India
Alleppey
Nine hundred kilometres of backwater canals where the ferry, the market and your bedroom all float.
The houseboat moves at walking pace, palms sliding past on both sides — a woman washing clothes on a stone step, a fisherman working a Chinese dip net off the embankment. The backwaters are not a tourist attraction. They are a transport network and a way of life that happens to be serene.
Alleppey — Alappuzha — is the gateway to a backwater labyrinth of canals, rivers, lakes and inlets stretching over 900 kilometres through coconut palm, coir workshop and village temple country. The kettuvallam houseboats began as rice barges and now carry bedrooms, kitchens and open upper decks, a dedicated cook buying fish from canoe-side vendors as you go. Each August, Punnamada Lake stages the Nehru Trophy: hundred-foot chundan vallams, more than a hundred oarsmen apiece, racing flat out.
Solo
Skip the big boat — ride the public ferry lines to see the canals as transport, then a homestay ashore.
Couple
Book a kettuvallam for one night — dinner cooked aboard, moored quiet by a paddy bund.
Family
Time it for the second Saturday of August and give the children the snake-boat race.
- The kettuvallam is a rice barge reborn — bedroom, kitchen and deck moving at walking pace.
- The canals are working water: ferries, coir, temples and school runs all afloat.
- Karimeen pollichathu — pearl spot grilled in banana leaf — comes off the houseboat's own stove.
- The Nehru Trophy fills Punnamada Lake each August with hundred-foot snake boats at full sprint.
Karimeen pollichathu — pearl spot marinated in red masala and grilled shut in banana leaf.
Toddy-shop lunches run tapioca with fish curry, eaten off banana leaves beside the canal.
Praia do Rosa
Brazil
Right whales leave Antarctica to calve in this bay, and you watch from the headland.
Puerto Deseado
Argentina
Tiny black-and-white dolphins spin through a flooded river canyon meeting the open sea.
Cape Agulhas
South Africa
Africa ends in low fynbos, shipwreck water and a red-striped lighthouse.
Procida
Italy
Pastel houses stacked above a fishing harbour that no car can reach.
Rann of Kutch
India
A salt marsh stretching to the horizon that turns blinding white under the full moon.
Kalpa
India
Apple orchards clinging to steep ridges directly facing the razor-sharp granite of the Kinnaur Kailash.
Mechuka
India
Wild horses grazing a high valley closed to outsiders until 2005, pines climbing to snow.