half building national institutions to justify the decision.

Eleven days in Serbia, North Macedonia and Greece: the corridor everybody flies over

The old Roman road south, followed the whole way on the ground: a Danube capital, a Roman emperor's birthplace, an Ottoman bazaar, a Byzantine port and the Acropolis at the end of it.

Belgrade → Niš → Skopje → Thessaloniki → Athens

Four days in Ho Chi Minh City: renamed in 1975, still Saigon to everyone

Three nights in Ho Chi Minh City: District 1's colonial core, the two museums that explain the war, the old pagodas, and a market dinner.

Ten days in Egypt: everything you came for is on one river

The classic first trip, done at a pace that leaves afternoons in it. Cairo for the pyramids and the medieval city, Luxor for the tombs and the temples, Aswan for the river, with the sleeper doing the long distance overnight.

Cairo → Luxor → Aswan

Ten days in Mexico: three cities, two flights, three thousand years

The first-trip route through Mexico that skips the resorts: the capital, the food city and the Yucatán, joined by two short flights and covering four of the country's great archaeological sites.

Mexico City → Oaxaca (city) → Mérida (Mexico)

Twelve days from Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City: the run that made Southeast Asia a circuit

Four cities in a straight line east, none of them more than a morning's travel from the next, and the food gets better the whole way.

Bangkok → Siem Reap → Phnom Penh → Ho Chi Minh City

Five days in Prague: the Central European capital the war left standing

A thousand years of city that came through the twentieth century almost intact, walked at three things a day, with the mornings booked early and the afternoons left alone.

Four days in Brussels: skipped for Bruges, and a much better night out

A four day Brussels trip that starts on the Grand-Place, spends one day in the museums above it, one day walking south through Art Nouveau and sour beer, and a last morning with the comics.

Nine days in coastal New England: north until the lobster gets cheaper

Eight nights and 220 miles up the coast, from the oldest streets in America to a granite island where the mountains meet the sea.

Boston → Portland (Maine) → Bar Harbor

Sixteen days in the Netherlands and Belgium: seven towns and never a car

A sixteen day rail tour of the Low Countries: three nights in Amsterdam and two each in Delft, Utrecht, Maastricht, Brussels, Ghent and Bruges.

Amsterdam → Delft → Utrecht → Maastricht → Brussels → Ghent → Bruges

Three days in Macau: a Portuguese town that pays its bills with baccarat

Two nights covers the world heritage centre properly, an evening on the Cotai strip and a morning in a fishing village, with egg tarts throughout.

Twenty-one days across Canada by train: the best days are the ones with nothing in them

Six thousand kilometres of railway from Vancouver to Halifax, broken into six stops, with five of the twenty nights spent in a berth and two whole days spent looking out of a window at rock, water and trees.

Vancouver → Jasper → Winnipeg → Toronto → Montreal → Halifax

Ten days in Portugal: one railway line, and every stop feels like a different country

The main line north, done properly: nine nights in three cities, each one long enough to stop rushing, with the trains between them under two hours.

Lisbon → Coimbra → Porto

Three days in Las Vegas: go for the desert, stay for the fake volcano

Two nights in a city built on a dry lake bed, where the best two things are a scrapyard of old signs and a canyon twenty miles west.

Three days in Valparaiso: a port that never bothered with flat ground

A three day plan for Chile's great port, built around the hill lifts and the two painted cerros, with the art museum, Neruda's house and the terrace above the cranes.

Four days in Florence: the Renaissance is still in the rooms it was made for

The cathedral and its dome, the Uffizi, David, and an Oltrarno morning, in a centre small enough that you never take a bus.

Four days in Lyon: the city the French eat in and visitors skip

Two thousand years of city on a strip of land between two rivers, at a pace that leaves room for the long lunches the place is famous for.

Four days in Toronto: half the city came from somewhere else, and it eats accordingly

Three nights in a city of three million where roughly half the residents were born in another country, which is the reason the food is extraordinary and the skyline is beside the point.

Twelve days from Tbilisi to Trabzon: the empty road between the Caucasus and the Black Sea

Twelve days overland from Georgia into eastern Turkey: Tbilisi, the cave monastery at Vardzia, the ruined city of Ani, Erzurum and the Black Sea coast at Trabzon.

Tbilisi → Akhaltsikhe → Kars → Erzurum → Trabzon

Five days in Budapest: built to outdo Vienna, and better company than it

Five days in the Hungarian capital, split between hilly Buda and flat, grand Pest, with the thermal baths kept for the afternoon you need them.

Four days in Honolulu: a kingdom's capital that happens to have a beach attached

Three nights in the only American city that was once the capital of a sovereign kingdom, with the sand, the volcano and the harbour all inside half an hour.

Four days in Bangkok: the royal quarter, all of it within one walk

Three nights in Bangkok, built around the hours the city is bearable: temples early, the river in the afternoon, street food when the sun has gone.

Four days in Marseille: the oldest city in France, and the least polite

Twenty six centuries of Mediterranean port, a national museum on the harbour mouth, and a coastline of limestone inlets starting at the edge of town.

Four days in Strasbourg: French and German by turns, and the food never changed sides

An island city on the Rhine plain that has belonged to both countries and cooks like neither, in four days that are almost all on foot.

Ten days in Norway: up the longest fjord by boat, back over the mountains by train

The west coast, the fjord country and the capital in one line, with the two connecting journeys, a five hour catamaran and a mountain railway, treated as destinations rather than transfers.

Bergen → Flåm → Oslo

Four days in Copenhagen: the harbour is clean enough to swim in, and people do

A capital you can cross on foot in an hour, with the parliament, the crown jewels and an 1843 pleasure garden all inside that hour, and the water between them swimmable since the baths opened in 2002.

Four days in Naples: Pompeii is the day trip, not the reason

The densest old city in Europe, a buried Roman town an hour down the line, and the food that made the place famous, with a hill to climb when the noise gets too much.

Four days in Seattle: a city with a volcano on the skyline and salmon in the traffic

Three nights in a city built on hills between a sound and a lake, where the weather decides how good the view is and the view is the point.

Nine days in northern Spain: green, rainy, and nothing like the country on the postcards

The wet green north: a Basque beach city that eats better than anywhere in Spain, an industrial port turned art city, and the cathedral a million people a year walk to.

San Sebastián → Bilbao → Santiago de Compostela

Nine days in Tokyo and Seoul: two capitals that stay open later than you can

The two densest capitals in the region, joined by a short flight, in the length of trip a fortnight of annual leave actually allows.

Tokyo → Seoul

Ten days in Switzerland: the trains go everywhere, including straight up

A first trip through Switzerland end to end, with four bases, three train transfers of under three hours each, and a mountain day in the middle of it.

