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Every hotel here sells the same photograph: a glass roof, a bed beneath it, green light overhead. What none of them can sell is the light itself. The aurora is weather plus solar activity, and no operator or price bracket changes the odds on a given night; the good ones simply wake you when it appears. So the trip has to work anyway, with the sky as a bonus rather than the itinerary, and Finnish Lapland does that better than almost anywhere. The viewing season runs from the end of summer through to early spring, with the darkest stretch in the depths of winter. Around the turn of the year the sun does not clear the horizon at all in the far north, a period Finns call kaamos, and the days pass in a long blue twilight. Further south around Rovaniemi the darkness is less absolute and daylight returns sooner. The early autumn weeks are already dark enough for the aurora and noticeably cheaper. It pays to compare flights and hotel prices for Rovaniemi and pick your base before your dat...

Think of this park as a single reservoir with taps. High on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska sits the Harding Icefield, a plateau of compacted snow big enough to bury a mountain range with only the peaks showing through, and dozens of glaciers pour off its edges. Some end in valleys. Others reach the sea, where they calve into deep inlets that the ice itself carved. Almost nothing here is reachable by road, so a visit means going by water or on foot, and understanding that one simple piece of plumbing explains everything you will see. The boat is the main event, and it leaves from Seward. Day cruises run out of the small boat harbour into the fjords, where the standard trip idles in front of a tidewater glacier waiting for it to drop ice into the sea, while longer sailings push further to a more remote fjord with fewer boats. The wildlife on the way is the other half of the value: humpbacks and orcas, sea otters on their backs in the kelp, Steller sea lions piled on the rocks and puff...

The southernmost city in the world has become a place people pass through rather than visit. Ships for Antarctica and the South Atlantic leave from its pier, so most travellers arrive the day before boarding, spend an afternoon buying gloves, and see the town again only as a receding line of lights. That is a shame, because the country behind those lights is as good as anything on the voyage ahead. Ushuaia sits pinned between the Beagle Channel and a wall of jagged peaks, with sub-Antarctic beech forest running down to the water and glaciers hanging above the rooftops, and it rewards the days almost nobody gives it. Start with Tierra del Fuego National Park, half an hour west of town, where the Andes finally run out of continent. A coastal trail follows the shore through lenga forest to a bay where the Pan-American Highway simply stops, there are lakes and peat bogs and beaver dams, and the walking ranges from flat strolls to a stiff climb with the whole channel underneath you. The...

Every spring on Baffin Island, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, the frozen sea begins to give way and a boundary forms where solid ice meets open water. Inuit guides call that boundary the line of life, and for a few weeks it is the most concentrated wildlife theatre in the northern hemisphere. Narwhal queue along it in their hundreds, tusks lifting out of black water. Seals haul out on the shelf. Polar bears walk the rim hunting them. Bowhead whales and beluga pass beneath. Then the ice rots, the edge retreats towards the shore and the whole stage simply melts. There is no other wildlife destination on earth with a season this short or this precisely defined. Trips run from late spring into the first week or two of high summer, and the calendar is not negotiable. Too early and the edge has not opened; too late and there is not enough ice left to camp on or travel over. The classic version leaves from Pond Inlet, on the island's northern coast, where visitors ride out for ...

Most national parks let you arrive with a rucksack and decide as you go. This one does not. Every night you sleep inside Torres del Paine has to be reserved in advance, at a named campsite or mountain refuge, and rangers can and do turn back walkers who cannot show a confirmed booking for each stage. The park entry ticket is bought separately and online. Different operators run the accommodation between them, so a multi-day walk means assembling a chain of reservations across separate systems before you ever board a bus, and the popular sites for the southern summer are gone months ahead. It sounds bureaucratic, and it is, but it also means the trails are not trampled, the refuges are not overrun and the wilderness at the far end of South America still feels like wilderness. The reward for all that admin is one of the great walking landscapes anywhere: granite towers rising straight out of the steppe, a glacier calving into a milky lake, guanaco grazing under condors, and the pumas...

