Trekking / Hiking in May

Black River Gorges is where you walk through what is left of the real Mauritius, the wet upland forest that once covered the island before the sugarcane. Trails thread more than sixty kilometers of native woodland across the park, from short walks to the Black River Peak, the island's highest point at 828 meters, down into the gorge itself and its river pools. This is the last refuge of species that exist nowhere else: the Mauritius kestrel, once down to four wild birds and now hunting over these ridges again, the soft-pink pink pigeon, and the noisy green echo parakeet, alongside flying-fox colonies and endemic ebony and tambalacoque trees. The most walked routes run from the Petrin and Black River visitor centers, taking in the Macchabee forest ridge and viewpoints that drop away over the whole south-west of the island to the sea. Come in the dry winter months and the trails are firm and the panoramas clear; the forest is quiet, birdsong-heavy and, for an island better known for its beaches, a completely different Mauritius.

Dilijan is the forested exception in a stony country, and it carries the Transcaucasian Trail's showcase: an 80-kilometer section built largely by volunteers in 2017, blazed red and white throughout, linking the medieval monasteries of Haghartsin, Goshavank, and Jukhtakvank with Parz Lake over four to five days of beech-forest walking. A dedicated trail foundation maintains the route database, a free app, and a local-guide directory, which makes Dilijan the easiest self-planned trekking in the Caucasus, while commercial outfits run guided day hikes and week-long traverses for those who want the logistics handled. Monastery-to-monastery hiking with teahouse towns between is a format the Alps forgot.

The Millennium Cave is the great land adventure of Santo, a full day loop through jungle, cave and canyon in the island's remote south center. You start with a rainforest hike from Funaspef village down a slippery trail and bamboo ladders to the mouth of Vanuatu's largest cave, then wade and scramble through the pitch dark cavern with a river running through it, past bats and waterfalls, guided by torchlight. Out the far side the walk becomes a canyon: you float and swim down a gorge between towering moss walls, clambering over boulders and under small falls, before the trail climbs back out through the plantation. The site is held and run by the landowning villages, so the day is as much a village experience as a trek, and the physical mix of hiking, caving and river swimming makes it one of the most complete adventure days in the Pacific.

Galicica is the mountain wedged between two of Europe's oldest lakes, and the summit of Magaro at 2,254 meters is the payoff: Lake Ohrid on one side, Lake Prespa on the other, both in a single turn of the head. The standard day from the Ohrid side climbs about 600 meters over 8.5 kilometers through karst meadows that hold endemic plants found nowhere else, in a national park that stays quiet even in August while the Ohrid waterfront below fills up. Local guides run it as a half-day with transfers from town, which makes it the easiest big-view summit in the southern Balkans.

Glendalough packs a great deal of Ireland into one glaciated valley an hour from Dublin. At the valley floor sit the ruins of a monastic city founded in the sixth century by St Kevin, its round tower and churches strung along the river, and above them a network of waymarked trails climbs through oak forest to the two lakes, the old Miners' Village and the ridge known as the Spinc. From the tops you look down the length of the valley to the lakes, with the boglands of Wicklow rolling away beyond. It is also the honeypot access point for the Wicklow Way, the long-distance trail that runs the spine of the mountains, so a day here can be a gentle lakeside loop or a lung-stretching climb, and a base for longer walking. The combination of accessible mountains, ancient ruins and proximity to the capital is why this is the walk most visitors to Dublin should make time for.

Grand Etang is the undisputed heart of hiking in Grenada, a cool, misty rainforest in the mountainous spine of the island a half-hour above the coastal heat. From the visitor center by the crater lake, the classic walk drops through forest of giant bamboo and heliconia to the Seven Sisters Falls, also called St. Margaret's Falls, a chain of cascades with pools you can swim in, reached on a muddy 40 to 45 minute descent. The tougher Mount Qua Qua trail follows the ridgeline for about three kilometers each way through cloud forest to a summit with views across the island to the sea, and the most committed carry on toward Mount St. Catherine, Grenada's highest peak at 840 meters. Mona monkeys, introduced from Africa in the plantation era, come down to the roadside, and armadillo, opossum and dozens of bird species live in the reserve. Grenada's hiking is guided by real characters, among them Telfor Bedeau, who has walked these hills for more than fifty years, so a local guide is as much storyteller as route-finder.

