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Kubu Island sits on the southernmost tip of the Makgadikgadi Pan, Botswana: if you’ve ever wanted to know what lies behind the back of beyond, this is probably it. Part of the attraction is the epic nature of the journey to get to it through the Kalahari Desert, itself a place not to be missed, and on to the great Makgadikgadi salt pan. For half the year this is a salt lake full of krill, which in turn attracts millions of flamingos. In the dry season, it is a flat glistening nothingness. You can turn 360 degrees and see only the curve of the earth. Nothing lives here: everything dies here. By quad it is a six-hour drive to Kubu, a huge green granite rock that rises out of the pan like a fairy castle. Kubu is a sacred place of the San Bushmen; giant boabab trees grow from it like red turrets. There are sacred votive caves where you can pick up thousand year-old beads that have been traded for salt as far away as China. To camp out here is an awe-inspiring experience - the most mystically magic and powerful place I have ever been.

One of the pleasures of travelling is to broaden the palette, to eat what the locals eat; the unfortunately named Stinky Food Festival held annually in Reykjavik will add a whole new annex to your palette. The Icelandic tourist board sell it as a bit of a joke - actually, it’s an amazing taste of the lengths to which people go to live in inhospitable places. Iceland is only 1000 years old as far as our species is concerned and virtually nothing grows here. So you can marvel over smoked sheep’s head, stuffed cod liver, raw puffin, pickled seal flipper and the simply extraordinary and repellant buried shark. Besides which, Reykjavik is a great place. You may never get to the food fair - the Blonde says it’s a guy place. Well, if it is a bloke-burg, how come there are so many amazing-looking girls here?

Then there’s this thing. You ignore what’s on the cover of the brochure. A lot of travellers by-pass the obvious tourist sites because they don’t make good travellers’ tales. Old India hands will direct you all over the subcontinent and roll their eyes and shake their heads at Agra - big mistake. Agra has more world heritage sites than anywhere else does in the world - Fatehpur Sikri, the red sandstone Fort and the Taj. The Taj Mahal is one of the half dozen bona fide man-made wonders of the world. It hurts to look at it; the symmetry, the whiteness, the scale is almost too big to fit in your head; and the people. I don’t mind the people - as many Indians visit it now as foreigners - not the case 30 years ago. People give it scale. Only with them do you realize how pristinely vastly monumental it is and they belong there, you belong there. You think it was built as a secret? It was made to be worshipped, to be loved, the one perfect architectural symbol of love in the world. If you die without seeing the Taj Mahal you’ve missed out big-time.

The Savitsky Art Museum, Nukus, is the ridiculous to the Taj Mahal’s sublime. If you get to Nukus in the semi-autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, you will almost certainly be the only person you know who has. It is the most depressing and ugly place in the world; a rotting Stalinist excrescence built in the uncared-for nether-regions of the old Soviet Empire. It’s a place that even in the old USSR was a forgettable, unimportant backwater, and it was precisely because no-one came here or cared about Nukus that one of the great art collections was built here by a remarkable archaeologist, who quietly saved the work of underground and officially degenerate artists. From the 1930s to the 1970s, he bought and was given artists’ entire portfolios. It is a remarkable and humbling collection, thousands upon thousands of paintings, drawings and sculptures produced in the face of great danger. The most moving examples come from the Gulag. Together this crammed and desperately under-funded gallery is a memorial to the power of culture, a candle of artistic resistance. The quality of the work varies hugely, from the great to the chronically derivative, but that’s not the point. Altogether they have a unique power.

All Europeans should go and see a concentration camp - it’s part of our heritage. Travel should be more than a change of temperature and wallpaper; it should broaden the mind and sharpen the perception. Go to see where narrow minds end up. Buchenwald is set in the outskirts of Weimar. The most culturally revered city in Germany, it is the great autobahn roundabout of German civilization. Everyone from Cranach to Mann worked here, a sparkling gingerbread German burg with sausage stalls and beer cellars, and just on the outskirts of town on a hill is the first camp of the Final Solution… There are things to fathom about this that go beyond language but mustn’t ever be beyond understanding, for your children’s sake. Just go.

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