San Marino Historic Centre and Mount Titano: A Comprehensive Guide San Marino has run itself as a self-governing republic since roughly the 13th century, which makes it the reason UNESCO put this place on the list, not the postcard views. Everything else, the towers, the walls, the cobbled lanes climbing Mount Titano, exists as physical evidence that a tiny state on a limestone ridge managed to...

A Guide to Aksum Current Travel Status: Read This First As of 2026, multiple governments - the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia among them - advise against all travel to the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, where Aksum is located. Since January 2026 there have been renewed clashes in the region including reports of drone strikes, and the security situation remains volatile. Aksum itself is...

A written language made almost entirely of pictograms, still used by living priests for actual ceremonies rather than preserved behind museum glass, survives in exactly one place on earth: the hills around Lijiang. That’s the Dongba script of the Naxi people, and it’s a big part of why UNESCO listed this Yunnan town in 1997, alongside a street plan that snakes without the rigid...

Taj Mahal: A Visitor’s Guide Shah Jahan spent the last eight years of his life imprisoned in the Agra Red Fort, with a direct view across the Yamuna River to the mausoleum he had built for his wife. When he died in 1666, his body was carried across the river and placed beside hers; the only instance in the entire symmetric plan of the Taj Mahal where the axis breaks, because his tomb is...

Get to Fushimi Inari before 8am or skip the famous torii gate tunnel entirely. The shrine has no closing hours and no entrance fee, but by mid-morning the lower gates become a shuffling queue for photos, while a 7am arrival gets you the vermilion corridor essentially empty. Kyoto also quietly scrapped its old 700 yen bus-only day pass back in 2024, so load an IC card like Icoca instead and tap in...

Skip the taxi stand at Galeao and open Uber or 99 instead. A ride to Copacabana or Ipanema runs roughly 60 to 90 reais through an app versus 150 to 200 reais for a metered yellow taxi, plus tolls on either option along the Linha Vermelha expressway. Travel time swings from 30 minutes with light traffic to over an hour during the weekday rush windows of 7 to 9am and 5 to 8pm, so build in buffer if...

Marco Polo’s Contemporary Called This Swahili City One of the World’s Great Ports, and Almost Nobody Visits It Now The 14th-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta stopped at Kilwa Kisiwani and called it one of the most beautiful and well-built towns he’d seen anywhere, ranking it alongside the great cities of his era. Today you can walk through its ruins with almost no other...

Historical Monuments of Mtskheta: A Comprehensive Guide for Tourists Every church in Mtskheta is free to enter. No tickets, no reservations, no combined passes to weigh against each other, which is worth knowing before you plan a budget around admission fees that simply do not exist here. Georgia’s ancient capital, about 20 kilometers northwest of Tbilisi, packs its entire historical core...

Day 1: Exploring Sharm El Sheikh Forget asking your taxi driver to turn the meter on here, because almost none of them use one, and the standard tourist quote from the airport to Naama Bay routinely runs three to five times what a resident pays for the same short hop. Agreeing a fixed price before you get in, or booking a transfer through your hotel in advance, is the only reliable way to avoid an...

Trying to visit the ATM cave and Caracol on the same day, as some quick-generated itineraries suggest, is not realistic. The ATM cave tour alone runs a full day out of San Ignacio: a 45-minute drive, a 45-minute jungle hike with river crossings, then hours inside the cave itself viewing calcified Maya sacrificial remains. Caracol is a separate multi-hour trip in the opposite direction, often...

Exploring Battle Abbey and Battlefield: A Guide for Visitors The arrow through King Harold’s eye, the single image everyone associates with 1066, may not have been in the original Bayeux Tapestry at all. Conservation research suggests the detail was altered or introduced during a nineteenth-century restoration of the tapestry, which means the most famous death in English history has been...

Siem Reap, Cambodia: 5-Day Itinerary If your flight lands at “Siem Reap International Airport,” check your ticket again. That airport closed to scheduled traffic in October 2023, replaced by Siem Reap Angkor International Airport, a genuinely different facility about 50 kilometers east of town, roughly 45 to 60 minutes by road. Arrange a hotel transfer or agree a fixed taxi price...