Zurich → Lucerne → Interlaken → Geneva

Three days in Brasilia: a whole capital built from nothing in forty one months

A three day plan for Brasilia, walking the monumental axis in the order it was built, with the government buildings, the two great churches, the lake and the memorial to the president who ordered the whole thing.

Three days in Osaka: a city with a word for eating itself into ruin

Three days in Osaka spent eating: Tennōji and the Shinsekai backstreets on the first evening, the castle and Umeda on the second, and Sumiyoshi Taisha on the way out.

Four days in Canberra: a city invented to settle an argument

The capital Australia had to build because Sydney and Melbourne would not let each other have it, laid out by a Chicago architect on a plan of circles and axes, with the country's national collections inside it and almost all of them free.

Nine days in Ireland and Northern Ireland: the border nobody can point at

A nine day trip up the eastern side of one island and across the top of it: three nights in Dublin, three in Belfast, two in Derry, all of it by scheduled train.

Dublin → Belfast → Derry

Seven days in the Florida Keys: a hundred and thirteen miles of road with sea on both sides

Six nights and 160 miles from a Latin American city to a coral island ninety miles from Cuba, on a road laid across a hurricane-wrecked railway.

Miami → Islamorada → Key West

Ten days in Albania: bunkers in the capital, and a coast Greece would charge triple for

Tirana, Berat, Gjirokaster and Saranda in one line down the country, with cold war history at the top and Greek and Roman ruins at the bottom.

Tirana → Berat → Gjirokastër → Sarandë

Ten days in Denmark: a country you can cross in three hours, and shouldn't

Zealand, Funen and Jutland in one line: the capital, the town Hans Christian Andersen escaped from, and the second city with two of the best museums in Scandinavia, all on one train ticket.

Copenhagen → Odense → Aarhus

Ten days in Kyushu: four cities south by train, ending under an active volcano

Japan's southern island end to end: ramen stalls in Fukuoka, the port that stayed open when the country closed, a rebuilt castle, and a volcano that drops ash on the city across the bay from it.

Fukuoka → Nagasaki → Kumamoto → Kagoshima

Eleven days from Lisbon to Seville: the bit in the middle nobody stops for

Two great cities at either end and three hundred kilometres of coast between them, taken slowly: an estuary full of dolphins, a wine town, and the cliffs at the bottom corner of Portugal.

Lisbon → Setúbal → Lagos (Portugal) → Seville

Four days in Baku: a medieval walled city with a fortune poured around it

The lowest-lying capital city on earth, wedged between a medieval fortress town, a Belle Epoque oil boom and a second boom that bought Zaha Hadid.

Ten days in Greece: two islands, not four

One capital and two islands in a straight line south, moving twice in ten days, with the ferries doing the work and nothing packed into a single day.

Athens → Naxos → Santorini

Ten days in Sicily: Greek, Arab and Norman long before it was Italian

Four bases, three long drives, and an island that has been the most fought-over piece of the Mediterranean for three thousand years.

Palermo → Agrigento → Syracuse (Italy) → Taormina

Five days in Seoul: mountains in the middle, and nothing shuts early

A four-night stay in central Seoul that walks the Joseon palaces, the prison museum, the Yongsan collections and two of the hills the city is built around.

Ten days in the Czech Republic: Prague, then east until the crowds stop

The country in two halves, Bohemia then Moravia, on a single railway line running two hundred and fifty kilometres east from Prague to Olomouc.

Prague → Brno → Olomouc

Twelve days from Istanbul to Rhodes: ruins on both sides of a very small sea

A twelve day run down the Turkish Aegean and across to the Greek islands, from Istanbul to Ephesus, then by boat to Samos and Rhodes.

Istanbul → Kuşadası → Samos → Rhodes (city)

Five days in Melbourne: the laneways matter more than the landmarks

A gold rush city with a grid of wide Victorian streets and a second city of narrow lanes hidden inside it, where the coffee is taken seriously and the best hours are spent walking.

Four days in Bordeaux: the wine capital with no vines in it

A cleaned eighteenth century riverfront, four good museums and a wine trade that explains the whole city, at a pace that leaves the afternoons open.

Four days in Delhi: every empire built here, and none of them tidied up

Four days in a city that has been the capital of something for eight hundred years and never demolished the last version. Sufi shrines, a Mughal fort, a twelfth-century minaret and a market street that has not stopped since 1650.

Four days in Kolkata: crumbling, bookish, and the best company in India

Four days in the city that ran British India until 1911 and has been arguing about everything ever since. Palladian ghats, a Bengali poet's house, a quarter that makes gods out of river clay, and the oldest museum in Asia.

Nine days in Colombia: a cold capital, a hot coast, and snow you can see from the beach

A first trip to Colombia in nine days: Bogota and the salt cathedral for three nights, Cartagena for two, and Santa Marta for three, with a full day walking Tayrona and another up at Minca.

Bogotá → Cartagena (Colombia) → Santa Marta

Twenty-one days in the Balkans: Alps at one end, the Acropolis at the other, no flights in between

The whole peninsula from north to south on the ground, two nights at a time, through the Alps, down the Adriatic and across the mountains to the Aegean.

Ljubljana → Zagreb → Split → Dubrovnik → Kotor → Tirana → Ohrid → Skopje → Thessaloniki → Athens

Nine days from San Diego to Baja: the best food on this coast is on the far side of the fence

One coastline, one metropolitan area, and a fence through the middle of it. Nine days spent on both sides, ending in a valley of Mexican wineries that most people in San Diego have never driven to.

San Diego → Tijuana → Ensenada

Ten days in Java: three cities on one railway, none of them alike

The length of Java on the railway, with three nights in Jakarta, four in Yogyakarta for the great temples, and two in Surabaya at the eastern end of the line.

Jakarta → Yogyakarta → Surabaya

Ten days in South Africa: the first trip everybody takes, plus the city they all skip

Nine nights, one domestic flight, one long drive, and eighteen places across three completely different countries in one.

Cape Town → Johannesburg → Kruger National Park

Four days in New Orleans: the least American city in America

Three nights in a city founded by the French, run by the Spanish, sold to the Americans and never entirely persuaded by any of them.

Twelve days in Vietnam: four cities, one sleeper train and a short flight south

Vietnam end to end in twelve days: the capital, the imperial city, the old trading port and Saigon, linked by one overnight train, one mountain road and one flight.

Hanoi → Hue → Hoi An → Ho Chi Minh City

Eight days in the American Southwest: three canyons, one hire car, and nothing green

Seven nights and about 500 miles of driving, from a city built on a dry lake bed to the biggest hole in the ground on the continent.