La Soufriere is the roof of Saint Vincent and one of the more dramatic day hikes in the Caribbean, a climb up an active volcano that last erupted explosively in April 2021. The classic windward route starts in old banana lands on the Atlantic side and climbs through thick rainforest onto the exposed upper cone, ending on the rim of a huge crater that still steams and has reshaped itself with each eruption. It is a real trek, long and steep, rewarded with a view down into the caldera and out over the island and the sea. Because the volcano is active and the summit weather turns fast, a licensed guide is required, and a good one reads the mountain, the recent eruption history and the forest along the way. For hikers who want more than a beach, this is the standout land adventure of the islands.

The Main Ridge Forest Reserve is the oldest protected forest in the western hemisphere, gazetted by the British in 1776 after planters argued that clearing the hills was drying up the rains, an early act of conservation that has left Tobago with a mature tropical rainforest running the length of its northern ridge. Walking it is the island's best land experience. The famous route is the Gilpin Trace, a muddy path that drops off the ridge road into deep forest of buttressed trees, tree ferns, bromeliads and hanging vines, threaded with streams and small waterfalls. The reward is the wildlife: this is one of the Caribbean's finest birding forests, with jacamars, motmots, trogons and six kinds of hummingbird, including the near-threatened white-tailed sabrewing that survives only here and in a corner of Venezuela. You go with a local guide both because the reserve requires it and because the good guides read the forest by ear, calling in birds that you would otherwise walk straight past. A half-day walk is enough to feel how different this green, misty interior is from Tobago's beaches.

Malolotja is the best walking country in Eswatini and one of the finest stretches of montane wilderness in southern Africa. This is high-veld at its wildest: rolling grassland cut by the Komati and Nkomati gorges, quartzite ridges that are among the oldest rock on earth, and the kingdom's tallest waterfall dropping through the Malolotja gorge. The reserve is unfenced, so you share the trails with zebra, blesbok, wildebeest and the odd leopard, and it holds over 280 bird species including breeding blue swallow and bald ibis. You can day-walk to the falls or take a two-, three- or four-night slackpacking trail sleeping in wilderness camps, carrying only a daypack while your kit moves ahead. For a shorter thrill there is the Malolotja canopy tour, a series of ziplines and a suspension bridge above the Majolomba river. It is quiet, cheap and remote, a rarity this close to a capital city.

Morne Seychellois National Park is the wild interior most beach visitors never see. Covering more than a fifth of Mahe, it climbs from mangrove and cinnamon-scented forest to granite ridges and the 905 meter summit of Morne Seychellois, the highest point in the country. A dozen trails thread it, from the short Copolia path that ends on a granite plateau above the Sainte Anne marine park to the demanding, root-tangled scramble to the main summit through dripping mist forest. Along the way you pass endemic pitcher plants, jellyfish trees and the birdsong of the highland forest. The summit trail is steep and easy to lose, so the park authority requires a licensed guide on it, which also turns the walk into a running commentary on the island's plants, history and birds.

Mount Mulanje rises straight out of the tea estates of southern Malawi as a single granite massif, its plateau ringed by peaks and cut by river gorges and clear rock pools. At its center stands Sapitwa, 3,002 meters, the highest point in Central Africa and the goal of most treks. You climb through montane forest onto open grassland, sleep in simple stone huts scattered across the plateau, and reach the summit on a dawn scramble over boulders and slabs. Mist can close in fast, which is why every party climbs with a registered local guide. The reward is a wild, roadless highland of waterfalls, endemic Mulanje cedar and long views toward Mozambique.

Climbing Mount Ramelau for sunrise is the classic Timorese trek and a genuine pilgrimage. Tatamailau, at 2,963 meters the highest point in Timor-Leste and on the whole island of Timor, rises from the coffee-growing highlands, and the walk starts in the small hours from Hato Builico, the highest village in the country at around 1,900 meters. A steep two to three hour climb by torchlight brings you to a summit crowned by a white statue of Our Lady of Fatima, placed here in 1997, where at dawn the light spreads over ridge after ridge and, on a clear morning, both the north and south coasts of the island appear at once. Timorese climb it in numbers for the March pilgrimage, but the mountain is walkable year round with a local guide from the village, and the cool highland air and coffee slopes are a world away from the coast.

