Why do we travel? What is it that pulls us away from our own front doors and out into the world?

Is it leaving the noise of everyday life behind - no alarms, no pings, no appointments, just a quiet landscape unfolding before you? Is it discovering the lives of people who built civilisations amongst mountains centuries ago, finding meaning in ways that still stop us in our tracks today? Or is it standing in front of something so vast, so improbable, so completely itself, that you can hardly believe you are really there seeing it?

Perhaps it's all three. Perhaps it's something else entirely.

Whatever adventure means to you, the destinations ahead have been chosen because they deliver something that's becoming harder to find - experiences that feel genuinely earned, places that haven't been smoothed into something comfortable and convenient, journeys that send you home changed. For some of these destinations, it's not that they're new - it's that 2027 is the year to finally experience them properly. These are the places we believe in. Get there before everyone else does.

There's a moment, somewhere on the Nakasendo Trail, when the last sound of modern Japan disappears behind you. No hum of bullet trains, no city noise - just stone underfoot, cedar overhead and the realisation that Samurai walked this same path four centuries ago. Japan does this to you. It pulls you in with the spectacle of Tokyo and then, quietly, draws you somewhere much older.

What makes Japan one of the most compelling adventure destinations of 2027 isn't its famous skylines or cherry blossom season, though both deliver. It's the country's extraordinary ability to hold its past and present in careful balance and the fact that its most rewarding experiences tend to come on foot, slowly, off the tourist trail.

Our Rising Sun Japan Walking Explorer holiday takes in two of Japan's most sacred pilgrimage routes: the Nakasendo Trail and the Kumano Kodo. Stay in traditional minshuku and ryokan, eat home-cooked meals prepared by your hosts and take part in a Chanoyu tea ceremony in Kyoto, this is Japan experienced at a depth that most visitors simply don't reach. Customers come back talking less about what they saw and more about how it made them feel - unhurried, welcomed, somewhere between two worlds.

For those who want to go further, Kyushu - Japan's third-largest island - offers something different again. Easily accessible but routinely missed by first-time visitors, our Exploring The Secrets of Kyushu on Foot rewards those willing to venture beyond the well-worn path with dramatic volcanic landscapes, onsens that bubble from the earth in river beds and a quieter, less-visited version of the country that feels like a genuine discovery.

KE Expert Aaron says, "Japan continues to be one of the world's top destinations and 2027 is the perfect time to step away from the tourist trails and experience a quieter, more authentic side of the country. Walking the Nakasendo and Kumano Kodo is the perfect way to do exactly that.”

Orchids and daisies stretch out like a runway before you, leading your eye upward to the jagged limestone walls of the Bjeshkët e Namuna - the Accursed Mountains. It's a view that stops seasoned walkers in their tracks, not because it's unexpected, but because it's this good and almost nobody knows it yet.

Albania has been quietly accumulating reasons to visit. Its mountains rival the Dolomites for drama and its food rivals Italy for the table - comparisons that sound like exaggeration until you're there, eating grilled lamb with nothing but mountains on the horizon. What makes it one of the standout adventure destinations of 2027 isn't simply that it's uncrowded - plenty of places are uncrowded for good reason. Albania is uncrowded despite being exceptional and that particular combination doesn't last forever.

For walkers, Trekking the Accursed Mountains delivers those meadows, those ridgelines and unexpectedly, a cruise along Lake Koman that feels lifted straight from the Norwegian fjords: deep water, sheer walls, a silence that gets under your skin. The Ultimate Albania Cycling Tour takes a wider view - pedalling from Tirana through to Lake Ohrid, where the water sits in a natural amphitheatre of mountains and on to the Roman ruins at Butrint. Two very different ways to see the same country and between them they make a compelling case.

Go in 2027. The crowds will figure it out eventually.

Camped on the red sand, the night sky blazes uninterrupted - star after star. No light, no noise, no familiar landmark. Just the vast silence of Wadi Rum, a desert that looks less like Earth and more like the surface of another planet entirely.

Jordan is that kind of destination - one that makes the familiar world feel very far away, then rewards you for making the journey. On the Dana to Petra Trek, sculpted sandstone trails carry you through canyons and ancient wadis toward the rose-red city of Petra - getting the title of one of the new Seven Wonders of the World and a place that earns that title. What makes arriving on foot so different from arriving any other way is the anticipation that builds with every day on the trail. When the city finally appears, you feel it. You walked here. You earned this moment.

For those who want to cover more ground, the Dead to Red Cycling Tour takes a broader sweep of the country - from the lowest point on Earth to one of its great ancient wonders, with the Jordanian desert rolling out between them.

KE Expert David says, "Jordan is up there with the best destinations in the world for warm hospitality, fascinating cultural insights and, of course, the amazing scenery of the Wadi Rum desert & mountains, and the incredible history & magnificence of Petra. It’s a brilliant destination for getting involved in on an active basis and you will be so well-looked after throughout."

Approaching the Gergeti Trinity Church is unlike anything you'll experience anywhere else in the mountains. The glacier of Mount Kazbek hangs above; the church sits below the snowline, ancient and improbable - a medieval stone building perched on a rocky spur as if placed there by hand, because it was. A country where the culture isn't separate from the landscape, it's built into it.

The medieval defensive towers that rise from the villages of Svaneti aren’t decorative. They were built by families who needed to survive brutal winters and raids across centuries of turbulent history. The mountains shaped the people and the people left their mark on the mountains in return - in stone, in folklore, in a tradition of hospitality so generous it can stop a trekker in their tracks.

