Best 15 Places to Travel in 2026

There is no festival on earth quite like Diwali. Not the Rio Carnival with its extraordinary spectacle. Not the Lantern Festival in Taiwan with its thousands of floating lights. Not New Year's Eve in Sydney or Edinburgh or New York. Nothing else combines the scale, the intimacy, the spiritual depth, the sensory overwhelm, the genuine warmth of human welcome, and the sheer visual beauty of five days in India when every home, every temple, every street, and every city in the subcontinent is illuminated by millions of oil lamps, candles, string lights, and fireworks in a celebration of light over darkness that has been observed continuously for over 2,500 years. Diwali 2026 falls on 20 October. This is your complete guide to being there.

There is a moment in the Thar Desert — usually just before sunrise, when the cold desert air is completely still and the sand dunes glow a deep amber in the first light — that stops every traveller regardless of how many deserts they have visited before. The Thar is not the largest desert in the world. It is not the driest or the most remote. But it is arguably the most alive — a desert of ancient cities, camel caravans, folk musicians who appear from nowhere around a campfire, and a culture so deeply rooted in the landscape that the desert and the people who inhabit it feel inseparable. This is everything you need to know to visit one of India's most extraordinary landscapes.