The Itinerary North America
Long-haul trips that need real lead time.
Canada
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Québec in 7 days: Montréal, Québec City and the whales at Tadoussac
Montréal's neighbourhoods, the only walled city north of Mexico, then north along the St Lawrence to where belugas live year round. Which season you pick changes the trip completely — and winter tyres are the law, not a suggestion.
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Canada in 8 days: the Canadian Rockies
Lakes the colour of toothpaste ads, a highway ranked among Earth's great drives, a glacier you stand on before lunch — Calgary to Banff to Jasper and back, with the visa timeline that needs months (or the eTA shortcut for US-visa holders), the Moraine Lake shuttle war, and 2026's free-entry summer decoded.
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USA and Canada in 12 days: Banff, the Icefields Parkway, Jasper and Glacier
Lakes the colour of antifreeze, a 230km parkway along the spine of the continent with glaciers hanging over it, and then south across the 49th parallel to a park that calls itself the Crown of the Continent.
United States
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Eastern USA and Canada in 13 days: New York, Niagara, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec
New York and Boston on one side, Toronto and the French-speaking cities on the other, with Niagara at the hinge. Thirteen days of cities you can walk, trains and short flights between them, and a border crossing that changes the language without changing the continent.
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Florida with kids in 8 days: Orlando, the Space Coast and the Gulf
Three days of theme parks, a rocket, a Gulf beach to recover on, an airboat through the Everglades and out from Miami. Date-based ticket pricing, resort fees, the afternoon thunderstorm, and why the second half of this trip matters more than the first.
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US national parks in 10 days: Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon
The Southwest loop that fits in ten days: Zion's canyon floor, Bryce's hoodoos at sunrise, Antelope and Horseshoe Bend at Page, and the Grand Canyon's South Rim. The permit lotteries, the shuttle rules and the altitude nobody warns you about.
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California road trip: Pacific Coast Highway and Yosemite in 10 days
The greatest drive in America, finally whole again: Highway 1 through Big Sur reopened end-to-end in January 2026 after three years of landslides. LA to San Francisco the long way — Malibu, Hearst Castle, McWay Falls, Bixby Bridge — then inland to Yosemite's granite cathedral. Ten days, one rental car, every cliché earned.
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USA in 10 days: New York, Washington DC and Niagara Falls
The East Coast classic without a car: five New York days from the Statue of Liberty to a Broadway night, the train down to Washington's free museum mile, then a short flight to stand at the brink of Niagara — plus the honest maths on the visa that now costs $435.
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USA West in 10 days: Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco
The second America: Hollywood and the Pacific, the neon absurdity of Las Vegas with the Grand Canyon and Antelope Canyon a day-tour away, then San Francisco's fog, cable cars and Alcatraz — three flights, no rental car, and the honest maths on resort fees and 4 a.m. canyon buses.
Mexico and Central America
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Belize in 8 days: the barrier reef, the ATM cave and the Cayo
The only English-speaking country in Central America, with the second largest barrier reef on earth off one coast and a Maya sacrificial cave inland that you swim into and walk through barefoot, past skeletons left where they fell twelve centuries ago.
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Costa Rica in 10 days: Arenal, Monteverde and the Pacific
A volcano, a cloud forest and a beach with monkeys in the trees above it, linked by the jeep-boat-jeep crossing that saves half a day — with the honest version of the driving, the two seasons that change everything, and why the famous national park is worth the ticket and the queue.
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Costa Rica and Panama in 12 days: Arenal, Monteverde, Boquete and the Canal
Two countries on the same isthmus that went opposite ways — one sold its forests to the world as national parks, the other cut itself in half for shipping. Quetzals and hanging bridges, then ships climbing a staircase of locks.
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El Salvador in 6 days: volcanoes, coffee towns and surf
A turquoise crater lake at the top of a two-hour climb, a road of coffee towns that puts its food on the street every weekend, a Maya farming village buried by ash and preserved like Pompeii, and black-sand surf beaches an hour from the capital.
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Guatemala in 10 days: Antigua, Lake Atitlán and Tikal
The cultural heart of Central America: a colonial city under three volcanoes, a lake ringed by Maya villages where the language changes shore to shore, and temples rising out of jungle canopy at dawn — with the honest brief on shuttles, the volcano hike worth doing, and the safety advice that is neither alarmist nor naive.
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Honduras in 7 days: Copán's Maya city and Roatán's reef
The most finely carved city the Maya ever built, with a stairway of 2,200 glyphs that is the longest Maya text in existence — and, two hours away by air, an island sitting on the second-largest barrier reef on earth.
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Oaxaca and the Pacific coast in 9 days: markets, mezcal and Mazunte
Four days in Oaxaca for the markets, the mole and the mezcal villages, then over the sierra to a Pacific coast that still has no big resorts. The mountain road that decides how you get there, when the turtles come ashore, and why Día de Muertos doubles every price.
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Mexico in 10 days: Mexico City and the Yucatán
The two Mexicos in one trip: the 22-million-person capital of Aztec ruins, Frida's blue house and the world's best street tacos, then the Maya coast — Chichén Itzá at opening time, jungle cenotes, Tulum's clifftop ruins over turquoise water. Plus the visa rule worth knowing: a valid US, UK or Schengen visa gets you in without a Mexican one.