Las Vegas → Zion National Park → Bryce Canyon National Park → Grand Canyon

Nine days in Lithuania: from a Baroque capital to a wall of sand on the Baltic

Lithuania fits into nine days without hurrying: three nights in Vilnius, two in Kaunas, three on the coast at Klaipėda, an hour of train and three hours of coach between them, and a country that held out against Christianity longer than anywhere in Europe and then briefly ran half the continent.

Vilnius → Kaunas → Klaipėda

Six days in Sardinia: an island with its own language and a Bronze Age nobody taught you

The capital, the archaeology nobody expects, and a walled Catalan town on the other coast, with one long drive through the middle of the island.

Cagliari → Alghero

Four days in Nice: French since 1860 and still cooking Italian

A Mediterranean city that was Italian until 1860, with two great small museums on a Roman hill and half the Riviera within an hour by train.

Seven days in Dubai and Abu Dhabi: two cities ninety minutes apart that could not be less alike

One country, two emirates, and two completely different answers to the question of what to do with a great deal of money in a very short time.

Dubai → Abu Dhabi

Ten days in Bulgaria: from a mountain monastery to the oldest gold ever made

Three cities and nine nights take you from a capital with a Roman rotunda behind the presidency, through the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe, to a Black Sea port holding the earliest worked gold anybody has found anywhere.

Sofia → Plovdiv → Varna

Ten days in Scotland: two great cities, then the road runs out

Edinburgh and Glasgow first, the train north through the Cairngorms, then a hired car for Loch Ness, the battlefield at Culloden and the cliffs of Skye.

Edinburgh → Glasgow → Inverness → Portree

Twenty-one days from Cairo to Jerusalem: three countries strung along one very old road

Three weeks east from the pyramids to the Old City, through Upper Egypt, the Sinai, the Jordanian desert and Petra.

Cairo → Alexandria → Luxor → Dahab → Wadi Rum → Petra → Amman → Jerusalem

Eight days in Wales and Ireland: castles, a mountain railway and the boat across

Eight days up the length of Wales and across the Irish Sea: two nights in Cardiff, three in Conwy with Snowdonia and Llandudno on the doorstep, two in Dublin.

Cardiff → Conwy → Dublin

Four days in Cologne: rebuilt in a hurry, and the best company in Germany

Two thousand years of Rhine city, ninety per cent of it flattened in the war and put back at speed, with the biggest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe standing over the station.

Four days in Toulouse: pink brick everywhere, and Airbus at the end of the tram line

France's fourth city, built out of pink brick and pointed at the sky, in four days that fit on foot with one tram ride out to the aircraft factories.

Seven days in the Dolomites: a coral reef pushed three thousand metres into the air

The strangest mountains in Europe, from a bilingual market town at their foot to a resort in the middle of them, with one of the great drives in between.

Bolzano → Cortina d'Ampezzo

Ten days from Bogotá to Quito: two great capitals and the white city between them

Colombia's cold, clever capital, a whitewashed colonial town in the Cauca valley, and the best preserved old city in South America, joined by two flights of about an hour.

Bogotá → Popayán → Quito

Eleven days on the River Plate: Buenos Aires is the loud one, Montevideo is the one you remember

Down the Paraná and across the widest river mouth on earth: a river city almost no visitor stops in, the loudest capital in South America, a Portuguese smuggling town and the quiet one on the far bank.

Rosario → Buenos Aires → Colonia → Montevideo

Four days in San Diego: the border city that acts like a beach town

Three nights in the mildest climate in the country, split between a working navy harbour, a park full of museums, and seventy miles of coast.

Ten days in Hungary: Budapest, and the two towns that explain it

Nine nights across three Hungarian cities, all reached by rail: the capital, the Mediterranean-feeling south, and the wine hills in the north east.

Budapest → Pécs → Eger

Ten days in northern Portugal and Galicia: Iberia at its least Mediterranean

The green Atlantic corner: port lodges and granite in Porto, an island national park off Vigo, the end of the pilgrim road at Santiago, and a Roman lighthouse still working at A Coruna.

Porto → Vigo → Santiago de Compostela → A Coruña

Three days in Bern: a capital small enough to swim through at lunchtime

Two nights in the Swiss capital, a medieval sandstone town wrapped in a river bend, walked end to end in an afternoon and worth three days anyway.

Eleven days in Albania and North Macedonia: painted tower blocks, then a lake full of churches

Five towns across two countries that were shut to visitors within living memory: a capital rebuilt out of paint and concrete, an Ottoman hill town, a lake of medieval churches, a Habsburg high street in the middle of the Balkans, and an Ottoman bazaar.

Tirana → Berat → Ohrid → Bitola → Skopje

Four days in Dresden: a baroque capital put back together from numbered stones

The Saxon court spent two centuries buying beautiful things and building somewhere to keep them, one February night in 1945 destroyed all of it, and the decades since reunification put most of it back.

Four days in Montreal: the best eating in Canada, and all of it in French

Three nights in the largest French-speaking city in the Americas, where a mountain sits in the middle of downtown and the best meal of the trip costs eleven dollars.

Ten days in Serbia and North Macedonia: two capitals nobody photographs, and a lake everyone should

Belgrade, Skopje and Ohrid by bus: two under-visited capitals with serious museums and cheap food, finishing on one of the oldest lakes on earth.

Belgrade → Skopje → Ohrid

Eight days in Montenegro and Albania: down the Adriatic and across a border almost nobody crosses

Kotor, Shkodra and Tirana in one line south: a Venetian bay, a fortress over the largest lake in southern Europe, and the strangest recent history in Europe.

Kotor → Shkodër → Tirana

Five days in Sofia: a mosque, a synagogue and two cathedrals inside one square

Sofia is 2,500 years old, has been Thracian, Roman, Bulgarian and Ottoman in turn, and left a piece of each within a few streets of the centre. It also has a 2,290 m mountain rising off the edge of the suburbs and the greatest monastery in the Balkans two hours south.

Four days in Edinburgh: the best looking city in Britain, and it knows it

A medieval town stacked on a volcanic ridge, a Georgian grid laid out beside it, and a hill you can climb before lunch without leaving the city.

Four days in Turin: the Alps at the end of every street

A grid of baroque streets under arcades, mummies and papyri by the thousand, a chocolate and vermouth habit, and mountains closing off the view in three directions.

Fourteen days in Greece: the mainland first, and it is the better half

Six stops down the length of the country, from a Byzantine port to a Minoan palace, taking in the monasteries on the rocks, the oracle, the first capital and the Acropolis on the way.

Thessaloniki → Meteora → Delphi → Nafplio → Athens → Heraklion

Ten days in Croatia: three cities that barely feel like one country

Three cities that explain the country: an Austro-Hungarian capital, a Roman palace people still live in, and a walled republic that outlasted Venice, joined without hiring a car.