The Mullerthal Trail is the finest walking in Luxembourg and one of the best short-distance trails in the Low Countries. Its 112 kilometers wind through the Mullerthal, the region long called Little Switzerland, past sandstone cliffs split into narrow passages, ferned gorges, waterfalls such as the Schiessentumpel, and beech woods that close over the path. The trail is built as three connecting routes plus five ExtraTours, so you can walk a single day loop out of Echternach or Berdorf or link the whole network across several days. In early 2014 it earned the Leading Quality Trails - Best of Europe label from the European Ramblers Association, a mark held by only a handful of trails on the continent and awarded for waymarking, natural scenery and the balance of forest, rock and village. The rock is the real draw: Luxembourg sandstone weathered into corridors, overhangs and stairways you climb through rather than merely walk past.

The Nuratau Mountains rise between the Kyzylkum desert and the road east, a quiet range of dry ridges and hidden green valleys that offers the best village trekking in Uzbekistan. This is walking at human scale rather than high-altitude effort: shepherds' paths link the mountain villages of Sentob, Hayat, Asraf and Uhum, past walnut and apricot orchards, spring-fed streams and the occasional petroglyph, with the desert haze always on the horizon. The draw is the community-based tourism network built here, where you sleep in family homestays, eat what the household cooks and walk from village to village with local guides, so the trip supports the people whose land it crosses. A 72-kilometer trail strings the villages together, and shorter loops suit anyone who wants a day or two on foot between the Silk Road cities.

Nyanga is the green, mist-cooled counterpoint to Zimbabwe's lowveld safari country, a highland of montane grassland, trout streams and afromontane forest that rises to Mount Nyangani, at 2,592 meters the highest peak in the land. Trekking here runs from a two-hour scramble to the Nyangani summit to multi-day traverses linking the park's waterfalls and gorges, including the 762-meter Mutarazi Falls, the second-highest in Africa. The signature route is the Turaco Trail, a three-to-five-night guided hike that climbs Nyangani and drops into the Pungwe Gorge along wild rivers and through forest loud with samango monkeys and Livingstone's turaco. It is walking country in a big-game nation, at altitudes that stay comfortable when the rest of Zimbabwe bakes.

O Le Pupu-Pue is the place to walk into Samoa's rainforest interior, a national park whose Samoan name means from the coast to the mountaintop and whose trails cover exactly that span. On the coast, the Pupu lava field forms a jagged black sea-cliff where waves explode through blowholes and a marked path traces the edge above the surf. Inland, the Ma Tree walk leads through dense lowland forest to a colossal buttress-rooted rainforest giant, and the Togitogiga stream tumbles over the Togitogiga waterfall into deep pools you can jump into and swim. For the fit and properly guided there is the long, steep climb toward Mount Fito on the crater rim, a full day through untouched forest that few visitors ever attempt. The park shelters flying foxes, the manumea tooth-billed pigeon and other native birds, and because Samoa sits off the main tourist track you often have the trails to yourself. Beyond the park, the same guides link Upolu's other classic walks, the Road of Loving Hearts up Mount Vaea to Stevenson's tomb and the crater-lake circuit at Lake Lanoto'o, so a few days here cover the island's best hiking on foot.

The Qadisha Valley is Lebanon's finest walking country and the clearest place to see the mountains that gave the country its cedars. A deep gorge cut below the town of Bsharri, it has sheltered Christian monastic communities for well over a thousand years, and the trail down its floor and along its terraces links rock-cut monasteries and hermitages such as Deir Mar Lichaa and Qannoubine, many still tended, with the river running beneath. Above the valley head stands the Cedars of God, one of the last old groves of the Lebanon cedar at around 1,900 meters, some of the trees many centuries old. The whole valley and grove are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and long-distance walkers pick up sections of the Lebanon Mountain Trail here. Bsharri itself, birthplace of the writer Kahlil Gibran, makes the natural base. Whether you drop into the gorge for a day or link villages over several, this is deep mountain and monastic Lebanon on foot.

