Most people who visit Trinidad and Tobago go to Tobago for the beaches and miss Trinidad almost entirely; which means they skip the Caroni Swamp, the leatherback turtle nesting beaches on the north coast, the Asa Wright Nature Centre (one of the finest birdwatching locations in the Western Hemisphere), and what is probably the best street food in the Caribbean. Trinidad is the more rewarding...

Angola 3-Day Itinerary Angola’s Kalandula Falls drop 105 metres and span 400 metres across, making them one of the largest waterfalls by volume in Africa. Most people visiting Angola have never heard of them. That gap between what the country contains and what international tourism has discovered is the defining feature of travelling here in 2025: infrastructure is limited, costs in Luanda...

Geneva is the most expensive city in Switzerland, which makes it the most expensive city most people will visit. Budget accordingly and stop being surprised by it; a straightforward lunch for two can hit CHF 80-100 without wine, and a dinner at anywhere worth going runs CHF 120-180 per person. The compensations are real: a compact, walkable old town on a glacial lake, the Jet d’Eau visible...

Westminster Abbey The Only Grave You Cannot Walk On There is one tomb in Westminster Abbey where it is forbidden to step: the grave of the Unknown Warrior, installed in November 1920 just inside the west entrance. The warrior is buried in soil brought from the battlefields of France, making the grave technically French territory. Every British monarch since George V has walked around it. Every...

A cocktail at a Mykonos beach club costs 18 to 25 euros. A sunbed at a premium beach club runs 50 to 100 euros per day. A taxi from the airport to Mykonos Town costs 10 to 15 euros. The first two numbers are the island being itself; the third is the one genuinely good deal. Mykonos is expensive, Greek locals will tell you it is overpriced, and five days here costs more than ten days almost...

Each evening at dusk, tens of thousands of Scarlet Ibis: the national bird of Trinidad and Tobago and arguably the reddest large bird on earth: fly in formation from their feeding grounds to roost in the mangroves of the Caroni Swamp. You watch it from a flat-bottomed boat, drifting through a tidal forest while the sky turns the same colour as the birds. It is one of the genuinely extraordinary...

Scientists surveying Atauro Island in 2016 recorded 642 species of reef fish in a single survey, which was at the time the highest reef fish diversity ever measured anywhere on earth. That fact, more than any romantic notion of a young nation or remote destination, is the honest reason to visit Timor-Leste. The country happens to also have a compelling history and a capital city worth a...

Two Days in Tripoli, Lebanon: A City Worth Understanding Tripoli (Trablous in Arabic) is Lebanon’s second city and the intellectual and commercial capital of the country’s north. It has the best-preserved Mamluk architecture outside Cairo, a 700-year-old souk network that still operates as a working market rather than a tourist attraction, and a reputation for sweets: particularly...

Tubbataha Reef There is no way to visit Tubbataha Reef on a day trip. There is no island accommodation, no supply boat, no ferry from the mainland. The only way in is by liveaboard vessel from Puerto Princesa, a crossing of roughly ten to twelve hours across the Sulu Sea. The park opens for exactly one season per year, mid-March to mid-June, when the weather permits the crossing and visibility...

Rome’s tap water comes from ancient aqueducts and is among the best-tasting public water in Europe. The small cast-iron drinking fountains (nasoni) scattered throughout the city, about 2,500 of them, deliver the same water free. You plug the spout hole with a finger and drink from a side jet. Carrying a water bottle and refilling it constantly at nasoni is the single most practical thing you...

Bordeaux: 4-Day Itinerary Getting From the Airport Bordeaux-Merignac Airport (BOD) is 12 kilometres west of the city centre. Tram A runs to the city in around 40 minutes for €1.70 per single ticket, stopping at key points including Palais de Justice and Sainte-Catherine. From December 2025, the new Tram Line F offers a direct connection to Gare Saint-Jean (the main train station) via the city...

Papua New Guinea’s Coral Reefs Why This Is Different From Anywhere Else Papua New Guinea sits at the apex of the Coral Triangle, the area of ocean between PNG, Indonesia, and the Philippines that contains more reef species than anywhere else on earth. The hard coral diversity of Kimbe Bay alone exceeds that of the entire Caribbean. That is not a marketing claim; it is the conclusion of...

