Singapore

Singapore is a city, an island and a country at once — an equatorial city-state that, in a single compact generation, turned a lack of natural resources into a kind of national discipline. It is dense, green, and engineered to a degree that can read as uncanny until you have spent a few days inside it.

The Marina Bay set pieces — the waterfront, Gardens by the Bay's steel supertrees — are the images everyone arrives with. But the city's better argument is granular: the Botanic Gardens, a UNESCO site and a working park; the shophouse quarters of Tiong Bahru, Joo Chiat and Chinatown; and the hawker centres, where the food culture is so central it carries its own UNESCO listing. For a country this small, the eating alone justifies the trip.

Singapore sits barely a degree off the equator, so the weather hardly changes — there is no wrong season, only the wetter monsoon stretch around the turn of the year. February to April and July to August tend to be the driest and most comfortable.