The Gauja valley around Sigulda is the best walking in a country that is mostly flat. Over roughly an hour from Riga you reach a broad forested gorge where the river has exposed Devonian red-sandstone cliffs, and trails drop from the plateau to the water and climb the far side between three castles: the ruined Sigulda medieval castle, Krimulda across the valley, and Turaida with its restored red-brick tower. Along the way is Gutmanis Cave, the largest grotto in the Baltics, its walls carved with centuries of inscriptions. It is a day of caves, cliffs, cable-car and castle ruins rather than summits, walkable in every season, with the autumn color in the beech and oak forest as the reason many Latvians come.

Gros Piton is the great walk-up summit of the Caribbean, the larger of the two lava spires that make the Pitons a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the emblem of Saint Lucia. The trail starts at the village of Fond Gens Libre, named for the freed people and escaped slaves, the Brigands, who used the mountain as a stronghold in the 18th century, and every ascent goes with a local guide from the interpretive center at the base. The climb is about 798 meters of gain over roughly two hours up, easy at first around the mountain's skirt and then relentlessly steep on rooty, rocky steps through changing forest, from dry woodland to cloud-brushed summit scrub. The reward is a 360-degree view over Petit Piton, the town of Soufriere, the reefs of the marine park and, on a clear day, the neighboring island of Saint Vincent. It is a genuine challenge rather than a technical climb, no ropes or scrambling, and finishing it is the classic Saint Lucian achievement.

Tara is Serbia's showcase national park: a forested plateau where eighty percent of the ground is spruce, fir, and beech, harboring the endemic Pancic spruce and the country's densest brown bear population, with almost three hundred kilometers of marked trails. The image everyone comes for is Banjska Stena, the cliff-edge viewpoint a thousand meters above the Drina's emerald bend and Perucac lake, and the classic day walks link it with Crnjeskovo and the Zaovine lakes at around fifteen kilometers and seven hundred meters of gain. Licensed guiding outfits run the park's full program, and the Drina Regatta town of Bajina Basta below doubles as the base.

The High Trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge is China's most celebrated independent trek, and it earns the name. The path clings to the upper wall of a gorge cut by the Jinsha, an upper reach of the Yangtze, with the 5,596-meter Jade Dragon Snow Mountain on one side and Haba Snow Mountain on the other. Over two days you climb the famous 28 Bends, traverse Naxi farming hamlets, and sleep in family-run guesthouses hung above the drop, the river a constant roar far below. It has drawn walkers since the late 1980s and the trail is well marked and well fed, guesthouse to guesthouse, so a guide adds context and logistics rather than rescue. Late spring and autumn are clearest, with the summer rains left behind.

Wadlopen, walking the sea floor at low tide, is the most distinctive thing you can do on foot in the Netherlands and it exists almost nowhere else. When the tide drops across the Wadden Sea it lays bare a vast plain of mud, sand and tidal channels, and with a licensed guide reading the water and the clock you wade out across it, sometimes knee-deep in silt, sometimes thigh-deep through a gully, all the way to islands such as Schiermonnikoog, Ameland or the remote bird sanctuary of Rottumeroog. It is hard, muddy, weather-exposed work, and it is also strangely meditative, a slow crossing of a landscape that will be under meters of seawater again in a few hours, alive with cockles, lugworms, seals hauled out on the banks and clouds of wading birds. The Wadden Sea has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2009, and going with an experienced organization is not optional but a legal and safety requirement, because people have drowned misjudging the tide. Done right it is unforgettable.

The Great South is New Caledonia's wildest walking country, and Blue River Provincial Park is its heart. This is a landscape found nowhere else: rust-red laterite plains studded with endemic maquis, ancient kauri pines, humid rainforest and the eerie drowned forest of bleached trunks standing in the dammed blue-green waters of the Yate lake. The park is a stage of the GR NC1, the territory's flagship long-distance trail that runs 126 kilometers and seven stages from the old village of Prony over the central chain to Dumbea, certified and waymarked by the French hiking federation and sleeping in simple faré shelters along the way. It is one of the surest places to see the cagou, Rhynochetos jubatus, the flightless gray bird with a crest that barks like a dog and is the emblem of New Caledonia, along with endemic parrots and geckos. Walk it and you cross an island that has been isolated so long that most of what grows and moves here lives only here.