New York City 5-Day Itinerary The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds more than two million objects and closes only on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. That scale is a useful frame for New York generally: everything here is larger, denser, and more contested than you expect. Five days is enough to move through the boroughs confidently, eat well without the tourist markup, and stand...

Khartoum, Sudan: A Travel Guide and Current Status Before any itinerary, a direct statement of the current situation is necessary: as of mid-2026, Khartoum is not safe to visit and no legitimate travel itinerary can be written for it in good conscience. What Happened to Khartoum Sudan’s civil war began in April 2023 when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the...

Cologne 4 Day Itinerary The Cologne Cathedral took 632 years to build, from 1248 to 1880, which makes it the longest continuous construction project in human history before modern skyscraper records displaced it. Most visitors photograph it from the plaza, spend 20 minutes inside, and move on. This itinerary does not do that. Four days in Cologne is enough time to understand why the city is worth...

The Pergamon Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island, usually one of the first recommendations in any Germany guide, is currently closed and will not reopen until June 2027 at the earliest. The Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way of Babylon will not be on display again until the 2030s. This is a significant change to how people plan their Berlin Museum Island time, and most itineraries written...

Temple of Preah Vihear A Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva sits on a cliff edge 525 metres above the Cambodian plain, looking north over a sea of forest toward the Thai frontier. It took Khmer kings roughly three centuries to build it. Two countries went to armed conflict over who owns the land around it as recently as 2025. The temple itself, with its 800-metre processional axis and carved...

Monaco is 2.02 square kilometres. You can walk from one end to the other in about 25 minutes on a flat route, though the principality is built on cliffs and the actual walking involves considerable vertical variation. The country’s per-capita wealth is the highest in the world, which expresses itself in the harbour (superyachts stacked three deep in season), the real estate (residential...

Two days is an honest constraint for Ethiopia, which has enough to occupy three weeks without repetition. The architecture alone, from the 11 rock-hewn churches of Lalibela to the 17th-century castle complex at Gondar, represents civilisational achievements that most travellers have never heard of, which is part of what makes the country so disorienting to arrive in for the first time. Use these...

The Dominican Republic’s Zona Colonial in Santo Domingo is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas, founded in 1498, and UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 1990. Most visitors fly directly to Punta Cana and never get there. Five days is enough to do both, and the contrast between the colonial capital and the resort coast tells you far more about this...

A pizza at L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele costs six euros and has not changed in 150 years. That is either a promise or a philosophy, and in Naples it is usually both. The city has Europe’s densest historic center, a UNESCO designation, an active volcano on the skyline, and a reputation for chaos that is about 30% accurate and 70% unfair. Four days is enough to understand why people come...

7-Day Itinerary for Exploring Cape Verde Cape Verde sits 570 kilometres off the West African coast in the Atlantic, and the islands feel like nothing else in the world: Saharan desert and volcanic peaks within sight of white-sand beaches, with a Portuguese-Creole culture and a music tradition (morna) that UNESCO inscribed on its heritage list in 2019. Seven days is enough to visit two or three...

Measured from its base on the ocean floor, Mount Teide is over 7,000 metres tall - which makes it the third largest volcano structure on earth, behind only Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The 3,718 metres above sea level that Teide advertises is the relatively modest portion that sits above the Atlantic. This distinction matters for understanding what you are actually looking at when you arrive...

Ethiopia is the only African country that was never colonised, a fact that shapes everything from its cuisine (no European food absorbed into the base culture) to its calendar (Ethiopia uses the Coptic calendar, currently in 2018 by their reckoning) to the way Addis Ababa looks and operates. It is also the birthplace of coffee, the headquarters of the African Union, and the city where a...

Terra Cotta Army, China: What You Actually Need to Know Before You Go A Scale That Does Not Photograph Well The scale of the Terracotta Army is one of those facts that sounds like hyperbole until you are standing in front of it. Pit 1, the main excavation hall, contains more than 6,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers arranged in military formation across a floor space large enough that the figures...