Every autumn several hundred polar bears gather along a stretch of Hudson Bay coast in northern Canada, pacing the shoreline until the sea freezes hard enough to carry them out to the seals. The settlement of Churchill sits directly on that waiting ground, and the town is organised around the fact. There is an alert line residents can call, vehicles and porches are commonly left unlocked so anyone caught out can duck inside, and bears that keep returning to the streets are held in a converted building until they can be released or lifted by helicopter back to the coast. No other town on earth is run this way. Three quite different trips share the same address, and the calendar decides which one you get. From the middle of October to the middle of November the bears mass on the coast and the tundra vehicles run daily, which is why that narrow window sells out first. In July and August thousands of beluga whales fill the river estuary, curious enough to come alongside a small boat, w...

A few thousand humans live in the Falkland Islands, and around a million penguins breed there, which settles who the place really belongs to. Five species turn up, four breeding in numbers, and most of the world's black-browed albatross nest on the outer islands, wing to wing along the cliff tops. The landscape is windswept moorland and white sand, something like a piece of Scotland set adrift in the South Atlantic, and the wildlife has never learned to fear people. Two different trips share this destination. Most visitors arrive on an expedition cruise bound for South Georgia and Antarctica, get a day around the capital, and sail on. A much smaller number fly in, and they see the real islands: the main air link runs weekly, so an independent stay tends to be a full week or two rather than a weekend. It pays to compare flights and hotel prices for the Falklands and plan the trip around the flight day rather than the other way round. Stanley is a tiny harbour capital, a line ...

The whole point of the Meteora monasteries was that nobody could reach them. Monks first gained these sandstone summits in central Greece by rope net and retractable ladder, hauling themselves and their supplies up the rock to escape the world below, and for centuries the inaccessibility was the protection. Stairs cut into the stone and a looping road eventually undid it. Six monasteries remain active on their pillars above the plain of Thessaly, and the site carries world heritage status twice over, for the landscape and for the living communities on top of it, which is a rare combination anywhere. Greece travel usually means islands and ferries, and this is the inland answer to it. There is no airport nearby, and the famous rail approach needs care at the moment. The direct line from Athens to Kalabaka has been out of action since severe storm damage, with trains running as far as Palaiofarsalos and a connecting bus covering the rest through Karditsa and Trikala. Repairs are und...

Nobody stamps your passport for the seventh continent, because there is no state to issue one. Antarctica belongs to nobody, issues no visas, and is run in practice by an international treaty framework and by the standards of the tour operators' association working within it. Those standards are strict and enforced. No more than one hundred passengers from a ship may be ashore at once, with a guide for every twenty and a single vessel at a site, and any ship carrying more than five hundred passengers may not land anyone at all. That last rule decides everything. Book a large cruise ship and you see Antarctica from a deck without ever standing on it, while a small expedition vessel lands twice a day. Almost all departures leave from the southernmost city in Argentina, crossing the Drake Passage in about two days each way, or flying over it at a premium on services that cross to an island airstrip and meet the ship there, weather permitting. Argentina asks no visa of most Europea...

In the far south of Uganda's most visited park there is a sector called Ishasha where the lions do something lions are not supposed to do: they climb. Through the heat of the day whole prides drape themselves along the branches of old fig trees, legs hanging, and the explanations on offer, escaping biting flies, catching the breeze, watching the plains for prey, remain arguments rather than answers. It is one of only a handful of places in Africa where the behaviour is routine, and it sets the tone for a park that collects oddities. The equator crosses it. Volcanic explosion craters pock its northern plains, some holding lakes. A gorge full of chimpanzees cuts through its savannah. Very few parks anywhere offer this much strangeness in one boundary. For all that, the single unmissable thing here is a boat. The Kazinga Channel is a wide natural waterway connecting two lakes through the middle of the park, and it holds a hippo population reckoned among the densest anywhere, alon...

