There is a category of travel destination that has earned its reputation so thoroughly that the reputation has become a liability. The over-hyped place that everyone warns you about because of the crowds, the cost, or the distance, and that turns out to be exactly as extraordinary as it was before anyone told you to lower your expectations.
These are the destinations that consistently deliver despite everything working against them.
The Galapagos Islands
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The Galapagos Islands are expensive, logistically complicated, and require a week minimum to see properly. They also contain the most unusual wildlife experience available on earth: animals that evolved in the absence of human predators and therefore have no fear of humans, which means you share the beach with sea lions who treat you as furniture, walk within a metre of blue-footed boobies performing mating dances, and have marine iguanas crawl over your feet on the path.
The snorkelling with sea lions, who play with divers the way dogs play with humans, is the single best underwater wildlife experience I am aware of. The Galapagos fully justify their considerable cost and the planning effort they require.
Bhutan
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Bhutan charges a daily tourist fee that covers accommodation, food, a guide, and transport, which makes it one of the most expensive destinations in Asia on paper. The fee also means that Bhutan receives fewer than 300,000 tourists per year, which is why the Tiger’s Nest Monastery on its cliff face above the Paro Valley can be experienced in relative quiet, the rice paddies and dzong fortresses of the Punakha Valley exist without a tourist infrastructure wrapped around them, and the country functions as a culture rather than a performance of one.
The experience of travelling in a country that has consciously chosen to limit tourism in favour of preserving what it has is unlike any other destination in Asia.
Antarctica
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Antarctica is the last continent and the only one with no indigenous human population, no permanent civilian residents, and no tourism infrastructure beyond the ships that bring the visitors. The landscape is entirely unlike anywhere else on earth: ice shelves, tabular icebergs, penguin colonies, and a silence that is absolute in a way that no inhabited place can produce.
The Drake Passage crossing from Ushuaia to the Antarctic Peninsula takes two days and is one of the roughest stretches of water in the world. Every passenger on those ships has decided that the destination justifies the journey. Almost all of them are right.
Kyoto in Cherry Blossom Season
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Kyoto during sakura season is the most photographed city in Japan and receives millions of visitors in the two-week window when the cherry blossoms are at peak. The temples and gardens are crowded. The Philosopher’s Path has more photographers than philosophers. And the experience is still extraordinary because the blossoms themselves, and the specific Japanese cultural relationship with their transience, produce a beauty that crowds cannot entirely diminish.
Go for dawn at Maruyama Park or walk the bamboo grove at Arashiyama before seven in the morning. The light at that hour and the absence of other people returns the city to something like what it is the rest of the year, with the addition of the blossoms.