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Mundo Maya in 14 days: Tikal, Copán and the Belize barrier reef
Temples above the rainforest canopy, the finest carved hieroglyphs in the Americas, a cave the Maya used for sacrifice that still holds the bones — and then the second-largest barrier reef on earth, because the same people traded along it.
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Nicaragua in 7 days: Granada, León and Ometepe
A crater with a lava lake you can stand above after dark, an island made of two volcanoes rising out of a freshwater lake, a cathedral roof you walk barefoot across, and a cinder cone people ride down on a plank.
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Panama in 9 days: the Canal, Bocas del Toro and San Blas
A country narrow enough to see both oceans in a day, and two island groups that could not be less alike: ships climbing through locks between the Atlantic and Pacific, an archipelago of 365 islands run by the Guna themselves, and a Caribbean backpacker chain with reefs — with the boat realities and the US dollar that is already in your wallet.
The Caribbean
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Antigua and Barbuda in 7 days: Nelson's Dockyard, Shirley Heights and pink sand
The only working Georgian dockyard left anywhere, a Sunday-night hilltop party that has run for decades, and a sister island with seventeen miles of pink sand and almost nobody on it.
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Bahamas in 8 days: the Exumas, Dean's Blue Hole and pink sand
Seven hundred islands on a shallow carbonate bank that turns the sea every shade of blue there is, with a 200-metre sinkhole free-divers train in, three miles of pink sand, and the swimming pigs worth thinking twice about.
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Barbados in 7 days: Bathsheba's surf, the Garrison and the oldest rum
A flat coral island with a calm Caribbean side and a wild Atlantic one, a UNESCO garrison town where Washington once stayed, and distilleries with a claim to the oldest commercial rum anywhere.
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Cuba in 9 days: Havana, Viñales and Trinidad
A country that runs on cash you bring with you: Havana's crumbling grandeur and live son in the plazas, tobacco valleys worked by ox and hand, and a colonial town frozen in the 1850s — plus the honest brief on cards that will not work, shortages that are real, and why casas particulares beat hotels on every measure.
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Dominica in 8 days: the Boiling Lake, sperm whales and the Waitukubuli trail
The Caribbean island with almost no beaches and the best hiking in the region — a flooded fumarole that boils, a 115-mile trail the length of the country, and the only place on earth where sperm whales live all year.
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Dominican Republic in 9 days: Santo Domingo, Samaná and the mountains
The Caribbean's oldest European city and its highest mountains in one country: the first cathedral in the Americas, humpback whales calving in Samaná bay between January and March, a 27-waterfall river you jump down, and beaches that earned the resorts their reputation.
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Grenada in 7 days: the underwater sculptures, nutmeg and Carriacou
An island that still runs on nutmeg, with the first underwater sculpture park ever built, a 1785 distillery powered by a water wheel, and a wreck that divers call the Titanic of the Caribbean.
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Haiti in 7 days: the Citadelle, Jacmel and Cap-Haïtien — and why not now
The first Black republic, holding a mountaintop fortress built against an invasion that never came — described honestly, in a country where gangs control much of the capital and every major government advises against all travel.
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Jamaica in 8 days: Kingston, the Blue Mountains and Port Antonio
The Jamaica that all-inclusives never show you: Trench Town and the Bob Marley house in Kingston, coffee farms at 1,200 metres, a river you raft on a bamboo punt, lagoons the colour of antifreeze on the north-east coast, and a fishing village on the south where almost nobody goes.
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Puerto Rico in 8 days: Old San Juan, El Yunque and the glowing bay
A 500-year-old walled city, the only tropical rainforest in the US national forest system, and a bay on Vieques so dense with bioluminescent plankton that it is the brightest recorded anywhere — every stroke of the paddle lights the water blue.
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Saint Kitts and Nevis in 7 days: Brimstone Hill, the sugar train and Nevis Peak
The smallest country in the Americas, with a hilltop fortress on the UNESCO list, a narrow-gauge sugar railway that still circles the island, and the volcano Alexander Hamilton grew up under.
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Saint Lucia in 7 days: climbing Gros Piton, the drive-in volcano and Marigot Bay
Two forested lava plugs standing 770 metres out of the Caribbean, a collapsed crater you drive into and bathe in, cocoa estates making chocolate where the beans grow — and the honest note on which coast is worth the money.
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Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 8 days: Tobago Cays, Bequia and La Soufrière
A volcano that erupted in 2021 and a string of small islands south of it where the sailing is the point — including a marine park of uninhabited cays protected by a horseshoe reef, with green turtles grazing in the shallows.
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Trinidad and Tobago in 8 days: Carnival, scarlet ibis and the oldest rainforest reserve
Two islands that barely resemble each other — an industrial, Carnival-mad one where the steelpan was invented, and a quiet one with the oldest protected rainforest in the western hemisphere — plus the swamp where ten thousand scarlet ibis come in to roost at dusk.