Sally Lunn’s occupies a building dating to around 1482, and the cellar excavation beneath it turned up a Roman hypocaust and mosaic fragments, meaning people were likely feeding travelers on this exact spot two thousand years before the bun the place is famous for was ever baked. Day 1: The City Center Morning: Start at Sally Lunn’s, in North Parade Passage, for the Bath bun, a large...

Munich, Germany: 6-Day Itinerary Book your Neuschwanstein Castle ticket before you land, not on the day. The official ticket office opens reservations up to three months out and the castle regularly sells out its daily slots in summer, so anyone planning a day trip on the fly is gambling with the trip’s biggest highlight. Day 1: Arrival and City Center Exploration The S1 and S8 S-Bahn lines...

Robot Restaurant in Kabukicho, the neon-and-drums spectacle that used to close out every Shinjuku night in guidebooks, shut down for good in 2023. If a hostel flyer still points you there, ignore it; the building’s been converted to something else entirely. That single closure has quietly outdated most Tokyo itineraries still floating online, so treat any Shinjuku evening plan with a healthy...

Metro Manila is sixteen cities stitched together with almost no visible seams, which means the version of Manila most visitors actually experience is Makati or BGC, not the old walled city most guidebooks lead with. Both approaches are valid, but they are different trips, and it helps to know which one you are planning before you land. Getting in from NAIA Ninoy Aquino International Airport sits...

Guide to the Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük Roofs as streets, and a goddess theory that fell apart Nobody built doors at ground level here. Houses at Çatalhöyük were entered through holes in the roof, using ladders, because the settlement had no streets in the way we understand them; instead people walked across rooftops and dropped down into whichever mud-brick box they lived in, packed wall to...

Cocos Island National Park: A Tropical Paradise for Adventurous Travelers You cannot simply visit this island There is no ferry, no day trip, no resort dock. Cocos Island, or Isla del Coco, sits about 550 kilometers off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, and the only realistic way to get there is a multi-day liveaboard dive expedition departing from Puntarenas, with the crossing itself taking...

Day 1: Stavanger City Centre Sola Airport sits close enough to the centre that the Flybussen express covers it in about 25 minutes for roughly 110 to 140 kroner, running every 15 to 20 minutes through the day. The cheaper option is city bus route 42, a single ticket for around 38 kroner, though the full route takes closer to an hour since it stops far more often. Stavanger has no tram network...

Here’s the geography problem with cramming the Gobi Desert into a two-day Mongolia trip: even flying, it’s roughly ninety minutes each way to reach the Gobi’s main attractions, and the Flaming Cliffs, Yolyn Am, and the Khongoryn sand dunes sit hours apart from each other on rough dirt roads once you land. Actual Gobi tours run a minimum of three to four days by air and closer to...

Title: 6-Day Albania Travel Itinerary Albania spent decades sealed off under one of Europe’s most paranoid communist regimes, which is precisely why a country with Roman amphitheaters, Ottoman hill towns, and a coastline rivaling Croatia’s still costs a third of what its neighbors charge. Six days is tight for a country this layered, but it is enough to string together the coast, the...

Lyon has roughly 500 traboules threaded through Vieux Lyon, Croix-Rousse, and the Presqu’ile, but only about 80 of them are actually open to the public, and they only exist because residents agreed decades ago to keep them accessible between 7am and 7pm. These are private building entrances, not tourist infrastructure, so treat them accordingly: quiet voices, no lingering photo shoots...

Royal Tombs of the Joseon Dynasty: A Comprehensive Guide Forty tombs, eighteen separate sites, five and a half centuries of continuous royal burial practice, and one Gangnam subway stop puts you inside the whole system without leaving Seoul city limits. That last part surprises people most: a genuinely ancient UNESCO landscape sits eight minutes’ walk from Seolleung Station, wedged between...

Old City of Sanaa: What This Guide Actually Needs to Say Let’s be direct about something most travel content on this site skips past. This is not a destination you should be planning a trip to right now. The US State Department rates Yemen Level 4, Do Not Travel, its highest risk category, and that advisory was most recently renewed in December 2025, citing terrorism, active conflict,...

5-Day Itinerary for Travelling in the West Bank A word on timing and safety before anything else, because it matters more here than in almost any other itinerary on this site. As of 2026, the US State Department advises Reconsider Travel for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, citing terrorism and civil unrest, and non-emergency government personnel were authorized to leave the region in February of...

