Vietnam
Floating wooden platforms where fishermen feed lobsters by hand in deep, sheltered turquoise bays.
The lobster surfaces in the cage and the fisherman reaches in bare-handed. The wooden platform sways beneath your feet β it's floating, anchored in a turquoise bay, and the lobsters are being raised directly under the living quarters. Dinner is grilled on the raft. The only way back to shore is by boat. The stars are ridiculous.
Binh Hung is a small island off the Cam Ranh coast in Khanh Hoa Province, surrounded by floating lobster farms built on wooden platforms anchored in sheltered turquoise bays. Fishermen raise spiny lobsters in cages suspended beneath the decks of their floating homes, pulling them up to feed by hand several times daily. Overnight stays on the rafts include seafood grilled directly on the platform. The island is a five-minute boat ride from the mainland but feels completely disconnected from it. The water clarity allows direct observation of the lobster cages from the surface. The surrounding bays hold additional floating farms producing grouper, cobia, and sea bass.
Couple
Sleeping on a floating raft above lobster cages in a turquoise bay, eating grilled seafood under the stars β Binh Hung is the most unexpected romantic night in Vietnam.
Friends
Grilling lobster on a floating wooden platform, swimming directly off the deck, and falling asleep on the water β this is the group dinner that nobody will believe actually happened.
Spiny lobster pulled directly from the cages beneath your feet, grilled with scallion oil.
Sea urchin porridge served on the raft as the wooden deck sways with the tide.

Jericoacoara
Brazil
Windswept dunes where the sun melts into the sea from a natural stone arch.

St Ives
England
Light so luminous it lured a century of painters to this harbour of turquoise shallows.

Tulpar-KΓΆl
Kyrgyzstan
Alpine pools at 3,500 metres that mirror a 7,000-metre peak at dawn like shattered glass.

Philae Temple
Egypt
A temple rescued from rising waters, reassembled stone by stone on an island in the Nile.

Hoang Su Phi
Vietnam
Rice terraces so vertiginous they look like topographical maps carved directly into the sky.

Hoi An
Vietnam
Mustard-yellow merchant houses glowing under thousands of silk lanterns beside a tidal river.

Trang An
Vietnam
Sampans paddled by foot through flooded caves beneath vertical limestone monoliths.

Pu Luong
Vietnam
Giant bamboo water wheels groaning as they lift the river into terraced rice paddies.