Kathmandu is a city that would be exhausting to navigate without any help and exhilarating once you stop fighting it. The traffic is bad, the dust from unpaved side roads is pervasive, sacred cows and motorcycles share lanes of the same width, and the UNESCO-listed temples sit immediately adjacent to hardware stores and mobile phone repair kiosks. This is not a defect to be managed around; it is...

Chengdu operates at a pace that the rest of China’s major cities have mostly abandoned. The city has a concept called “shu” culture, a Sichuan temperament of ease and pleasure that expresses itself in hours spent at tea houses, late-night hotpot dinners that start at 10 PM, and a genuine indifference to the kind of relentless forward momentum you feel in Shanghai or Beijing. It...

Amsterdam: 6-Day Itinerary Amsterdam has roughly 900,000 people, 165 canals, and 800,000 bicycles, which works out to almost exactly one bicycle per resident. The city’s compactness is its defining logistical feature: every major museum, the best markets, and most worthwhile neighbourhoods sit within 4 km of Amsterdam Centraal station, which means six days here is genuinely enough to see the...

Brighton 3-Day Itinerary Brighton acquired its reputation as a place where London comes to misbehave at the seaside. That reputation is half right. The city is genuinely permissive, the nightlife is serious, and the weekend crowds in July and August are relentless. But it also has a Michelin-starred restaurant (Maré by Rafael Cagali, the first in the city, awarded in early 2026), one of the oldest...

Zermatt 7 Day Itinerary Before You Arrive: The Car Problem Nobody Tells You About Zermatt has been car-free for decades. No private vehicles enter the village. If you are driving, you park at Täsch, five kilometres down the valley, where the Matterhorn Terminal provides around 2,100 covered spaces plus further private parking. A shuttle train runs from Täsch to Zermatt every 20 minutes between...

Travel Guide to Djerba, Tunisia In 2014, an art collective invited 150 street artists from 30 countries to paint murals across the whitewashed walls of Erriadh, a village in the south of Djerba. The result, known as Djerbahood, turned an ordinary Tunisian village into one of the most-discussed open-air art installations in the world. It is still there, slowly weathering, and it tells you something...

Babur, the Timurid prince who would eventually found the Mughal Empire, spent time in Osh in the late 15th century and built a small meditation house on the eastern peak of Sulaiman-Too to use as a retreat. That house still stands, rebuilt but on the original foundations, and from its terrace you can see the Fergana Valley stretching out in three directions, the same view Babur described in his...

Two days in China means two days in Beijing, and two days in Beijing means choosing between covering the obvious landmarks and covering them properly. The answer is to do fewer things more slowly: the Forbidden City alone needs three hours, Mutianyu section of the Great Wall needs a full day once you factor in the 90-minute bus ride each way, and the hutongs are most interesting if you are not...

Every year between late February and April, agricultural burning across the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai, combined with smoke drifting from Myanmar and Laos, creates an air quality crisis that can push the AQI above 700 on the worst days. The city that receives nearly ten million visitors per year has a season when the mountains are invisible behind haze and N95 masks become daily equipment....

Before February 1945, Dresden was called “the Florence of the Elbe.” Over two nights, Allied bombing raids killed between 22,700 and 25,000 people and destroyed most of the city. The Zwinger, the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper: all were reduced to rubble. What you see in the Altstadt today is a meticulous reconstruction, completed over decades, some of it not finished until 2005 when the...

Djibouti is about the size of Wales, borders three countries it cannot easily be confused with, and sits at the southern entrance to the Red Sea at one of the busiest shipping lanes on Earth. It contains the lowest point in Africa, one of the saltiest lakes in the world, a prehistoric volcanic crater, an ancient juniper forest that is among the least-visited nature reserves on the continent, and,...

For most of its existence, Samarkand was considered the geographic centre of the world. It sat at the intersection of the Silk Road routes connecting China to Rome, India to Persia, and every major trading civilisation of the medieval period passed goods, ideas, and scholars through it. The Registan, built in the 15th century under Tamerlane’s heirs, remains one of the most compositionally...

