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Lockdown restrictions may be loosening, but for most, holidays to sunnier climes are a distant possibility. Thankfully, Radio 4 Extra’s Global Adventures is bringing the world to your ears. Our programmes will evoke the sounds, sights and scents of holiday travel – from the shimmering heat of the Mediterranean to the vibrant music of Africa and the vast expanse of the American landscape. As well as fascinating documentaries there’ll be drama, including classic Agatha Christie, a gritty modern thriller set in Shanghai, and also globe-trotting comedies featuring Reece Sheersmith, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tina C.

Here are a few of the highlights to look forward to. Join us as we take in the sites and sounds of beautiful Florence in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, marvel at ancient artworks off the coast of Australia, and join Laura Barton on a road trip across America. You don’t even need to print off a boarding pass...

“Where are you going on holiday this year?” has depressingly been replaced with, “where were you going on holiday this year?” If you’re missing out on an Italian city break, a week on the beach or any Italian adventure this summer, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View is surely the next best thing. This novel, dramatised in four parts, tells of cousins Lucy and Charlotte and their adventures in Florence, armed only with a trusty Baedeker guidebook.

Lucy is intoxicated by the freedom she feels in shaking off her uptight chaperone Charlotte, and with her the Edwardian expectations which she finds so constraining. From the comfort of your own home, join Lucy as she gets lost in the awe-inspiring streets and squares of Florence; take shelter from the midday heat in an imposing church; witness a shocking murder; travel with the cousins by carriage to a violet field in Fiesole; and follow Lucy’s dizzying love affair with the eccentric, seemingly inappropriate George Emerson.

Perhaps backpacking around Southeast Asia is your dream trip? Sketch trio Daphne harness the unique power of Radio so that you can fly to Borneo without leaving the room.

Join Jason Forbes, Phil Wang and George Fouracres as they pick their way through treacherous rainforest on a bounty hunt for Phil’s legendary criminal uncle, Pak Belang, with the help of a studio audience and nine-piece band. After dodging a black widow, spotting a monkey and encountering an exhausted hiker, the group finally comes to the edge of the jungle’s dense foliage, where the trip takes an unexpected turn…

Travel with Kirsti Melville to the Dampier Archipelago, or Murujuga – a cluster of islands off the edge of North West Australia – to see 50,000 years of history adorning the area’s red rocks. Murujuga is the start of the songline which runs to Uluru in the heart of the country.

Songlines are integral to Aboriginal culture, they are stories which track the journeys made in the Dream Time by the creators who crafted the landscape. Songs tell the tales of the land in sequences, linking up landmarks across the country, explains Clinton Walker, a descendent of the Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi people: “Murujuga, for example is chapter one in the story, it’s the beginning point. Between Murujuga and Uluru, which is a couple of thousand kilometres, in essence what you have is a route that you can take to navigate. You can literally sing your way from one end to the other.” It is said that to know the country, you must know its songs. In Singing the Stones, you can discover these stories at what is thought of as the world’s largest outdoor art gallery. These ancient rock carvings depict fish, whales, turtles, crabs, kangaroos, emus, the extinct thylocene (a striped marsupial), as well as tribal symbols and creation spirits.

Zakia Sewell takes us to the home of her grandparents – Carriacou, which is a small island off the coast of Grenada. Zakia’s descriptions of this “lush, green, beautiful, paradise island” are enough to transport you with her on the juddering ferry as it approaches its shimmering shores.

Her great-grandfather, Williamson Lambert, was part of a drumming group in Carriacou with his two brothers. Take a tour around this tiny island with Zakia to discover how the Big Drum music of the legendary Lambert Brothers and their contemporaries evokes the songs and sounds of West Africa, brought to the island by enslaved people. This music, and the dancing it inspires, is a crucial link between the locals and their ancestors. Listen in, here.

Hop into the passenger seat of a Mustang and fasten your seatbelts for an audio adventure across the States with Laura Barton. Starting in the bright lights of New York, documentaries and stories from the Â鶹Éç archives will take us on an evocative trip through the southern states to the Pacific breeze of California. Travel not just across land, but also through time as this dreamlike journey explores life in the USA over the past 70 years. Tired? We can stop en route at a roadside motel, the history of which is explored by Joe Queenan in the programme.

Set sail along the river Nile with moustache-twiddling Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. While there’s the steamer to relax on and temples to visit, Poirot is never far from a crime scene, even on his holidays. Listen to the mastermind at work in this five-part adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s most renowned novels, as he investigates the murder of a wealthy heiress. This thrilling tale is the perfect story to escape into, though you may not sleep easily on a steamer full of suspects. Will the murderer be apprehended before more lives are lost on board the boat?

Wherever you decide to explore first, Radio 4 Extra’s Global Adventures will certainly whet your appetite for when globetrotting is back on the menu.