A bunch of close friends and I from high school are planning a "grad trip" (for them at least, I don't graduate until 2019) this upcoming December. We have roughly 10 days to work with. Two of these friends are in London, one friend is in New York, I'm located in Calgary and a potential fifth is also located in London.
We're all from Hong Kong, so we were thinking a place like Japan would be good because we could stop-over in Hong Kong and visit our parents/family/friends for a few days before going to Japan. The problem with Japan is that we really want to visit a bunch of places like Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo, and this would be achievable on a 10 day trip especially when the former four cities are close by each other, but if we only get 5-6 days or so in Japan that's not a lot of time, and seems like a race against time to see as many places as possible.
A simple solution for this would be to either skip seeing our family/friends all together, or just not go to Japan and do something closer to Hong Kong like take a trip up to Mainland China or go to Taiwan or something.
If we skip seeing our friends/family, another alternative we were thinking about could be my friend from NY and myself could fly to Europe and we can all go to a couple of European countries, but none of us are really too keen on that idea.
Finally, we were thinking of something like Cancun or someplace in Mexico and do an all-inclusive thing for a week or so. Only thing is that it would cost roughly the same for the UK guys to go to Cancun than if we go to Japan, and Japan seems more like a better deal/place to visit.
What are some ideas for a group of people scattered around countries (but have our home base in Hong Kong that we prefer to visit, but don't have to visit)?
Thanks!