Zagreb → Split → Dubrovnik

Eight days in Azerbaijan: leave the oil city and go up into the mountains

The capital gets almost all the visitors and about a third of the country's interest. This route spends half its nights inland, where nobody goes.

Baku → Sheki → Ganja

Five days in Cape Town: a mountain in the middle and a prison in the bay

Four nights, fourteen places, and two bookings that decide the shape of the whole trip.

Four days in Tallinn: a medieval trading town, fifty years behind the Iron Curtain

Estonia's capital keeps one of the most complete medieval town centres in northern Europe inside its walls, a Russian imperial cathedral and a Danish castle on the hill above it, and fifty years of Soviet occupation documented in the streets just outside.

Ten days in Argentina: a different country at the end of every flight

A nine night route across the three Argentinas that fit into ten days: the belle epoque capital, the subtropical falls in the far northeast, and the colonial northwest under the Andes.

Buenos Aires → Puerto Iguazú → Salta

Ten days in South Korea: one train line from the palaces to the sea

A first trip to Korea down the country's main line: the palaces and hills of Seoul, the burial mounds and temples of Gyeongju, and the markets and beaches of Busan.

Seoul → Gyeongju → Busan

Three days in Geneva: Calvin preached here, and the world moved in

Two nights in a small French-speaking city that spent four centuries as its own republic and now hosts everybody else's, walked in three easy days from Cornavin.

Three days in Genoa: palaces so grand the city drew lots for who hosted the king

A working port with a maze of alleys behind it, forty palaces built to impress visiting royalty, and the best cheap food on the Italian coast.

Four days in Bucharest: the city Ceausescu tried to replace

Bucharest rewards four days better than two, because the good parts are scattered: a knot of 18th century churches in the Old Town, a colossal parliament on a flattened hillside, and a run of museums along one long boulevard in the north.

Four days in Guadalajara: the city that invented what the world thinks Mexico is

Mexico's second city at a walkable size: the greatest murals in the country, the birthplace of mariachi, and the valley that gives tequila its name an hour up the road.

Nine days from Lake Como to Lake Maggiore: the part of Switzerland that speaks Italian

Three lakes and a border that changes the currency and nothing else: silk-weaving Como, Lugano between two funicular mountains, and Locarno under a hillside sanctuary.

Como → Lugano → Locarno

Three days in Palermo: a chapel where Arab, Greek and Norman craftsmen worked on one ceiling

A city conquered by everybody and shaped by all of them, where the best building in Sicily is a royal chapel the size of a large room.

Three days in Zurich: buttoned up until it gets in the water

A short, walkable three days in Switzerland's largest city, using the Hauptbahnhof as the hinge and the river as the reason to stay another night.

Eleven days from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur: the easiest road in Southeast Asia, and the best eating on it

Four hundred kilometres north up the peninsula, through two of the best food cities in Asia, a Dutch colonial port and a set of tea plantations at fifteen hundred metres.

Singapore → Malacca → Cameron Highlands → Kuala Lumpur

Four days in Belgrade: no old town to speak of, and the best night out in Europe

A capital rebuilt after every war it lost, with a fortress park over two rivers, serious museums, cheap food and a nightlife that starts at midnight.

Four days in Vilnius: a Baroque capital with a breakaway republic across the stream

Lithuania's capital has one of the largest surviving old towns in northern Europe, mostly Baroque, built in the century and a half after the country became Catholic, and it holds a former KGB headquarters, a lost Jewish city and a self declared republic of artists inside twenty minutes' walk.

Six days in Cape Town and the winelands: the best value fine wine anywhere, forty minutes inland

Five nights, fifteen places, and a wine region close enough to the city to be a mistake to skip.

Cape Town → Stellenbosch

Three days in Nashville: a company town, and the company is songs

Two nights in a city where the main industry writes songs for a living, and you can hear the results for free every afternoon of the week.

Eight days at Iguazú Falls: Brazil gives you the view, Argentina puts you in it

The same waterfall from two countries, with a third thrown in for the dam and the second falls: a green Brazilian city, the panorama from the Brazilian bank, and a day on the walkways above the Devil's Throat.

Curitiba → Foz do Iguaçu → Puerto Iguazú

Eleven days from Malaga to Fez: through a Spanish city in Africa

A route almost nobody takes: the Malaga ferry to Melilla, a Spanish city on the African coast full of Art Nouveau, then over the land frontier and down the railway to Volubilis and the oldest medina in Morocco.

Málaga → Melilla → Meknes → Fez

Sixteen days from Granada to Marrakech: one civilisation, two continents

The Moorish thread followed backwards, from the last emirate in Spain to the city the Almoravids founded: Granada, Ronda, a ferry to Spanish Ceuta, then Tetouan, Rabat and Marrakech.

Granada → Ronda → Ceuta → Tétouan → Rabat → Marrakech

Four days in Dublin: not a grand capital, and far better company than one

Three nights, ten places, and a capital small enough that two advance bookings cover the whole trip.

Four days in Kraków: the prettiest city in Poland, and its hardest day out

Poland's old royal capital came through the twentieth century with its medieval centre intact. It is the most visited city in the country, and the hour's drive west of it is the hardest day anybody spends here.

Four days in Vancouver: mountains at the end of every street

Three nights in a city hemmed in by water on three sides and mountains on the fourth, where the good half of every day is spent outdoors and the weather decides which half.

Ten days in Tamil Nadu: the India the Mughals never got to

The Coromandel coast and one great temple city. Colonial Madras, seventh-century rock carving at Mamallapuram, a French grid at Pondicherry, and Madurai, which has been a city for two thousand years.

Chennai → Mamallapuram → Pondicherry → Madurai

Eight days in northern Israel: the quiet half of the country, and the best cooking in it

A week and a day between the coast and the Golan, in the part of the country most visitors skip: Crusader ports, Arab hill towns, a lake below sea level and volcanic uplands.

Haifa → Nazareth → Tiberias

Eight days in Puglia: the sea on both sides, and a cave city in between

The heel of Italy in three bases: a cliff town over clear water, a city of caves people were moved out of in living memory, and the most carved town in the south.

Polignano a Mare → Matera → Lecce

Eleven days from Sydney to the South Island: three hours across the Tasman and nothing is the same

Half the trip on the largest natural harbour in the world, then a short flight to a South Island coast where a submarine canyon brings sperm whales in close, and a country still visibly repairing earthquake damage.

Sydney → Christchurch → Kaikoura → Nelson (New Zealand)

Four days in Leipzig: Bach's church, and the one that brought a state down

A trade fair town that has been the place where things start: Bach's best work, German publishing, and the Monday marches that ended East Germany without a shot.

Four days in Seville: a bell tower that was built as a minaret

A Moorish palace still in use, the biggest Gothic church in Europe, and a city that does most of its living after nine at night.