There is a park in southern Tanzania that serious safari people mention with a certain protectiveness, the way you might mention a restaurant you hope stays unfashionable. Ruaha is enormous, it is hard to reach, and it receives a fraction of the visitors that fill the northern circuit. The result is the thing money usually cannot buy on safari: sightings without an audience. A pride on a buffalo kill here is often yours alone for as long as you care to stay, and that changes the character of a trip more than any lodge upgrade ever could. The Great Ruaha River is the reason the park works. It runs along the eastern side, and as the dry season advances and the surrounding country empties of water, everything converges on it and on the sand rivers that feed it, where elephants dig down to reach water moving beneath the surface and other animals drink from the holes they leave. Driving the banks in the dry months is the core of the experience. It pays to compare flights and hotels for ...

The two halves of Tsavo are separate national parks with separate gates and separate fees, and the thing that divides them is the road and railway running between Nairobi and the coast. That corridor is not an inconvenience to work around. It is why this park is one of the easiest big wilderness areas in Africa to reach, because the modern train stops at Voi and at Mtito Andei, the gateway towns for the eastern and western park. Not every service calls at both stations, so check which train stops where. Ride it, have a lodge collect you at the platform, and you skip the highway drive entirely. Tsavo East is the flat one: open red country, enormous space, and the elephants that give the place its signature. They are ordinary grey elephants wearing the local soil, which they throw over themselves against heat and insects, and the effect at a distance is a herd the colour of terracotta. Tsavo West is the opposite in almost every way, hilly and volcanic and green, with old lava flows,...

Search for a safari in the Selous and you will still find plenty on offer, but the name now describes something different from what it once did. The northern, photographic portion of that enormous old reserve was gazetted as a national park and renamed after Tanzania's first president, while the southern portion kept the old name and remains hunting country closed to ordinary safari traffic. So a camp advertised as Selous almost certainly sits inside Nyerere National Park. The other change is physical. Stiegler's Gorge, the rocky defile where the Rufiji once narrowed and the only way across was a hand worked cable car left over from old survey work, is now the site of the Julius Nyerere hydropower station, with a very large reservoir behind the wall. It is not a place you visit for wildlife, but it is worth knowing the map has moved. What remains is the reason to go, and it is water: this is the Tanzania safari built on a river rather than on plains. The Rufiji River cuts ...

The map shows two rivers meeting in the southern Kalahari, and the park is built entirely around them, but neither of them flows. The Auob and the Nossob are dry beds of pale sand cutting through red dunes, and the tourist roads simply run along the bottom of them. That is the whole design. Boreholes and windmills feed waterholes down each bed, the trees that survive line the banks, and everything with legs works up and down these two corridors. You are not looking for wildlife across a wilderness here. You are driving a channel and stopping at the taps. The sparseness is what makes it extraordinary. There is very little vegetation to hide behind, so a cheetah on a dune crest is visible from a long way off, and a lion asleep under a camel thorn is unmissable. This is not big five country, since there are no elephant or rhino, and nobody who comes here is disappointed by that. It is predator and raptor country: black-maned Kalahari lion, leopard, cheetah, both hyena species and an ...

The animals here are the same animals that are in Kruger National Park. They cross a boundary that exists only on paper: the fences between the private reserve and the national park came down decades ago and the two now work as one ecosystem. So the question worth asking is why a night in Sabi Sands costs many times what a night in a Kruger rest camp costs, when the wildlife is identical. The answer has nothing to do with the animals and everything to do with the rules that apply to the vehicle you are sitting in. Inside the national park you stay on the road, keep to the speed limit, are back before the gate closes and share every good sighting with whoever arrives. Inside the private reserve, guides drive off road, follow a leopard into the bush, work after dark with a spotlight and radio each other so only a couple of vehicles attend a sighting. That last rule is the one people underestimate, and it is why a sighting feels unhurried. It pays to compare flights and hotels for Sa...