Bohemian Switzerland is the sandstone wilderness of the northwest, a national park of pillars, ravines and deep forest where the Elbe crosses from Germany. Its emblem is the Pravcicka Gate, the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, a slender rock span high above the trees that featured in the film The Chronicles of Narnia. Below it the Kamenice river runs through the Edmund and Wild Gorges, where flat-bottomed boats are poled between mossy walls, and trails link viewpoints, table mountains and the twin park on the German side, Saxon Switzerland. A 2022 wildfire closed parts of the park and access around the Gate has changed since, so a local guide who knows the current trails and rules is useful. For a day or two of hiking among some of Europe's strangest rock scenery, this is the Czech classic.

The Amphitheater is a five-kilometer-wide, 1,200-meter basalt wall in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg UNESCO World Heritage Site, topped by Tugela Falls, recorded as the world's highest waterfall at 948 meters, and reached via the Sentinel route's famous chain ladders. The trekking here scales honestly: guided three-day Amphitheater slackpacking with twelve-to-fourteen-kilometer days at one end, and the six-day Northern Traverse, roughly eighty kilometers of escarpment walking from Mont-aux-Sources toward Cathedral Peak, at the other, led by guides registered with South Africa's mountain training trust. The escarpment rim walks along the top of a wall most countries would call a national monument; here it is the trail.

The Fish River Canyon hike is one of Africa's great walks and its most honest. The trail runs 86km along the canyon floor from Hobas to the hot springs at Ai-Ais, four to five days over sand, boulders and river crossings, carrying everything on your back with no huts and no bail-out points once you drop in. It is open only from May to mid-September, when the heat eases and the river is low, and permits are capped and issued by Namibia Wildlife Resorts to self-sufficient groups of at least three. If the full trail is too much, Fish River Lodge sits alone on the western rim and runs guided two and three-day hikes into the canyon with permits, gear and camps arranged.

The Pinnacles are one of the most striking treks in Borneo and one of the hardest days most walkers will ever do. Gunung Mulu, UNESCO-listed for its caves and karst, hides on the flank of Mount Api a field of razor-sharp limestone spires up to 45 meters tall, rising straight out of the rainforest. Reaching them is a three-day, two-night trip: a river journey and jungle walk to Camp 5, then a brutal 2.4-kilometer ascent that gains around 1,200 meters up roots, rock and ladders, using fixed ropes and rungs near the top, before turning around at a viewpoint over the spires and climbing all the way back down. It is guided-only and seriously tough, for fit, sure-footed hikers with a head for heights. Mulu rewards the effort beyond the Pinnacles too: Deer Cave releases millions of bats in a spiralling exodus at dusk, Clearwater Cave is among the longest cave systems in the world, and the Sarawak Chamber is the largest known cave chamber on earth. Come for the Pinnacles, but leave days for the caves and the canopy.

Jinshanling is the Great Wall hike serious walkers come for. Northeast of Beijing on the border with Hebei, it strings dozens of Ming watchtowers along a broken ridge, some restored, many crumbling, over roughly ten kilometers of steep brick and stone. Unlike the cable-car sections nearer the city, you walk here for hours with the wall mostly to yourself, dropping into saddles and climbing back to towers with long views over the folded hills. The classic longer outing links Gubeikou to Jinshanling and on toward Simatai West, a full day of ridge walking through some of the least touched wall left. Spring and autumn are the season: clear air, low sun on the towers, and none of the summer haze.

The Juliana Trail is a 270-kilometer, sixteen-stage circular route designed to walk around Triglav National Park rather than over it: valley paths, alpine villages, and both faces of the Julian Alps, from Bled and Bohinj through Kranjska Gora to the emerald Soca Valley. It was built deliberately as a model of dispersal-led slow tourism, fully waymarked with stage-end accommodation averaging seventeen kilometers apart, and Slovenia's rail and bus network means you can walk it in sections without ever needing a car. The summit story belongs to the mountaineers; this is the trek for seeing how people actually live in these valleys, one gostilna dinner at a time.

The Kolsai Lakes are the classic hiking circuit of the Northern Tian Shan, three glacial lakes strung up a spruce-lined valley at between 1,800 and roughly 2,850 meters. The walk from the first to the second lake is the signature day, and strong parties can push on to the third lake near the Kyrgyz border. Most trips pair Kolsai with two neighbors that make the region special: Kaindy Lake, where a line of drowned spruce trunks still stands upright in water dammed by the 1911 Kebin earthquake, and Charyn Canyon's Valley of Castles, a red sandstone gorge often compared to a smaller Grand Canyon. It is a two to three day loop from Almaty, at its best when the larches turn and the light is clean.

