[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

The Countries Everyone Skips That Are Quietly the Best Trips of My Life

Nobody puts these on the list. They go to the neighbor instead. But Albania, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Taiwan, and Namibia gave me the best trips of my life — and named places to prove it.

There’s a moment on every great trip to an “unfashionable” country where you stand somewhere staggering, realize you’re nearly alone in it, and feel a small flicker of guilt that you almost didn’t come. I’ve had that moment in a Georgian mountain valley, in a turquoise-tiled square in Uzbekistan, on an empty Albanian beach that would be elbow-to-elbow if it were 200 km west in Italy. Every time, the same thought: why does nobody come here?

The honest answer is mostly habit and headlines. People go to the famous neighbor — Italy instead of Albania, Turkey instead of Georgia, Japan instead of Taiwan — because that’s what the algorithm shows them and what their friends already did. The countries below ask for slightly more effort and reward you with about three times the experience for half the money and a tenth of the crowds. Here are five that genuinely gave me the best trips of my life, with real places so you can’t accuse me of being vague.

Everyone goes to the Croatian or Italian coast. Twenty kilometres of water away, Albania has the same Adriatic and Ionian blue, with prices that feel like a clerical error and a fraction of the crowds.

Start in Berat, the “city of a thousand windows,” where Ottoman houses stack up a hillside in white tiers and a hilltop castle district is still lived in. Then drop to the Riviera in the south — Ksamil, with its tiny offshore islands you can wade to, and the quieter beach coves around Himarë. Inland, the Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër) is a spring so vividly blue it looks edited. A full seafood lunch with wine on the coast cost me less than a sandwich in Dubrovnik.

Not the US state. The country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, where wine was invented 8,000 years ago and the hospitality is so intense it can be slightly alarming.

Base in Tbilisi, a tumbledown, arty capital of sulphur bathhouses, crooked balconies, and a nightlife scene people fly in for. Eat khachapuri (a boat of bread, cheese, and a runny egg) and khinkali (soup dumplings you eat by hand) until you can’t move. Then go up — the road to Kazbegi (Stepantsminda) ends at the Gergeti Trinity Church perched alone beneath a 5,000-metre peak, one of the most jaw-dropping sights I’ve stood in front of anywhere. For wine, the Kakheti region in the east pours you glasses in family courtyards for the cost of a bus fare.

People imagine Central Asia is hard. Uzbekistan is now genuinely easy — visa-free for most, a high-speed train linking the great cities — and almost nobody you know has been, which means the wonders are nearly empty.

Samarkand is the headline: the Registan, three vast turquoise-domed madrasas facing one square, is one of the single most beautiful built spaces on Earth, and you can often stand in it without a tour group in frame. Then Bukhara, a still-living medieval town of mud-brick and minarets where you sleep in converted merchants’ houses, and Khiva, a walled desert city so intact it feels like a film set that forgot to strike. The high-speed Afrosiyob train stitches them together in comfort. I keep waiting for this country to be overrun; it hasn’t happened yet.

Taiwan sits in the flight path to Tokyo and gets skipped by almost everyone, which is baffling, because it’s one of the great food-and-nature countries in Asia and friendlier than most.

Taipei runs on night markets — go to Raohe or Shilin and eat your way down the row, pepper buns and oyster omelettes and stinky tofu you’ll either love or never forgive me for. Ride the gondola up to the Maokong tea hills above the city. Then take the train down the east coast to Taroko Gorge, a marble canyon with a river the colour of jade, and the high mountain town of Alishan for a sea of clouds at sunrise. It’s safe, the public transport is flawless, and the whole place runs on a kind of relaxed warmth Japan’s efficiency doesn’t quite have.

If you want a trip that makes you feel genuinely small, Namibia is it — one of the least densely populated countries on the planet, built for a self-drive road trip through pure emptiness.

Climb the rust-red dunes of Sossusvlei at dawn and walk out onto Deadvlei, a white clay pan studded with 900-year-old blackened trees against orange sand — the most surreal landscape I’ve ever stood in. Drive the gravel to Swakopmund, a strange little German colonial town where the desert runs straight into the cold Atlantic. Then Etosha National Park, where you park beside a floodlit waterhole and animals simply come to you. You’ll go days seeing more oryx than people. It costs more to reach than the others here, but the emptiness is the entire point and nowhere else delivers it like this.

The thread running through all five: they ask you to ignore the default, the famous neighbor, the path of least resistance. Do it once and the whole “best trips” calculation changes. The crowds are at the postcard places. The trips of your life are usually one country over.

Are these countries safe to travel? Broadly, yes — Albania, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Taiwan, and Namibia all see steady tourism and rate as safe for ordinary travel, with the usual caveats about driving conditions (Namibia’s gravel roads, Albania’s mountain ones) and normal city-smarts in the capitals. Check your government’s current advisory before booking, as always.

Which one should I do first if I’ve only got one trip? If you want easy-and-stunning, Georgia or Taiwan — both are friendly, cheap-to-moderate, and logistically simple. If you want the bigger “I can’t believe more people aren’t here” hit and don’t mind a little more planning, Uzbekistan delivers the most awe per dollar of anywhere I’ve been.

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