From the sandy beaches of Northland to the snowy Southern Alps, New Zealand is a country of eye candy. When New Zealand was designed, it’s as if all the greatest places on earth were put together in one compact little land mass and most of the people were removed. Luckily for travelers, New Zealand is also a user-friendly kind of place, combining the laid-back attitudes of an island with the conveniences and life-style of the first world. New Zealanders, or Kiwis, are honest-to-goodness nice folks. It’s like living in a country full of labrador retrievers.

 Brazil

The Bahamas are the stuff of the tropics: fine white sand and swaying palms, blue skies and sunshine, warm waters with schools of rainbow-colored fish, resort hotels that cater to every taste and whim, and, oh, those offshore bank accounts so close to home. There are duty-free shops and delectable seafood restaurants, and a rollicking nightlife in the capital city of Nassau. There are remote beaches and rocky shorelines for solitude on the Out Islands. There are actually more than 700 islands and cays and over 2,000 islets in the Bahamas archipelago, and yet it is one of the smallest nations in the world, and the richest in the Caribbean, all but a stone's throw from mainland USA.

United States

France is the birthplace of the grand notion of bon vivant. For if there's one thing the French do well, it is enjoy life. Here is the home of wine and haute cuisine, of perfume and haute couture, of cinema and jazz. It is where the Impressionists and Fauves came alive, where surrealists and existentialists coexisted, where Baudelaire and Rimbaud held sway, where Pablo Picasso spent the last 15 years of his life, and where Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve redefined sex symbol and beauty respectively. And the French have a way of putting it all together: They call it, Joie de vivre!

[featured]After three decades of "Goulash Communism," Hungary has emerged as the most exciting country from the[/featured] "Other Europe." It is a land of martyrs and monuments, of piquant foods and full-bodied wines, of Turkish mineral baths and medieval towns, and a history that is just as diverse as it is rich, where Tartars, Magyars, gypsies and others have melted into a landscape that is at once wild and beguiling and as memorable as the "paprika that burns twice."