The Liechtenstein Trail, the Liechtenstein-Weg, is the neatest way to see an entire country on foot: 75 kilometers of waymarked path that threads through all eleven municipalities from Balzers in the south to Ruggell in the north. Created for the principality's tercentenary in 2019, it strings together vineyards, the Rhine embankment, forest and hill villages, castles and nature reserves, always with the mountains in view, and breaks naturally into about five day stages plus two circular loops. A free national app, LIstory, marks 148 interactive stations of history and culture along the route, so the walk doubles as a moving museum of the country. It is gentle valley and hill walking rather than high alpine, which makes it an achievable multi-day trek, and local certified guides run it stage by stage for those who want the stories told in person.

Morne Trois Pitons National Park is Dominica's hiking heart and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its prize is the trek to the Boiling Lake, the second-largest boiling lake in the world after New Zealand's Frying Pan Lake. The route is a full, hard day: from the village of Laudat you climb over the Morne Nicholls ridge, drop through the Valley of Desolation, a steaming moonscape of sulfur vents, hot streams and mineral-stained rock, and finish at the rim of a gray-blue cauldron 60 meters across that churns and boils where a flooded fumarole vents through the crater floor. It is one of the great walks of the Caribbean, and it links into the wider network here, the Middleham Falls trail, the Freshwater and Boeri crater lakes, and Segment 4 of the 115-mile Waitukubuli National Trail, the region's first long-distance path, which threads the park on its way up the island. The forest is dense, wet and loud with mountain whistlers and, if you are lucky, the endemic sisserou parrot. This is rainforest walking with real volcanic drama underfoot, not a stroll, and a certified guide is required on the Boiling Lake route.

Mount Karthala is the roof of the Comoros and one of the great volcano treks of the Indian Ocean, a 2,361-meter shield volcano whose summit holds a caldera around four kilometers wide, among the largest active craters on earth. The climb from the villages above Moroni on Grande Comore is a serious one to two day trek that passes through banana groves and dense tropical rainforest loud with endemic birds, up through tree-fern and giant-heath cloud forest, and finally onto a bare, black moonscape of ash and lava where the vegetation gives out. Camping on the crater rim, you look down into a smoking caldera that last erupted seriously in 2005 to 2007, and at dawn the view runs across the whole island to the sea. The forest holds birds found nowhere else, the Karthala scops owl and the Comoro drongo among them. It is raw, little-visited and physically demanding, a proper expedition on an island most travelers never reach.

Mount Liamuiga is the high point of Saint Kitts and the classic day hike of the northern Leeward Islands. The trail climbs off the old sugar-estate lands through dense tropical rainforest, then thinning cloud forest, up onto the rim of a volcanic crater that drops away into a green bowl often filled with mist and a seasonal pool. The name is Kalinago for fertile land, and the whole upper mountain sits inside the Central Forest Reserve, so the walk doubles as a slow read of the island's ecology, from strangler figs and vervet monkeys to the birdsong of the canopy. It is a real hike rather than a stroll, steep and often muddy underfoot, with the round trip taking the best part of a day. Guided walks start from the village of St Pauls, usually reached in an open safari truck, and a good guide turns the climb into the story of the forest, the volcano and the estates below.

Pico Bonito is the great wall of rainforest behind La Ceiba, a national park that climbs from sea level to a 2,435-meter summit and stacks seven distinct life zones on the way up. Most people come to walk its lower and middle trails, which is where the park is at its best: forest paths that ladder up to lookout towers and to waterfalls like El Bejuco, tumbling through a canyon of primary jungle, with more than four hundred bird species overhead and howler monkeys, agoutis and the odd tapir track underfoot. Two very different sides give two experiences. The El Pino entrance on the west leads to birding-focused reserve trails; the Cangrejal valley on the east gives community-run rainforest walks straight off the river. The named summit itself is a serious multi-day expedition through untracked cloud forest that very few attempt, which keeps the peak wild and the day-hiker's forest quiet. This is jungle hiking with real biodiversity, a short drive from the coast.

