A standing atlas of 132 destinations, scored for a Nanjing base. Every place carries a 12-month seasonality curve, a real door-to-door time from Nanjing, and its own friction profile. Change the month and the answer changes — that is the entire point.
The five strongest answers for every month of the year, scored with your current settings. This is the view to open when the question is when rather than where.
Every number here is an editorial judgement, not a measurement. What follows is exactly how the ranking is produced, so you can disagree with it precisely.
score = 50%·season + 50%·interest − time penalty − friction penalty,
then zeroed if the trip does not fit the days you have.
| Term | What it does |
|---|---|
| Season | The destination's score for the selected month, 0–10. A 0 means the reason to go is physically absent — Kamikochi is shut, the lavender is cut, the ice festival is demolished, Antarctica has no ships. Not merely "bad weather". |
| Interest | Scenery / culture / history / water / food, each 0–10, weighted by your sliders. Defaults are set to your stated ranking: scenery first, then culture, history, water, food. |
| Time penalty | Door-to-door hours from central Nanjing beyond a 4-hour floor, plus 4 points per connection. Scaled by the time-sensitivity slider. This is where the NKG problem below does most of its damage. |
| Friction penalty | Two things you specifically said you dislike: forced early starts (dawn game drives, sunrise summits, balloon launches) and queue burden (permit lotteries, shuttle scrums, Golden Week). Driving and physical effort are not penalised — you said they are fine, so Patagonia and the Pamirs are not punished for being hard work. |
| Days fit | Below the destination's minimum viable days it scores zero and disappears. Above minimum but below ideal it takes an 18% haircut for being compressed. |
Six agents built this in parallel: route reality from live schedule data; China-domestic phenology cross-checked against the 2026 State Council holiday calendar; Asia-Pacific monsoon and typhoon windows; EMEA and Americas seasonality including hard operational closures; plus two Maestro agents — CodexTravel (gpt-5.6-sol) on shoulder-season and under-picked destinations, and DeepSeekTravel (deepseek-v4-flash) on the month-by-month sheet.
Verified by source: migration river-crossing windows, the Okavango flood mechanism, Antarctic and Patagonian operating seasons, the February Inca Trail closure, Iceland F-road dates, Norwegian pass dates, Yellowstone road dates, Harbin ice festival dates, Wuyuan bloom windows, Meili and Changbai visibility rates, and the NKG route network. Everything else is established climatology and tour-operations knowledge — high confidence on the windows, editorial on the exact scores. Re-check snow-dependent road and lodge openings at booking time; they move by 3–6 weeks a year.
| Okavango | The flood peaks in the dry season. Angolan rain takes four months to arrive, so July–August is high water; the local rainy season is when the delta is at its lowest. The two are six months apart. |
| Tanzania | Calving (February, Ndutu in the south) and the Mara River crossings (July–October, far north) are 800 km and six months apart. One trip cannot hold both. |
| Aurora vs midnight sun | Mutually exclusive. August and mid-April in Lofoten give you neither. |
| Peru in February | Not merely wet — the Inca Trail is legally closed for the entire month for maintenance. |
| Chiang Mai in March | The instinct is to avoid the monsoon. Wrong instinct: burning season is worse. AQI 200–400, and the mountains are invisible. |
| Lapland in summer | Aurora is not merely unlikely in June and July — under the midnight sun there is no astronomical darkness at all, so it cannot be seen at any strength. |
This atlas has been through three adversarial audit passes. Every finding below was a real error in an earlier version, found by an agent whose only instruction was to attack the data. They are listed because the pattern is instructive — the errors cluster in exactly two places: seasonal closures that do not appear in any climate table, and confusing discomfort with absence.
| Was wrong | Now |
|---|---|
| Taroko Gorge scored as open | Still largely closed after the April 2024 earthquake — Shakadang, Swallow Grotto, Nine Turns, Baiyang and Zhuilu are all shut and Highway 8 is convoy-only. The entry is now Taipei and the north coast, and its scenery score was cut. |
| Lapland aurora scored 5 in June and July | Cut to 0–1. The midnight sun makes it physically unobservable. |
| Sipadan scored 4 in November | Cut to 2 — the island closes to all diving for the entire month, every year. |
| NKG–Milan listed as a live route | Removed. The Neos service ended in October 2025. This one could have stranded a booking. |
| Antarctica scored 0 in October | The season opens in late October — that is the pristine-pack-ice window, not a blackout. |
| Dubai, AlUla, Egypt scored 0–1 in high summer | Raised. Nothing closes; it is brutally hot. A 0 is reserved for absence, not discomfort. |
| Hokkaido scored 9 in August | Cut to 6. Farm Tomita starts cutting the lavender in early August, so the fields are gone by mid-month. |
| Yading April, Sri Lanka September, Dolomites October | All cut for closures invisible in the weather: Yading's long route to the Five-Colour Sea, Yala Block 1, and the rifugi and cableways respectively. |
| Xishuangbanna April, Cebu January, Ladakh January | All raised — the Water-Splashing Festival, peak amihan plus Sinulog, and the Chadar frozen-river trek are plan-around-it draws that were scored as ordinary months. |