Germany

Germany is a country travellers tend to reduce to a city or a cliché — Berlin, or beer halls — and the reduction costs them. A federal republic of sixteen states, it changes character every couple of hours of driving: the flat Baltic and North Sea coasts, the vineyard valleys of the Rhine and Mosel, the dark uplands of the Black Forest, the Alpine wall along the southern border.

Berlin is the country's most discussed city and its least typical — a place still working out what it is. Munich is the easier pleasure, with the Alps an hour south and a museum quarter that rewards a full, slow day. Between them lie the smaller cases: Hamburg's harbour, Dresden's rebuilt baroque, the half-timbered towns of the centre.

May, June and September are the temperate window — long light, working biergartens, the shoulder before and after the high-summer crowds. December has its own pull, when the Christmas markets are genuinely the event the marketing claims.