Soomaa means land of bogs, and walking on those bogs is the signature Estonian hike. This national park of raised mires, flooded forest and four rivers is best crossed on bogshoes, wide frames that let you pad across the spongy sphagnum surface of mires thousands of years old and studded with dark pools. The park runs on five seasons rather than four: the fifth is the great spring flood, when snowmelt and rain lift the rivers by several meters and submerge the forests, and you swap boots for a canoe. Guided bogshoe walks and canoe trips both put you deep into a wilderness that feels far larger than Estonia's flat map suggests, with beavers, elk and cranes for company.

Taman Negara is a walk through primary rainforest that predates the Amazon, a forest so old it survived the ice ages intact, and you feel that age the moment the canopy closes over the trail. Most trips run from Kuala Tahan, reached by a scenic riverboat up the Tembeling, and build from easy to serious. The gentle end is a climb up Bukit Teresek for a view over the forest and a walk out to one of the world's longer canopy walkways, a swaying series of rope bridges strung 40 meters up between giant trees. Night walks and river-hides give the best chance of the park's shy wildlife, from tapir and deer to, very rarely, signs of elephant and big cats, and a visit to a Batek Orang Asli camp shows how people have lived in this forest for millennia. At the hard end sits Gunung Tahan, a tough seven-day return trek to 2,187 meters for experienced, well-guided hikers only. It is humid, leech-prone and gloriously wild, the definitive rainforest trek of Peninsular Malaysia.

Troodos is where Cyprus goes vertical and green, and its nature trails are the best way to see it on foot. The signposted routes fan out around Chionistra, the summit of Mount Olympus at 1,952 meters, and each has its own character. The Artemis Trail circles the peak at around 1,800 meters through black pine and juniper with long views to both coasts, the Caledonia Trail drops along the Kryos Potamos stream to the island's highest waterfall, and the Atalante Trail starts from Troodos square and passes a drinkable mountain spring. The range is also a living museum: ten of its remote painted churches carry Byzantine frescoes protected as UNESCO World Heritage, and the lower villages are wine and orchard country. Spring brings endemic wildflowers found nowhere else on earth, autumn brings cool light and the grape harvest, and a local guide turns a walk into a reading of the geology, the plants and the mountain villages.

Vikos holds the Guinness World Records listing as the deepest gorge in proportion to its width, about 900 meters deep at a point where the rims stand only 1,100 meters apart, with walls ranging from 120 to 1,350 meters through the Vikos-Aoos National Park. The classic guided crossing runs roughly 13 kilometers from Monodendri to Vikos village in six to seven hours, finishing where the Voidomatis springs burst from the base of the cliffs into what is reputedly Europe's clearest river. Guided days pair the canyon with the Zagori stone villages and their Ottoman bridges, and the trails stay uncrowded by Alpine standards even in August.

Fiji is known for its reefs, but the interior of Viti Levu is a green wall of grassland ridges, river valleys and cloud forest that almost no visitors see. Talanoa Treks, the country's only dedicated hiking company, opens it up on foot with the highland communities who live there. Routes cross the island's rolling grassland from village to village, sleeping in community bure, and take in the waterfall at Nabalasere, the heritage forest of Koroyanitu above Lautoka, and the climb up Mount Tomanivi, at 1324 meters Fiji's highest peak. The walking is as much cultural as physical: your guides are villagers who show you where they farm, hunt and fish, and each night is spent as a guest in an iTaukei village rather than a lodge.

The West Highland Way is Scotland's first and most walked long-distance route: 96 miles from Milngavie on Glasgow's edge along the full length of Loch Lomond, across the emptiness of Rannoch Moor, and down Glen Nevis to Fort William beneath Britain's highest mountain. What makes it internationally distinct is the infrastructure culture: a mature ecosystem of baggage transfer, village B and Bs, and self-guided packages that lets you walk hut-free with a daypack and a dram at the end of each stage, a model the big operators ship thousands of walkers through every year. Seven to nine days, no technical ground, and weather that is itself a Scottish cultural experience.