Ten days in Rajasthan: a desert that never stopped showing off

Four Rajput cities in ten days, each a different colour and each built to be looked at. Hill forts above Jaipur, a pilgrim lake at Pushkar, the blue lanes under Mehrangarh, and three nights on the water in Udaipur.

Jaipur → Pushkar → Jodhpur → Udaipur

Three days in Hiroshima: the park first, the island second, and the trip ends well

Hiroshima in two nights: an afternoon in the Peace Memorial Park, a full day on Miyajima for Itsukushima Shrine and Mount Misen, and a last morning at Shukkeien and Okonomi-mura.

Seventeen days across the Alps: from a French lake to a Roman arena, the slow way over the top

A crossing rather than a base: a Savoyard lake town, the Swiss riviera, two car-free villages under some of the biggest rock faces in Europe, and a landing in Roman Italy.

Annecy → Montreux → Wengen → Zermatt → Verona

Three days in Sapporo: the least Japanese-looking city in Japan, and the best fed

Hokkaido's capital, laid out on a grid by foreign advisers in the 1870s, buried in snow for four months a year and eating better than anywhere else in Japan.

Three days in Zagreb: the best small museum in Croatia

An Austro-Hungarian city of coffee, trams and parks, with an upper town of gaslit lanes on the hill and no queue for anything.

Four days in Nairobi: the safari starts before you leave town

Most people change planes here and go straight to the Mara. Four days is enough to find out that the lions, the elephants and the best museum in East Africa are all inside the city limits.

Four days in Reykjavik: a capital of 140,000 holding two thirds of a country

A capital small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes, with the country's most famous waterfall and geyser a morning's drive east.

Three days in Tampere: a factory town that turned its chimneys into museums and kept the saunas

Finland's third city sits on a narrow neck of land between two lakes, with an eighteen metre drop of rapids running through the middle of it that powered the country's industrial revolution and left a centre of red brick mills now full of museums, cinemas and restaurants.

Eleven days in Romania: the country everyone flies over, done by train

Romania is bigger than the UK and almost nobody spends more than a long weekend in it. Eleven days and one railway line take you from a communist capital through the Carpathians to three Saxon and Hungarian towns, with four castles and a salt mine on the way.

Bucharest → Brașov → Sibiu → Cluj-Napoca

Four days in Bologna: the city that has never heard of spaghetti bolognese

Arcades you can cross the city under in the rain, an anatomy lecture theatre carved out of spruce, a day of gold mosaics in Ravenna, and the best eating in Italy.

Four days in Glasgow: rougher than Edinburgh, and far better company

Victorian shipping money spent on art and sandstone, four world class museums that charge nothing, and the best night out in Scotland.

Four days in Perth: nobody gets here by accident

The most isolated big city on earth, on the wrong side of a continent, with an Indian Ocean sunset every evening and a port town down the river that has kept its 1890s streets intact.

Four days in Tel Aviv: a hundred years old, and out on the beach by four

Three nights is enough for the White City, a full day in Jaffa, a market morning and a Florentin evening, with time in the sea on every one of them.

Fourteen days in colonial Brazil: where the gold went, and who paid for it

The route Brazilian gold took to the sea, then north to the ports it was traded through: cobbled Paraty, the baroque hill towns of Minas, and two of the oldest cities in the Americas.

Paraty → Ouro Preto → Belo Horizonte → Salvador → Recife

Four days in Hanoi: a thousand-year-old capital, all of it out on the street

Three nights in Hanoi, arranged so the outdoor sights happen before the traffic and the heat, and the museums fill the afternoons.

Three days in Portland: a city that put a bookshop and a forest at its centre

Two nights in a small, green, contrarian city where the best things are a garden, a bookshop and whatever is coming out of a food cart.

Four days in Valencia: the city moved its river and made a park of the bed

A Mediterranean city that emptied its river, filled the bed with parkland, and put a white science city at the end of it.

Seventeen days from Baku to Yerevan: the long way round, because there is no short one

Seventeen days across the three South Caucasus countries, from the Caspian at Baku through the mountains and the vineyards to Yerevan under Ararat.

Baku → Quba → Shamakhi → Sighnaghi → Tbilisi → Alaverdi → Yerevan

Three days in Alexandria: an ancient city you visit by going down

Egypt's second city, and the least Egyptian-looking place in the country: sea, fish restaurants, Greek and Roman ruins in the middle of downtown, and a fortress standing on the stones of the lighthouse.

Four days in Brisbane: the city Australians move to for the weather

Australia's third city, subtropical and unbothered, built on a river that loops back on itself, with winter days in the mid twenties and public transport that costs fifty cents a ride.

Four days in Gdańsk: where the war began and communism ended

A Hanseatic port that spent most of its history speaking German, was flattened in 1945, rebuilt as a Polish city, and then produced the shipyard strike that brought down a government.

Three days in Nagasaki: the one harbour Japan kept open when it shut the world out

A steep harbour city that spent two centuries as Japan's only door to the outside world, and forty seconds in 1945 as its second atomic target.

Three days in Santa Fe: adobe, altitude and the only question that matters is red or green

Two nights at 7,000 feet in the oldest state capital in the United States, where a building code has kept everything the colour of the ground since 1957.

Four days in Nuremberg: the empire's favourite city, and the Nazis' too

A medieval imperial city that the Nazis took as their stage set, was bombed almost flat, rebuilt itself and then chose to explain the whole thing rather than bury it.

Four days in Riga: the Baltic city that got rich first and spent it on facades

Latvia's capital is the biggest city in the Baltic states, with a World Heritage centre where a third of the buildings are Art Nouveau, a medieval merchant quarter on the river, and a covered market built out of surplus Zeppelin hangars.

Four days in Yerevan: a pink city staring at a mountain it cannot reach

Founded twenty nine years before Rome, rebuilt in pink stone in the 1920s, and pointed the whole time at a mountain on the wrong side of a closed border.

Fifteen days in southern Mexico: the half of the country that does not do beaches

Two thousand kilometres of overland travel through the five southern states, from a colonial city built on tiles to the Yucatán, taking in four Maya capitals, one Zapotec one and the best food in Mexico.

Puebla → Oaxaca (city) → San Cristóbal de las Casas → Palenque → Mérida (Mexico)

Four days in Pretoria: two monuments on facing hills, still not speaking

Three nights, nine places, and a capital small enough to see properly without ever feeling rushed.

Ten days in Thailand: two short flights instead of a week on the road

The standard first trip to Thailand, done properly: the capital, the northern hills and the limestone coast, three nights each, with nothing done twice.

