The List
International, nature-and-diving first, with the odd city stroll — a mix of marquee bucket-list trips and lowkey under-the-radar ones. Each shows the best month to go, so you can book flights in advance around the right season. The rough arc: dive trips are the anchors (built for the A7C II wide-angle rig), with the mountains and cities slotted into their good-weather windows.
For the Housing
The richest reef on Earth — mantas, coral walls, karst-island split shots. THE wide-angle trip for the A7C II housing. Liveaboards book 6–12 months out.
Manta cleaning stations, big fish, dramatic reefscapes — and dragons + dry-season land parks topside.
Blue Corner shark walls, Jellyfish Lake, WWII wrecks. Pacific big-blue diving at its best.
Permit-limited island wall: turtles everywhere and the barracuda tornado. Base at Mabul or Kapalai.
Pristine remote walls, healthy soft coral, and hardly any other divers.
Wild, current-fed, barely-touched eastern Indonesia. Big pelagic energy.
Giant oceanic mantas, sharks, and curious dolphins. Liveaboard-only big-animal wide-angle.
The plankton feast: manta and whale-shark aggregations. Central atolls dive well year-round.
Whale sharks that gather under fishing platforms, daily and close. Genuinely surreal.
Mountains, Deserts & Ice
On the list for next year. Climb it in the official early-July to early-September season, or shoot the classic snow-capped reflection from Lake Kawaguchi on a clear winter morning. Book the mountain huts early if climbing.
Japan's nature escape: Furano's lavender fields in July, drift ice and powder snow in February. Cool, wide-open, endlessly photogenic — and dodges the July heat down south.
Thousand-year cedar forests dripping in moss — the island that inspired Princess Mononoke. Rainy, primeval, and magical for a photographer.
Korea's finest autumn foliage: granite spires, ridge trails, and mountain temples ablaze in October colour. A hiker's payoff.
Volcanic Hallasan, coastal Olle walking trails, waterfalls and lava tubes. Go spring or autumn to skip the summer monsoon and crowds.
The Himalayan trekking season — clear skies, giant peaks, teahouse trails. Made for your race legs. (Mar–Apr is the spring window.)
Torres del Paine, El Chaltén — the trekking-and-landscape pinnacle, in the Southern summer.
Trail-running and landscape heaven: fjords, alps, glaciers. Autumn (Apr) is quieter and golden.
Two different trips: midnight-sun waterfalls and highlands in summer, aurora and ice caves in winter.
Himalayan high desert in the rain shadow — monasteries, moonscapes, thin bright air.
Alpine lakes, nomad yurts, wide-open trekking — and cheap. One of the most underrated mountain countries.
Two wild trips in one country: the Almaty lakes in summer — Kaindy's sunken forest standing in turquoise water, the Kolsai lakes, and Charyn Canyon's 'mini Grand Canyon' — then the otherworldly Mangystau desert (Bozzhyra's chalk cliffs) in the cooler shoulder months. Vast, empty, and criminally underrated for a landscape shooter.
Impossibly green sea-cliffs and turf-roof villages under moody light. A photographer's fever dream.
Sossusvlei's red dunes, desert-adapted wildlife, and empty roads that go forever.
Alien dragon-blood trees on one of Earth's strangest islands. Takes real effort to reach — that's the point.
Cliffside monasteries, the Tiger's Nest, and low-impact tourism that keeps it pristine.
Worth a Stroll
Temples and koyo foliage (or cherry blossom), world-class transit, easy solo. The ease you'll appreciate after Taipei.
Tbilisi's wine-and-alley strolls plus Kazbegi and Svaneti's mountains. Cheap, warm-hearted, and rising fast.
Samarkand and Bukhara's blue-tiled madrasas. Cities that still feel like walking through history.
The northern loop's rice-terrace mountains, then lantern-lit Hoi An. Nature and city in a single trip.
Your three-country trip: Laos's karst mountains and Kuang Si waterfalls (the nature heart of it), Angkor's jungle temples in Cambodia, and Vietnam's Ha Long Bay. Heritage and landscapes strung along the Mekong — do it in the cool dry season.
Two continents of city, then dawn balloons over Cappadocia's valleys.
Tea country, safari, and temples in the dry south — and the July east-coast surf you already know about.
One home-water exception worth the splurge despite the "done with local" rule: Tubbataha Reefs (liveaboard-only, mid-Mar–mid-Jun) is a world-class wide-angle site most Filipinos never dive — the one PH trip that can't be replicated abroad.