New Zealand

New Zealand is what happens when you take every spectacular landscape on Earth - fjords, glaciers, volcanoes, rainforests, beaches, geothermal wonderlands - and compress them into two islands at the bottom of the Pacific. The Maori call it Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, and they arrived here roughly 700 years ago in one of the most extraordinary feats of Polynesian navigation. They found a land with no mammals except bats, where giant flightless birds called moa stood three meters tall and the forest was so dense that sunlight barely reached the ground.

Today New Zealand is home to 5 million people and roughly 26 million sheep. It punches absurdly above its weight in almost every field. Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, was the first person to climb Everest. The All Blacks are the most successful team in the history of international sport. Peter Jackson turned the country into Middle-earth and the film industry never left. The country was the first to give women the right to vote, the first to introduce the 8-hour working day, and has consistently ranked among the least corrupt nations on Earth. And the landscapes - Milford Sound, Tongariro, the Southern Alps, the Coromandel coast - are so ridiculously photogenic that they barely look real.