Bangkok → Chiang Mai → Ao Nang

Three days in The Hague: a seat of government with a beach on the tram line

A three day trip to The Hague: Vermeer and Rembrandt in a small palace, a 19th century panorama of a beach you then walk on, and a morning of impossible staircases.

Eight days in Nepal: the two halves of the country, and the road between them

Seven nights split between a medieval city and a mountain lake: carved wood, butter lamps and cremation ghats at one end, eight thousand metre peaks at the other.

Kathmandu → Pokhara → Kathmandu

Four days in Adelaide: a city that put a park all the way round itself

One square mile of streets, ringed on all four sides by parkland, surveyed in 1837 by a dying man who got it exactly right, with wine country half an hour away in three directions.

Four days in Antalya: two Roman cities that would be famous in Italy

Three nights in the old town is enough to see the two great Roman sites on this coast properly, with the afternoons kept for the harbour and the sea.

Six days in Wallonia: Three citadels on one river, and hardly a visitor on it

A six day trip down the Meuse through French-speaking Belgium: two nights in Liege, two in Namur below its citadel, and one in Dinant under the cliff.

Liège → Namur → Dinant

Ten days in Morocco: four medinas, one railway line

The classic north-south run through Morocco on the railway that already connects it: two great medinas, the capital in between, and the Mediterranean at the end.

Marrakech → Rabat → Fez → Tangier

Three days in Bursa: where the Ottomans started, and where they are buried

Two nights is enough for the mosques and tombs the early sultans built, a morning up at the old village on Uludağ's slopes, and a proper go at the food.

Four days in Johannesburg: where South Africa actually happened

Three nights, ten places, and the clearest four days you can spend on how this country got here.

Ten days in Himachal Pradesh: the empire's summer capital, and the Dalai Lama's

Three Himalayan towns and the roads between them. Shimla, where the British ran India every summer, Manali under the snow passes, and McLeod Ganj, where the Tibetan government has been in exile since 1960.

Shimla → Manali → Dharamsala

Twelve days in Taipei and Okinawa: from the best night markets in Asia to the clearest water in Japan

Taipei is closer to the southern Japanese islands than Tokyo is, and an hour in the air joins a great food city to the best beaches in the country.

Taipei → Ishigaki → Naha

Eight days in Armenia: the first Christian country, and it never lets you forget it

A small, high, stony country that adopted Christianity in 301 and has been carving the evidence into cliffs ever since.

Yerevan → Gyumri → Dilijan

Eight days in colonial Mexico: four highland cities where the empire came apart

A loop through the highland cities that silver built and that Spanish rule ended in: a mining town in a ravine, a preserved hill town, the city where the plot was hatched and an emperor shot, and a state capital where everything is cut from the same pink stone.

Guanajuato → San Miguel de Allende → Querétaro → Morelia

Eight days in the Canadian Rockies: the lakes really are that colour

Seven nights driving from Calgary through Banff and Jasper national parks, with the Icefields Parkway in the middle and glacier-fed lakes at both ends of it.

Calgary → Banff → Jasper

Eight days in Yunnan: uphill from the flower markets to the snow line

Seven nights climbing northwest through Yunnan by train, from a mild provincial capital to a Bai town on a lake to a Naxi one under a 5,596 metre massif.

Kunming → Dali → Lijiang

Four days in Kuala Lumpur: everything Singapore has, for a third of the price

A four day city break through KL's Malay, Chinese and Indian quarters, its colonial core and the limestone caves on its northern edge.

Four days in Lima: adobe pyramids between the apartment blocks

A four day plan for Peru's capital that treats it as a destination rather than a layover, with the historic centre, two clifftop districts and the pre-Inca sites in and around the city.

Four days in Wrocław: the city that changed countries, and came out cheerful

Wrocław was Breslau until 1945, was ruined in a siege, and was then refilled with Poles expelled from the other end of the country, who brought their university and a painting with them.

Ten days in the western Balkans: Ottoman Bosnia first, then Venetian water

Four towns and three borders in a straight line: an Ottoman capital in a mountain bowl, a rebuilt bridge, a walled republic and a bay that looks like a fjord and is not one.

Sarajevo → Mostar → Dubrovnik → Kotor

Three days in Turku: Finland's oldest city, demoted and much improved by it

Turku was Finland's capital until Russia took it away in 1812, burned almost to the ground in 1827, and rebuilt itself along a river that runs from a thirteenth century cathedral at one end to a medieval castle at the other.

Ten days in Kerala: India at half the speed and twice the green

Kerala in three parts, in the order the land goes: a spice port with five hundred years of foreign churches, tea country at 1,600 metres, and two nights on the water at the end.

Kochi → Munnar → Alappuzha

Three days in Heidelberg: a castle nobody rebuilt, above a university older than the country

A red sandstone ruin on a wooded hill, a strip of old town along the Neckar underneath it, and the oldest university in Germany still filling the bars.

Three days in Kobe: a foreign port under a mountain, with Himeji Castle down the line

A cosmopolitan port wedged into a strip between Mount Rokko and the sea, with Japan's most beautiful castle forty minutes down the tracks.

Three days in Verona: the balcony is fake and the amphitheatre still sells out

A pink marble city inside a loop of river, small enough to walk, with one of the best surviving Roman buildings anywhere still in weekly use.

Four days in Hyderabad: the city that sold the world its diamonds

Four days in the old Deccan capital: a sultanate that traded the world's only diamonds, a dynasty of Nizams who became the richest men alive, and an old city that still eats and shops the way it did.

Ten days in Ireland: the further west you drive, the better it gets

Nine nights and one loop: Dublin on foot, the Kerry mountains by pony and boat, the Cliffs of Moher on the drive north, and Connemara out of Galway.

Dublin → Killarney → Galway

Three days in Granada: the last Moorish city in Spain, and its conquerors are buried in it

One of the great buildings of the world, a hillside of whitewashed lanes facing it, and a city where the tapas still come free with the drink.

Three days in Reims: France crowned its kings here, and keeps its champagne underneath

The cathedral where French kings were made, a rebuilt Art Deco city around it, and miles of Roman chalk galleries under the southern suburbs.

Twelve days in Slovenia and Croatia: green water first, blue water after

A small alpine capital, a canyon of terraced lakes, and three Adriatic towns built by Rome and Venice, done end to end on public transport.

Ljubljana → Plitvice Lakes National Park → Zadar → Split → Dubrovnik

Five days on Easter Island: the loneliest place people ever chose to live

A five day plan for Rapa Nui, worked around a park ticket that admits you to the two headline sites once each, with the east coast, the crater rim, the northwest and Hanga Roa itself.

Four days in Antwerp: a port city that dresses better than you do

A four day Antwerp trip that starts on the Grote Markt, spends a day among the docks, a day with Rubens and the Flemish masters, and a last morning at the Plantin-Moretus and the diamond quarter.

