Between Kyoto's temples and Tokyo's vertigo, the Asia we plan is one of deliberate contrast — the quiet of a Zen garden a few hours from a city that never sleeps.
Our favourite trips to help you get a feel for this destination. Use these as inspiration, then get in touch to build your own.
6 nightsUlaanbaatar to the Gobi Desert
Nights under a ger with nomadic families, to the singing dunes of the Gobi Desert
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7 nightsSamarkand to Khiva
The Registan's turquoise mosaics and the museum-cities of the Silk Road
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8 nightsKyoto to Tokyo: Old Japan, New Japan
Temples at dawn, neon at midnight
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6 nightsTaipei to Taroko
Taipei's night markets and the marble gorges of Taroko
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8 nightsBangkok to Koh Yao Noi: Temples and the Andaman Sea
Golden temples at dawn, a car-free island at sunset
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7 nightsBeijing to Xi'an
The Great Wall snaking along the ridgelines, then the terracotta army of a first emperor
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6 nightsSeoul to Gyeongju
Royal palaces and neon in Seoul, then an open-air museum of a millennium-old kingdom
Explore TripTemples and rice terraces
From Japan to Southeast Asia, the continent pairs sacred architecture with farmed landscapes shaped over millennia. A vermillion torii gate atop a hill, a Buddhist temple wrapped in morning mist, rice terraces that trace the curve of a mountain like hand-drawn contour lines — every stop tells the story of an old relationship between people and their land. It's a continent where the sacred and the everyday are never far apart.
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Urban vertigo, hidden sanctuaries
A few streets from the neon, a red torii gate and the silence of a Shinto shrine — Asia knows how to let the densest city and the calmest gesture share the same block. In Tokyo, one turn down an alley is enough to go from the Shibuya crossing to a century-old moss garden without a sound. That constant juxtaposition of urban vertigo and total withdrawal is probably what makes the region so hard to sum up in a single trip.
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East Asia
Japan, between Shinto tradition and dizzying modernity.
Southeast Asia
Islands, temples and street food — a region built to be explored slowly.
A moment that stays with you
Our travellers almost always come back with one specific story rather than a vague holiday memory — a sunrise seen from the right spot, an encounter that wasn't on the itinerary, a silence they didn't expect. It's rarely the big sights themselves that stay with people most, but the particular instant that slipped in around them: a table shared with a local family, a road taken alone early in the morning before the coaches arrive. We build every itinerary with deliberate room for that kind of moment — impossible to schedule to the day, but almost always there when you actually know the ground. This one could soon be yours.
Actually slowing down
No checklist, no schedule to keep — just a day designed to be lived at your own pace. Many travellers arrive in the habit of rushing from one site to the next and leave feeling like they saw everything without really experiencing much. We prefer the opposite: a lunch that runs two hours because the conversation deserves it, an entire afternoon spent in one place rather than three rushed stops, the freedom to say 'not today' to a step on the plan. It isn't laziness — it's a choice, one that trades a few photos for memories that actually matter.
What only a guide on the ground knows
The right time, the right angle, the right word to the right person — the difference between a visit and a real encounter. Any guide can recite dates and names in front of a monument; what matters more is knowing what hour the light changes a place, which unmarked door leads to the view no one else sees, or which shopkeeper will happily talk about their neighbourhood to anyone who takes the time to stop. It's that kind of detail — invisible on a map or in a guidebook — that turns a day of sightseeing into a real travel moment, and it's exactly what our local teams bring, itinerary after itinerary.
Mei
Destination Specialist
Arjun
Travel Advisor
