Where to go in April, when half the world is in flower

There is a reason so many of the world's great festivals fall in spring, and it is not only religious. After a winter indoors, people everywhere want an excuse to go outside and look at something growing. April is the month when the excuses arrive, and several of the best of them are within a night's sailing of the British coast.

Tulips, and the madness they once caused

The tulip is not Dutch. It came to western Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, and it was the botanist Carolus Clusius, planting bulbs at the university garden in Leiden in the 1590s, who helped to make it a Dutch obsession. Within forty years the obsession had become a mania: in the 1630s single bulbs of prized varieties changed hands for the price of a house, before the market collapsed. Historians still argue about how mad tulip mania really was, but nobody argues about the fields that followed. Each April, the bulb country between Leiden and Haarlem is striped red, yellow and purple, and the Keukenhof gardens at Lisse, open for only a few weeks each spring, are the showpiece.

Fred. Olsen's six-night Tulip Season in the Netherlands leaves Newcastle in April, spends a day crossing the North Sea, and calls at Amsterdam, sailing the North Sea Canal, and Rotterdam, with the Keukenhof among the places listed. It is a short, sensible trip for a month when a fortnight away may be more than you want.

Japan under the blossom

If the Dutch have tulips, the Japanese have the cherry, and they treat its brief flowering as something close to a national holiday. The blossom sweeps north up the country from late March into May, reaching Tokyo and Kyoto around the turn of the month, and for a week or so in each place the parks fill with people eating, drinking and sitting under the trees. The custom, hanami, is centuries old. The blossom is short-lived, which is rather the point of it.

Travelsphere's twelve-night Japan: Land of the Rising Sun departs across much of the year, and an April date is worth seeking out. The route is a classic first journey: Tokyo, Hakone and Mount Fuji, then over the mountains to Takayama, an old merchant town with well-kept streets of wooden houses, and on through Shirakawa-go, a village of steep thatched farmhouses built to shed the heavy snow, to Kyoto, Nara, Hiroshima, the island shrine of Miyajima and Osaka. The blossom timing moves by a week or two from year to year, so choose your departure knowing that you are making an educated guess.

The fjords as the snow lets go

In Norway, April is the start of the thaw. The mountains are still white, but the lower slopes are greening, and the meltwater begins to find its way over every edge it can. The ships are few and the quays quiet. Ambassador's week-long Springtime Fjords from Tilbury calls at Haugesund, sails the Sognefjord and the Aurlandsfjord to Flåm, visits Bergen and ends at Stavanger with a cruise on the Boknafjord. It is a good introduction for anyone who has always meant to see the fjords, at a lower price than the height of summer, and at a time of year when you may find the place nearly to yourself.

Italy, before the summer

The Mediterranean in April is fresh and green, with the wild flowers out and the water still cool. It is a fine month for Italy's coast, which in August can be both hot and crowded. Fred. Olsen's eighteen-night Culture & Coastline of Italy sails from Southampton, with Cádiz on the way out, then La Spezia for the Cinque Terre, Civitavecchia for Rome, and two calls in Sardinia, at Olbia and Alghero, before Mahón on Menorca and Matosinhos, for Porto, on the way home. Alghero is the curiosity: it was held by the Crown of Aragon for centuries, and a form of Catalan is still spoken there.

The case for April

April is a month of short windows. The tulips peak for a few weeks; the blossom for a few days in each city; the fjords are at their fullest waterfalls a little later. You cannot see all of it. But choose one, go at the right time, and you will have seen something that the summer visitors never do.