Trekking in Georgia and the High Caucasus moves through this layered landscape at walking pace - past fortified villages, through the UNESCO-listed Svaneti region with its ancient tower houses, with the High Caucasus always somewhere on the horizon. For those drawn more to the summit than the valley, the Mount Kazbek Climb takes you to 5,054m above sea level, with time in Kazbegi's cobbled old town and remote mountain villages along the way.

Georgia rewards the curious. The higher you go, the deeper the history gets.

Alpamayo doesn't look real. A perfect pyramid of ice and rock rising above the Cordillera Blanca, its geometry so precise it seems almost designed - as if a mountain decided to become a monument to itself. Mountaineers have called it the most beautiful peak in the world and standing beneath it, that claim feels entirely reasonable.

Peru has always drawn travellers and Machu Picchu deserves every word ever written about it. There is, however, another Peru - higher, wilder and known mostly to those who seek it out - waiting in the ranges north and west of Cusco. Here, fifty peaks exceed 6,000 metres, glaciers pour between ridgelines into lakes of improbable turquoise and the scale of everything is the kind that recalibrates your sense of what a mountain actually is.

The Alpamayo Circuit moves through the heart of the Cordillera Blanca over fifteen days - crossing high passes, camping beneath glaciated walls, waking to mornings so clear and cold they feel like the first morning the world ever had. For those who want the full challenge, the Cordillera Huayhuash Circuit is one of the most demanding and spectacular multi-day treks on earth: more remote, more raw and - for those who complete it - genuinely life-changing.

This is the Peru that serious trekkers dream about. It was always there. Most people just never looked past the citadel.

The sun sets over the chaotic Djemaa el-Fna and the city shifts up a gear. Conversations in languages you can't place dart around you, colour spills from every doorway and the smoke from street vendors carries the smell of spices and grilled meat across the square. It should be overwhelming. It isn't. There is calm in this madness.

Within two days, you can be experiencing the polar opposite. The stillness of the desert is loud - a silence so complete it takes your ears a moment to adjust. Above you, the Saharan sky unfolds endlessly and the same calm that found you in the medina finds you again out here, under an entirely different kind of blanket.

This is Morocco's particular genius: two completely different worlds held within touching distance of each other and the journey between them - through the High Atlas, past Berber villages, into landscapes that grow quieter and more ancient with every hour - is the adventure itself.

The Edge of the Sahara Trek begins in Marrakech and moves through the Atlas Mountains and desert gorges toward the great sand dunes of the Sahara, camping under those skies with nomadic guides who know this landscape like a second language. For something wilder and less visited, the Jebel Sahro Walking Holiday takes you into the volcanic Anti-Atlas - a landscape of rock towers and hidden valleys - with nights beside nomadic Berber settlements where the hospitality is as disarming as the silence.

There is calm in this madness and in the silence beyond it.

Granite towers rise above a bank of snow. Below, you stand at the edge of green water and take in the scale of Torres del Paine - sculpted so fantastically, so precisely, it looks designed rather than formed. This is Patagonia, in the far south of Chile and it is unlike anywhere else on earth.

What makes it so disarming isn't just the scale - it's the feeling that the landscape refuses to be entirely believed. Waterfalls appear from nowhere, glaciers spread like frozen deserts to the rock edges and the wind comes off the ice with a force that feels almost intentional. Not picturesque, not managed, but untamed in a way that gets under your skin.

On Spires and Ice -Trekking Patagonia, you'll camp in refugios among grassy moorland, limestone peaks rising on every side, with the legendary Torres del Paine National Park as your backyard. For those who want to go further, The Classic Paine Circuit takes you deeper into the wilderness - crossing the John Gardner Pass as Greys Glacier sweeps below you like a vast frozen desert, before a thrilling swing bridge crossing signals you've earned your way through.

Chile will shock you. To see it with your own eyes, it almost feels unreal.

KE Expert Tim says, "The Torres del Paine national park has some of the most spectacular scenery on Earth with iconic granite towers, huge glaciers, and stunning lakes. It’s a place that has to be experienced first-hand to fully appreciate it’s magnificence."

The cobalt blue and gold geometric tilework spanning the three madrassas of the Registan will stop you in your tracks -not just for its beauty, but for the disbelief that something so precisely, so impossibly intricate was built in the 15th century. This is Uzbekistan, sitting quietly in the heart of Central Asia, home to some of the most extraordinarily beautiful architecture on earth. The crowds haven't realised it yet.

What makes the Silk Road cities so disarming is that they were never lost -they were simply overlooked. At the height of the Timurid Empire, Samarkand was one of the most powerful and cultured cities in the world, a centre of scholarship, astronomy and trade that rivalled anything in Europe. Then the sea routes opened, the overland caravans slowed and the western world simply stopped looking. The cities carried on regardless.

Samarkand and the Silk Road moves through three of these remarkable places -from Khiva, an entire medieval walled city preserved so completely it barely seems real, through the domed bazaars and turquoise minarets of Bukhara, to the Registan itself in Samarkand, a courtyard so vast and so ornate it redefines what you thought a building could be. Woven between the cities are walks through the surrounding landscapes -a change of pace that makes the return to each ancient skyline feel like a reward.

Uzbekistan isn't a secret. It just hasn't been discovered yet.