Four days in Bilbao: a shipbuilding town that bet everything on one building, and won

The biggest city in the Basque Country: a river that used to be full of ore, a titanium museum that changed its mind about itself, and the best bar food in Spain.

Four days in Catania: a black city built out of the lava that buried it

Sicily's second city, rebuilt in black and white stone after the volcano and the earthquake, with a mountain on the skyline and breakfast made of ice.

Seven days on Vancouver Island: an English tea room at one end, a rainforest with surf at the other

Six nights crossing from the tidiest city in Canada to the wettest coast in it, with orcas in the strait at one end and Pacific swell breaking on a rainforest beach at the other.

Victoria (British Columbia) → Tofino

Ten days in Iceland: one road, 1,332 km, the whole way round

Route 1 all the way round, anticlockwise, with the nights placed so no single day is more than six hours behind the wheel.

Reykjavík → Vík í Mýrdal → Höfn → Mývatn → Akureyri → Reykjavík

Three days in Quebec City: still walled, still French, four hundred years on

Two nights in the only city north of Mexico that still has its walls, a French fortress town of seven hundred thousand people wrapped around a seventeenth century core you can walk across in fifteen minutes.

Three days in Rotterdam: the Dutch city with no old town

A three day Rotterdam trip: modern architecture by the Oude Haven, a day on and beside the water, and a short last morning at the two monuments to the 1940 bombardment.

Twenty-one days from Bangkok to Hanoi: everything gets slower and better the further north you go

Eight stops across three countries, mostly by train and bus, from the loudest city in Southeast Asia to one of the quietest and back out again.

Bangkok → Ayutthaya → Chiang Mai → Chiang Rai → Luang Prabang → Vang Vieng → Vientiane → Hanoi

Four days in Avignon: a papal fortress with Roman Provence half an hour away in every direction

A walled town that belonged to the popes rather than to France, used the way it works best: half the trip inside the ramparts and half out in Roman Provence.

Four days in Málaga: Picasso's home town, and it only recently started saying so

The city the Costa del Sol flies into and most people drive straight out of: a Moorish citadel, a half built cathedral, three good art museums and grilled sardines on the beach.

Four days in Trabzon: the last Greek empire, and a monastery stuck to a cliff

Three nights is enough for the two great day trips inland, the Byzantine churches in town, and a proper go at Black Sea food.

Six days in the Swiss Alps: Zermatt to St. Moritz, and eight hours of train in between

A short high-altitude trip between the two most famous mountain resorts in Switzerland, joined by the slow panoramic train that runs the whole width of the Alps.

Zermatt → St. Moritz

Three days in Calgary: a cattle town that struck oil and never took the hat off

Two nights in the third largest city in Canada, a young, rich, flat-out prairie town an hour from the Rocky Mountains that most visitors treat as an airport and should not.

Three days in Fukuoka: a ramen city nearer Seoul than Tokyo

Fukuoka in two nights: a temple walk through old Hakata, a morning on the castle hill and the lake below it, an evening at the riverside food stalls, and Dazaifu Tenmangu before you fly.

Three days in Trieste: Vienna's seaport, left behind at the edge of Italy

The Austro-Hungarian empire's only port, stranded in Italy after 1918, with the best coffee houses in the country and a castle on a headland.

Five days in the Red Centre: the climb is shut, and the walk round the bottom is better anyway

Two towns and a rock in the dead middle of a continent, a full day's drive from anywhere at all, on country the Arrernte and Anangu people have lived on for tens of thousands of years.

Alice Springs → Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park

Four days in Bergen: it rains most days, and it is still the best looking city in Norway

Norway's second city sits on a bay ringed by mountains, keeps a German merchant quarter of wooden warehouses that has burnt down and been rebuilt for six centuries, and gets around two hundred and thirty days of rain a year.

Four days in Xi'an: a buried army, and a Muslim quarter as old as the Silk Road

Four days covers the terracotta warriors properly, a circuit of the largest surviving city wall in China, and enough evenings in the Hui quarter to eat your way through it.

Ten days on New Zealand's North Island: the half of the country the postcards skip

A drive down the spine of the North Island from the biggest Polynesian city on earth, through the geothermal country the Te Arawa people have shown visitors since the 1870s, to the capital at the bottom.

Auckland → Rotorua → Taupō → Wellington

Three days in Nanjing: the capital China keeps coming back to

Two nights for a Ming emperor's tomb, a republican one, an evening on the Qinhuai, and the memorial that no visit to this city should skip.

Four days in Manila: everybody warns you about it, and everybody is half wrong

Three nights in the Philippine capital: the Spanish walled city, the free national museums, Binondo, and the churches that survived 1945.

Three days in Bergamo: everybody lands here for Milan and nobody looks up at the hill

A walled medieval town on a hill above a modern one, five kilometres from an airport most of Europe uses without ever going into the city.

Fifteen days from Lima to the Atacama: you climb on day three and never come down

Sea level for two days, then twelve above three thousand metres: Inca stonework in Cusco, a capital that runs on cable cars, the largest salt flat on earth, and the driest desert going.

Lima → Cuzco → La Paz → Uyuni → San Pedro de Atacama

Three days in Basel: the city that voted to buy its Picassos

Two nights in a small Swiss city on the German and French border that spends its pharmaceutical money on art and keeps most of it within a tram ride of the Rhine.

Three days in Cagliari: the flamingos nest between the airport and the beach

Sardinia's capital on five limestone hills, with a walled citadel on top, a lagoon of flamingos behind it and eight kilometres of sand twenty minutes away.

Three days in Konya: Rumi is buried here, and he still runs the town

Two nights covers the shrine, the Seljuk buildings around the hill, an evening at the sema and a morning out at Sille.

Three days in Ljubljana: one architect's city, with the cars taken out

A pedestrianised Habsburg capital on a green river, small enough to walk end to end, with a castle above it and no queue for anything.

Three days in Siena: the city that lost to Florence and kept its Middle Ages

A brick city on three ridges that stopped growing in 1348 and therefore still looks like a fourteenth century painting of itself.

Five days in Guilin and Yangshuo: down the river on the back of the banknote

Four nights either side of the boat trip everyone comes for, with time in Guilin for the city peaks and time in Yangshuo to cycle the valley rather than photograph it from a deck.

Guilin → Yangshuo

Four days in Dubai: the tallest building on earth, and the creek it grew out of

A creek-side trading town that turned itself into a skyline in fifty years, and is a far better city than the shopping-and-brunch caricature suggests.

Four days in Wellington: the wind is the price, and it is worth paying

The world's windiest city and the southernmost capital on earth, squeezed onto a few hundred hectares of flat land between a harbour and a ring of hills, with a national museum that costs nothing.

