Best of the World 2012

• Best of the World 2012
• All Best Trips

What places are calling your name for 2012? Whatever your mood, Traveler magazine has a recommendation for you—from the romantic hills of Croatia to the perfect beach in Thailand.

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Iceland

Photograph by Johnathan A. Esper, Getty Images

Harmonic Convergence

Dusk falls on a primeval landscape on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. A final relic from the world’s last ice age, this North Atlantic island nation is a world of knife-cut valleys, gargantuan fjords, monumental cliffs, black-sand beaches, thundering waterfalls, and silent white glaciers. Recent volcanic eruptions remind us that Iceland is still a country in the making, with changed landscapes that even Icelanders continue to discover.

Three years of financial recovery have made Iceland more affordable, with consumer prices now largely pegged to the euro. The country’s return to a humbler attitude stems from a thousand-year-old tradition of self-reliance—a tradition that has preserved one of the world’s oldest living languages and harnessed some of the cleanest energy on Earth.