Sightsee and sleep across Canada while on a Red Beaver Bus tour. Starting in June, a small fleet of custom-built buses will zip between Vancouver and Halifax, stopping at such sites as Ontario’s Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, while tourists relax in booths and on couches that each night convert to 23 beds for dream-inducing passage.

Plumb the depths of a scuba paradise at privately owned Cooper Island, five miles south of Tortola, the largest island in the British Virgin Islands. Stay at the small Cooper Island Beach Resort or dock offshore and dive to some 60 charted scuba sites that offer glimpses of vertical walls, coral reefs, submerged pinnacles, caverns, and wrecks.

Although the monarchy in Hawaii was abolished in 1893, Honolulu’s Iolani Palace is a regal reminder of Hawaii’s last king and queen. Its new gallery displays such relics as King Kamehameha’s gold and red feather cloak and a large diamond-studded butterfly pin gracefully worn by Queen Liliuokalani at the 1887 Golden Jubilee of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria.

The Wat Lan Kuad Buddhist monastery in northwest Thailand takes recycling to a higher level. Temple monuments and buildings here are crafted from about 1.5 million bottles (from a local energy drink, beer, Fanta, 7-Up, and Coca-Cola). Mosaics depicting Buddha incorporate bottle caps. Since the low-maintenance, fade-proof bottles provide color and light, they’re a godsend to builders (Bangkok Post).

Austria’s 247-room Bad Blumau spa is touted as “the world’s biggest inhabitable work of art.” Designed by the late artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the spa fits into the contour of surrounding hills and affords such pleasures as mineral springs, massage, sound therapy, and the aroma grotto—a rain forest-like chamber filled with citron-scented air.

Go fly (at least in your imagination) a few kites of acclaim at Tako-no-hakubutsukan, a kite museum in Tokyo’s Taimeiken restaurant. The restaurant owner, a kite-craft enthusiast, shares his collection of more than 3,000 colorful, low-flying masterpieces. Kites from Japan and other Asian nations are fantastically displayed from floor to ceiling and portray themes that include age-old battles and theatrical performances.

The restoration of Hatta, a 150-year-old village 71 miles from Dubai, has opened to tourism one of the finest examples of a traditional oasis village on the Arabian Peninsula. The village’s historic fort, grand mosque, and houses are made of such local materials as date palms, mud, straw, and stone.

Garden Tours & Festivals

A green thumb isn’t needed to cultivate a passion for the Victorian-age Lost Gardens of Heligan, near Mevagissey in Cornwall, England. Take a stroll around 200 acres of such horticultural marvels as an Italianate garden and huge tree ferns. Once part of an estate that fell victim to neglect following World War I, the now restored gardens were opened in 1998.

Everything will be coming up lilacs from May 18-27 when North America’s largest lilac festival is staged in Highland Park (Rochester, NY). More than 500 varieties of lilacs will compete for your attention as the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and other local musicians and artists provide entertainment.

Satisfy your rain forest dreams at Kauai’s Limahuli Garden, on the north coast of Hawaii. You’ll encounter 17 acres of gardens, where taro thrives on lava rock terraces. Take an extensive guided tour and learn cool details about native plants and some of the useful ones imported by the settling Polynesians (+1 808 826 1053).