Cusco sits at 3,399 meters, high enough that most visitors feel it within hours of landing, headache, breathlessness on stairs, occasionally nausea. The single best fix isn’t coca tea, though it helps, it’s simply not planning anything strenuous on day one. Airport taxis run about 35 to 55 soles to the historic center from official counters inside the terminal, worth the extra few...

There’s a frog carved into the facade of the University of Salamanca and generations of students have believed that spotting it unassisted on your first look means good exam luck for the year. It’s a small, half-hidden detail perched near a carved skull on the ornate plateresque facade, and the crowd of tourists squinting up at it every afternoon is as good a summary of Salamanca as...

Climb 364 steps up bare rock in tropical heat, past troops of macaques crashing through the branches overhead, and you reach a set of caves that has been in continuous use as a place of worship for roughly 2,000 years. That’s the honest physical reality of visiting Dambulla, and it’s worth setting the expectation before the history, because the climb itself, taking 10 to 20 minutes...

The honest starting point for this itinerary is that most Western governments, including the US and Australia, still list Syria as a do-not-travel destination as of 2026, even after Bashar al-Assad’s government fell in December 2024. That advisory sits alongside a genuinely different reality some independent travelers report on the ground in Damascus itself, where tourism police now have a...

Marco Polo sheep do not live in Ala Archa National Park, that species is a high-Pamir animal found much further south and east, mostly Tajikistan and the far reaches of southern Kyrgyzstan, and no day-trip park outside Bishkek will show you one. What Ala Archa actually has is ibex, argali, marmots sunning themselves on rocks above 2,500 meters, golden eagles, and a genuinely elusive population of...

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...

Three days is genuinely tight for both Dubai and Abu Dhabi, since the drive between them runs about 90 minutes each way outside rush hour and closer to two hours if you hit the 7 to 9am or 5 to 7pm crunch on Sheikh Zayed Road. Plan the order below with that math in mind rather than trying to bounce between cities more than once. Day 1: Dubai Morning: Breakfast in Downtown Dubai at any of the cafes...

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...

The unmarked black-roofed cars circling Keleti station and the airport arrivals hall are not licensed taxis, they’re the so-called freelancers who rig meters to run four times the real fare. A legitimate Budapest taxi is yellow with yellow plates and a fare table on the dashboard, or just use Bolt or City Taxi and skip the guesswork. The 100E express bus into the center costs about 2,500...

The Enchanting Old Town of Corfu: A Comprehensive Guide for Tourists The best collection of Chinese and Japanese art in Greece sits inside a Venetian-era palace on Corfu’s seafront, and almost nobody visiting the Old Town knows it’s there. That’s the kind of layered, mismatched history this town runs on: Byzantine bones, Venetian skin, French arcades, British parade grounds, and,...

At baggage reclaim in Geneva Airport, before you even reach passport control, there is a ticket machine handing out a free 80-minute Unireso transit pass covering the entire Tout Geneve zone. Almost nobody grabs it because almost nobody knows it exists, and it will get you and your bags all the way into the city centre on the train, tram, or bus at zero cost, which is a genuinely rare thing to say...

Chefchaouen sits roughly eight hours by road from Ouarzazate, which means any itinerary that tries to bolt the blue city and Fes onto the tail end of a Marrakech-and-desert trip is fantasy scheduling, not a plan you can actually drive. Three days is enough to do Marrakech and one serious day trip south into the Atlas properly, so that’s what this covers; save the north for a separate trip...

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...

Cusco 6-Day Itinerary There is no such thing as a walk-up ticket to Machu Picchu anymore. Every visitor books a specific date and a specific entry window, morning slots run 6am through 11am and afternoon slots noon through 2pm, and turning up even significantly late for your slot can mean denied entry. Build the rest of this trip around that fixed point, not the other way around. Day 1: Arrival...

Ultimate Guide to Traveling in Bangkok Overview If a stranger near the Grand Palace tells you it’s closed for a holiday and offers to take you somewhere better in his tuk-tuk, walk away immediately, it’s one of the oldest and most consistent scams running in this city, and it ends at a gem shop where the driver gets a commission on whatever you’re pressured into buying. Bangkok...

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...