An alpine river or northern Laos, and room to reserve at $1,960 per person

The $1,960 rung, and the three or four departures standing on it

Everything below is priced at $1,960 a head with two of you sharing a room. They are set out in no order of merit, because there is none to give.

Same figure, four unrelated propositions

The Soca valley is eight nights under the Julian Alps, beside a river that runs an improbable turquoise from May to September. Barbagia is nine nights in the granite interior of Sardinia. Shepherd villages, a language of its own, walked in spring or autumn rather than midsummer. Cappadocia and the Ihlara valley is eight nights of rock cut churches and a green gorge inside a dry plateau. The Nam Ou valley is twelve nights in northern Laos, limestone towers and upland villages on a slow green river, and it runs November to February. All four are $1,960 per person, two sharing. We set them out in that order because that is the order they were added, and for no other reason. The office does not rank them and will not tell you which to take. If you want help narrowing, the useful questions are the month you can travel, how many hours of flying you accept, and how much walking you want in a day.

How a reservation is placed and who bills you

You name a trip and a month. The office contacts the company that operates it and asks for the dates. That company confirms availability, sets out its own terms in writing, and collects whatever it asks to hold the place. Barbagia asks ten percent. The Soca valley asks twenty five. Cappadocia asks fifty. The Nam Ou valley asks the full amount at the time of reservation, which is common for small operators running a short winter season where rooms are few. Everything is paid to that company, on its own terms, before you commit. This office never takes money from a traveler and keeps no card on file. It is paid a commission by the operator afterwards. We say all of this plainly because a hundred percent up front is a real difference between these four, and it is the sort of thing people learn too late. Ask, and the current terms go in front of you first.

Not included at $1,960

International flights are not in the figure, on this rung or on any other. Neither are meals outside those listed on the trip page, entry fees not named there, tips, laundry, or anything bought along the way. Rooms are modest. Guest houses, family run places, a mountain inn where that is what the village has. Single occupancy costs more, and the operating company quotes it separately. Long haul appears on this rung exactly once, in Laos. Twelve nights is simply the length of that trip. It is not put here as a reason to prefer it over the three in Europe. The next rung is $2,410. Four trips sit on it, among them northern Vietnam, the Sri Lankan hill country, southern Morocco and Bosnia. That is a fact about the catalog. Nobody at this office will suggest you move up to it, and $1,960 reserves any of the four described above.