Choose the month, not the place

The usual way to plan a trip is to fall for a photograph, decide on a place, find the dates that work and then discover what the weather does to them. The lagoon in the photograph was full because the picture was taken in July. The dune was red because it was dawn in May. The salt was a mirror because it had rained in February. The photograph does not carry its month, and the month was the whole point.

Tausim is built on the opposite order. Start with the month you can actually travel. Then ask which places on earth are doing their best thing in that month. Then choose among those. This sounds obvious written down, and almost nobody does it, because the photograph got there first.

Every place has four months

Look at the twenty-four place pages on this site and a pattern appears: nearly every one has a window of about four months. Wadi Rum has spring and autumn. Socotra has February to April and a shorter second window in autumn. The Icelandic highlands have ten weeks. The Antarctic Peninsula has a single season from November to March. The Okavango floods from June to October. Outside the window the place still exists, but it does something else: it is closed, or flooded, or dark, or forty degrees.

The windows do not overlap neatly, and that is the opportunity. For any month of the year, roughly a third of the places on this site are in their window. August alone gives you the Namib, the Okavango, Iceland, Ladakh, the Faroes, Bwindi and the Brazilian lagoons at their best. January gives you the Salar mirror, Wadi Rum in low light, the Danakil, Antarctica and the Galápagos in their warm season.

What the month decides

Four things, in order of how often they ruin trips. Access: roads, ferries and flights that only run in season, like the Tsingy road or the Socotra charter. Weather: not the temperature but the rain days and the wind, which decide whether the boat crosses and the pass opens. Daylight, which at high latitude changes the day by hours and at the equator does not move. And the thing itself: the flood, the mirror, the lagoons, the chicks on the nests, the ice.

The Climate Simulator holds the first two for every place. The Daylight Simulator holds the third. The place pages hold the fourth in the line called the best window, and the honest sentence under it that says what to avoid.

The comparison that saves the trip

When two places are both in their window in your month, the choice is no longer about weather and becomes about you: cost, effort, altitude, comfort, how far you are willing to be from a hospital. The Place Comparator puts two places on the same radar for the same month, and the weights are yours. Most people who use it find that the choice was made by the month and confirmed by the money.

What this does not solve

The month is the biggest variable and not the only one. A good month in the Faroes still rains every second day. A good month in the Danakil is still 34 degrees. The month gets you into the window; the rest of the site is about what happens inside it.