Belarus

Belarus is the country most Europeans can't place on a map, and that's kind of the point. Sandwiched between Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, this landlocked nation of about 9 million people has stayed remarkably under the radar. It's sometimes called "Europe's last dictatorship" and sometimes "the country that time forgot" - and honestly, both descriptions have some truth to them.

What Belarus does have is nature on a scale that's almost extinct in Western Europe. The Belovezhskaya Pushcha is one of the last remaining sections of the primeval forest that once covered the entire European Plain, and it's home to the continent's largest population of European bison. Minsk, the capital, was almost entirely rebuilt after World War II in monumental Soviet style and has a strange, grand emptiness to its boulevards. The country produces world-class tractors, has surprisingly good IT talent, and takes its borscht extremely seriously.