Being there are the right time makes a huge difference. Depending on how you travel, this can be rather difficult. General tours and cruises particularly tend to go places at the worst time of the day. Some areas like parks and natural wonders have opening hours which are very restrictive as well. The main trick in those situations is not much of a trick actually: Just shoot what works.

The main difficulty when the sun is high is excessive dynamic range. So the easiest is to find a way to frame elements which do not differ so much in brightness. Say you are visiting an imposing monument. Take a shot of the whole thing is going to work out poorly but instead focus on details such as carvings, doors, etc.

Then there is the if you cant beat them, join them approach. Take that imposing monument for example and find angles where it has an interesting contour. If you shoot there with some negative exposure compensation, you can get an interesting silhouette.

The last way is to capture all that dynamic range using a set of bracketed exposures. You can merge the set using Exposure Fusion or HDR. You really should be using a tripod for this and make sure there are no moving subjects in your frame. You mileage will vary greatly here and will generally not give the best results anyway.