The Jomolhari trek is Bhutan's classic high walk, a route to the base of a 7,300 meter peak that Bhutanese revere as the abode of a protective goddess. From the road head above Paro the trail follows the Paro Chhu up through blue-pine and rhododendron forest to the yak-herder camps and army post at Jangothang, the base-camp meadow at around 4,000 meters, where the north face of Jomolhari rises straight ahead. Walkers spend a rest day here for acclimatisation and side hikes to glacial lakes and ridgelines with blue sheep and, higher up, the chance of a Himalayan griffon overhead. Longer versions cross high passes to Lingzhi and Laya. This is real mountain country, cold and thin-aired, and it stays quiet because Bhutan caps visitor numbers and everyone walks with a guided camp crew.

The Kokoda Track is the great walk of the South Pacific, a 96-kilometer single-file path across the Owen Stanley Range that carries as much history as it does hardship. In 1942 this was the front line of the Kokoda campaign, where Australian and Papua New Guinean forces fought the Japanese advance on Port Moresby in the mud and cloud forest, and the trek still moves between named battle sites, Isurava, Brigade Hill, Templeton's Crossing, with memorials along the way. It runs eight to ten days over a relentless series of ridges and river valleys, through villages that host trekkers and supply the porters who make the walk possible. A guide is effectively required, both for the terrain and because the villages along the route are on customary land. Most walkers come for the war history, the physical challenge, or the family connection to men who fought here, and finish at the Kokoda plateau under the same range they have just crossed.

Nyika does not look like the rest of Africa. Malawi's largest national park is a rolling montane plateau above 2,000 meters, all open grassland, wildflower meadows and pockets of evergreen forest, closer to the Scottish Highlands than the bush. That openness is the point: you can walk for hours in clear air among roan antelope, eland and zebra, with leopard on the plateau and the occasional long view toward Lake Malawi far below. After the rains the grassland fills with orchids, more than a hundred species of them. Trails run for days between simple stops, and the sheer space and quiet set it apart from anywhere else in the country.

The hike to Paro Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, is the walk that defines Bhutan. The monastery clings to a granite cliff about 900 meters above the Paro valley floor, at roughly 3,120 meters, on the spot where Guru Rinpoche is said to have flown in on a tigress and meditated in the eighth century. The trail climbs through blue-pine forest hung with prayer flags to a teahouse viewpoint, then drops and climbs a final stone staircase across a waterfall to the monastery gate. It is a half-day out and back, four to six hours, steep but non-technical, and the payoff is one of the most photographed sights in the Himalaya. Because everything in Bhutan is guided, you walk with a licensed guide who can read the murals and shrines inside once you reach the top.

Phong Nha-Ke Bang is the world's greatest cave region, and the way in is on foot: multi-day jungle treks through UNESCO-listed karst where the campsites are inside the caves themselves, tents pitched on underground beaches beneath dolines that pour jungle light into caverns big enough to hold city blocks. Oxalis Adventure, the sole licensed operator for Son Doong, the largest cave passage on earth, also runs the more attainable Hang En and Tu Lan treks with a safety team trained by British cave experts; Jungle Boss runs licensed routes to Do Quyen waterfall and the Hang Pygmy system. This is expedition trekking where the destination happens to be underground, and nothing else in Southeast Asia resembles it.

Tsingy de Bemaraha is a UNESCO World Heritage site in the west, a forest of gray limestone blades eroded into razor pinnacles so sharp that the Malagasy name means the place where you cannot walk barefoot. Exploring the Grand Tsingy is part hike and part via ferrata: you clip into fixed cables and ladders, squeeze through slot canyons, cross a suspension bridge strung high between the spires and climb out onto viewpoints above a stone forest that runs to the horizon. The massif shelters wildlife found almost nowhere else, including the white Decken's sifaka, red-fronted brown lemurs and the nocturnal fat-tailed dwarf lemur, along with endemic birds and chameleons wedged into the rock. Below it the Manambolo River cuts a gorge that many travelers reach by dugout canoe. It is one of the most physically demanding and rewarding places to walk in Madagascar, and the remoteness keeps the crowds thin even in high season.

The Nida plateau is the standard start for the walk up Crete's highest mountain, on a marked section of the E4. Bare limestone, shepherds' huts, and the Idaean Cave on the approach.

Sixteen kilometres downhill through Europe's longest gorge, from the Xyloskalo steps at 1,250m to the Libyan Sea. The Iron Gates narrow to about three metres with 300m walls above. One-way, ending with a boat out of Agia Roumeli.