Lushan National Park The Mountain That Changed Chinese History Twice In the summer of 1959, the senior leadership of the Chinese Communist Party gathered on the slopes of Mount Lu at the resort town of Guling for what became one of the most consequential political meetings in modern Chinese history. The Lushan Conference, held in the mountain villas that nationalist and colonial-era elites had...

Salvador was the first capital of colonial Brazil and the port of entry for more enslaved Africans than anywhere else in the Americas. That history has produced something specific: the most African city in the Western Hemisphere, with a cuisine, a music culture, a martial art (capoeira), and a religious tradition (Candomble) that are unlike anywhere else in Brazil. The city gets 3.5 million...

Two days in Rome is not enough to be thorough, but it is enough to get the sequence right: the ancient city first, the Vatican second, the food throughout. The mistake is trying to cover too much ground between sites and ending up exhausted and behind schedule by mid-afternoon. Pick fewer things and walk to them. Getting In Fiumicino Airport (FCO) is 30 km from central Rome. The Leonardo Express...

Monaco 5-Day Itinerary Monaco is 2.02 square kilometres. The entire principality fits inside Central Park with room to spare, and yet it contains a Formula 1 street circuit, three Michelin three-star restaurants, the world’s most famous casino, and the kind of density of supercars that registers as absurd within an hour of arrival. Five days here requires using the principality as a base for...

Slovenia is one of the more practical countries in Europe to visit without a car if you concentrate on Ljubljana and Bled, and one of the countries where having a car matters enormously once you want to reach the Soca Valley or the karst cave systems in the southwest. This itinerary accounts for that split: the first two days work well on public transport, the later days are significantly better...

Mexico City sits at 2,240 metres above sea level, making it one of the highest capital cities on Earth. The altitude catches people off-guard: what feels like mild fatigue on arrival is often early altitude adjustment. Drink water aggressively on your first day, take the first evening slowly, and the rest of the trip will be easier for it. Visa: Citizens of the US, Canada, EU countries, Australia,...

Oslo is one of Europe’s most expensive cities and also, by most measures, one of the easiest to enjoy on a well-planned trip. The key adjustment visitors need to make is accepting that the food and transport costs are simply what they are, and focusing on what Oslo does at no cost at all: fjord swimming in summer, walking trails from the city edge, free museum days, and a public life that...

Czech Republic 4-Day Itinerary Prague is one of the most visited cities in Europe and its Old Town is correspondingly crowded; Charles Bridge at midday in summer is a slow shuffle between tour groups. The antidote is an early morning start (the bridge is near-empty before 8 AM), two day trips that most visitors skip, and a realistic understanding that the beer here costs less than bottled water...

Kiribati is consistently ranked among the least-visited countries in the world, not because it lacks things to see but because getting there requires genuine commitment. The country straddles the equator across 33 atolls in the central Pacific, the highest point of land is three metres above sea level, and the entire nation faces probable inundation from rising seas within decades. That context...

The Bahamas has 700 islands, 30 of which are inhabited, and most tourists never leave Nassau’s two square miles of resort zone. Five days done thoughtfully includes Harbour Island’s three miles of pink sand, Exuma’s swimming pigs, and at least one evening at the Arawak Cay fish fry with a fried snapper and a Sands beer, which is what people who actually live here eat on a Friday...

6-Day New Orleans Itinerary New Orleans is the only American city with no dominant cultural ancestor. French, Spanish, African, Creole, Haitian, and German streams mixed here under conditions that produced a cuisine, a music, and an architecture that belong to nowhere else. The French Quarter is where most first-time visitors spend most of their time, and it is fine, but the more interesting...

Kizhi Pogost: Twenty-Two Wooden Domes on a Lake Onega Island The Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi was built in 1714 without a single metal nail, rises to 37 meters through 22 tiered domes covered in aspen shingles, and has been standing for more than 300 years in a climate that regularly drops to minus 30 degrees Celsius in winter. The story that a carpenter named Nestor threw his axe into...

East Timor (Timor-Leste): 2-Day Itinerary Atauro Island, visible from Dili’s waterfront on most mornings, sits above what marine biologists from Conservation International identified in 2016 as the highest fish biodiversity of any reef system on Earth: 642 species of fish recorded in a single survey. The capital of the world’s youngest nation is also one of the most undervisited...