Three days in Perugia: a pope buried a whole neighbourhood and the city walks through it

A hill town with an Etruscan gate, a medieval fountain, a subterranean sixteenth century fortress, and the best painting in Umbria at the top of the stairs.

Three days in Thessaloniki: Byzantine churches wedged into an interwar grid

Two nights covering the Roman core, the Ottoman upper town and the sea front, in a city that rewards walking and eats better than Athens.

Three days in Varanasi: the city that has never tried to be pleasant

Three days in a city Hindus have been dying in on purpose for two and a half thousand years. Eighty-odd sets of steps down to the Ganges, two cremation grounds that never go out, and a temple at the middle of it all.

Three days in Harbin: they cut the river into blocks and build a city out of it

Two nights in the coldest big city in China, for an ice metropolis built from the frozen river, a Russian high street and the museum nobody enjoys and everybody should see.

Three days in Poznań: the city Poland began in, and the one everybody skips

Poland's first cathedral is here, the first Polish rulers are buried in it, and almost every visitor to Poland goes straight past on the Berlin to Warsaw line without getting off.

Eleven days in Malaysia: up the west coast by train, eating the whole way

Four west coast cities in eleven days, south to north, linked by the ETS railway: Dutch Malacca, the capital, the tin town of Ipoh, and George Town.

Malacca → Kuala Lumpur → Ipoh → George Town (Malaysia)

Four days in Chengdu: pandas before breakfast, then nowhere to be all afternoon

Four days for the pandas at the right hour, a Three Kingdoms temple, an afternoon in a park teahouse and as much Sichuan food as you can stand.

Four days in Hobart: a mountain above the town, and a gambler's museum under the ground

Australia's second oldest city, wedged between a 1,270 metre mountain and a deep water river, built by convicts for whalers and now the last port before Antarctica.

Nine days in Andalusia and the Rif: Africa is closer than Madrid

Sherry and horses in Jerez, a Roman town on a beach at Tarifa, then across the Strait of Gibraltar by ferry into Tangier and up the mountain road to Chefchaouen.

Jerez de la Frontera → Tarifa → Tangier → Chefchaouen

Six days in Newfoundland: it was its own country until 1949 and has not entirely got over it

Five nights on the far eastern edge of North America, starting in the oldest city on the continent and ending on a headland where an Italian sailing for England probably made landfall in 1497.

St. John's → Bonavista

Three days in Freiburg: closer to Basel than to Berlin, in every sense

The warmest city in Germany, a Gothic tower that survived the night the town did not, water channels running down every street, and the Black Forest at the end of the tram line.

Three days in Nha Trang: a resort town that never stopped being a Vietnamese city

Two nights on Vietnam's best known stretch of city beach, with the seventh-century Cham towers, the hot springs and the fishing quarter across the Cai river.

Three days in Salzburg: an Italian city that ended up in the Alps

A baroque town built by prince-archbishops who wanted their own Rome, squeezed between two wooded crags with a fortress on one of them and the Alps behind.

Four days in Gothenburg: Sweden's second city, and the one that talks to strangers

A port at the mouth of the Gota river, laid out by Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century, industrial, informal, and the place the rest of Sweden goes for seafood and an easier conversation.

Seven days in Transylvania: three walled towns, and almost no Dracula

Transylvania is not a country and never was: it is a plateau ringed by the Carpathians that Hungarians, Germans and Romanians all built towns in. Three of those towns, six nights and two train rides give you the whole argument, and Bucharest is not involved.

Cluj-Napoca → Sighișoara → Brașov

Ten days in Peru: sea level to 3,400 metres, one step at a time

Ten days across Peru that gain height gradually rather than all at once: sea level in Lima, then Arequipa at 2,300 metres, then Cusco, the Sacred Valley and a night below Machu Picchu.

Lima → Arequipa → Cuzco → Aguas Calientes

Three days in Aix-en-Provence: a rich little town under plane trees, where Cezanne kept going home

Provence at its most comfortable: a small parliamentary town of ochre houses, thermal water and market mornings, in three unhurried days on foot.

Three days in Bolzano: the iceman is kept at minus six degrees just off the main square

An Alpine market town with German street signs, Italian coffee, the best preserved prehistoric body in the world, and three cable cars out of the valley.

Three days in Ghent: a medieval city that never turned into a museum

A three day Ghent trip built around van Eyck and the belfry, a full day between the castle and the Friday market, and the city museum on the way back to the train.

Three days in Hangzhou: the lake every Chinese poet got to first

Two nights is enough to walk the lake properly, spend a morning at the largest temple in the region, and drink Longjing tea on the hill it grows on.

Eight days in Slovenia: a country you can cross before lunch

Ljubljana, Bled and Piran in one week: a riverside capital, the Julian Alps, an underground canyon and a swim in the Adriatic.

Ljubljana → Bled → Piran

Four days in Montevideo: a capital that walks its waterfront with a thermos under one arm

Uruguay's quiet, low-rise capital on the north bank of the Plata, with a 22-kilometre seafront and the country's entire cultural life in it.

Four days in Nicosia: Europe's last divided capital, crossed on foot down a shopping street

A four day walking plan for Nicosia, covering the old town inside the Venetian walls, the island's great archaeological museum, and a full day across the Green Line in the north.

Ten days in the Philippines: skip the islands once and see the country instead

Three Philippine cities in ten days: the Spanish capital, the port where Magellan landed in 1521, and the sugar town nobody visits, linked by two flights.

Manila → Cebu City → Iloilo City

Three days in Lausanne: the same lake as Geneva, and twenty years younger

Two nights in a student city stacked up a hillside above Lake Geneva, with a lakeside day trip east to Vevey, Montreux and the most visited castle in Switzerland.

Three days in Syracuse: a cathedral built inside a Greek temple

The city that rivalled Athens, now a limestone island of baroque streets with the Doric columns of a temple standing in its cathedral walls.

Three days on Lake Como: everything worth seeing faces the water, so stay on the boat

A deep glacial lake with gardens on every headland, a cathedral that took four centuries, and a boat timetable that is the only itinerary you need.

Ten days in Uzbekistan: the greatest buildings in Central Asia, and room to look at them

Four oasis cities strung along the old Silk Road, each one a short train ride from the last, and between them the finest tilework anywhere in the Islamic world.

Tashkent → Samarkand → Bukhara → Khiva

Three days in Graz: warm, young, and left off everybody's Austria trip

Austria's second city: a Renaissance old town under a wooded crag, thirty thousand students, pumpkin seed oil on everything, and almost no visitors.

Three days in Toledo: the capital Spain walked away from, and left standing

A walled city on a granite loop of the Tagus that lost the royal court in the sixteenth century, kept its mosques, synagogues and churches, and has been quiet ever since.