Indien

For many visitors, particularly cashed-up young Indian tourists from Bangalore and Mumbai plus Europeans on package holidays, this is Goa’s party strip, where the raves and hippies have made way for modern thumping nightclubs and wall-to-wall drinking. The Calangute market area and the main Baga road can get very busy but everything you could ask for – from a Thai massage to a tattoo – is in close proximity and the beach is lined with an excellent selection of increasingly sophisticated restaurant shacks with sunbeds, wi-fi and attentive service.

Few places in India are at once so traveler friendly and enchanting as mountain-framed Leh. Dotted with stupas and whitewashed houses, the Old Town is dominated by a dagger of steep rocky ridge topped by an imposing Tibetan-style palace and fort. Beneath, the bustling bazaar area is draped in a thick veneer of tour agencies, souvenir shops and tandoori-pizza restaurants, but a web of lanes quickly fans out into a green suburban patchwork of irrigated barley fields. Here, gushing streams and narrow footpaths link traditionally styled Ladakhi garden homes that double as charming, inexpensive guesthouses. Leh’s a place that’s all too easy to fall in love with – but take things very easy on arrival as the altitude requires a few days' acclimatization before you can safely start enjoying the area's gamut of adventure activities.

Separating the Assam valley from the plains of Bangladesh, hilly Meghalaya (‘the abode of clouds’) is a cool, pine-fresh mountain state set on dramatic horseshoes of rocky cliffs. Cherrapunjee and Mawsynram are among the wettest places on Earth; most of the rain falls between June and September, creating very impressive waterfalls and carving out some of Asia’s longest caves.

A Portuguese colony for 426 years, tiny Diu island, linked by a bridge to Gujarat’s southern coast, is still infused with the history, architecture and, in some places, the cultural remnants of its European colonizers. The streets of the main town are clean, colorful and quiet once you get off the tourist-packed waterfront strip, and there are numerous crumbling Portuguese villas and churches. Although it's often thought of as being part of Gujarat, this is incorrect. With Daman it's actually a separate union territory known as Daman and Diu, and it has its own rules and government.

Virginal Arunachal Pradesh appears as a giant patch of green on India’s map. The country's wildest and least explored state, Arunachal (literally, Land of Dawn-Lit Mountains) rises abruptly from the Assam plains as a mass of improbably steep and densely forested hills, culminating in snowcapped peaks along the Tibetan border. Arunachal lures travellers with the promise of adventurous journeys to remote mountain valleys and encounters with some of its 26 indigenous tribal peoples. Tourism infrastructure – such as hotels or even homestays – has yet to reach many areas; this is travel far beyond standard tourist trails.

When Swiss architect Le Corbusier was commissioned with the job of designing Chandigarh from scratch in 1950, he conceived a people-oriented city of sweeping boulevards, lakes, gardens and grand civic buildings, executed in his favourite material: reinforced concrete. Seventy years on and the parks, monuments and civic squares are all still here, albeit somewhat aged.

Nestled amid evergreen hills that line the southernmost edge of Karnataka is the luscious Kodagu (Coorg) region, gifted with emerald landscapes and hectares of plantations. A major centre for coffee and spice production, this rural expanse is also home to the Kodava people, who are divided into 1000 clans. The uneven terrain and cool climate make it a fantastic area for trekking, birdwatching or lazily ambling down little-trodden paths winding around carpeted hills. All in all, Kodagu is rejuvenation guaranteed.

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A regular nominee among travelers’ favorite beaches in India, Gokarna attracts a crowd for a low-key, chilled-out beach holiday and not for full-scale parties. Most accommodation is in thatched bamboo huts along the town's several stretches of blissful coast.

North Goa is the Goa you might have heard all about: crowded beaches, upbeat nightlife, Goan trance, cosmopolitan cuisine, hippie markets and yoga retreats. If you like a fast pace and plenty of things to do, this is the place.