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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A city nicknamed Rongcheng, the Banyan City, for the ancient trees that used to shade its streets, Fuzhou gets skipped by most foreign visitors heading straight for Xiamen or Fuzhou’s more famous southern neighbor. That’s a mistake for anyone who wants an old merchant quarter that hasn’t been fully sanitized for tourists yet, plus fish balls that put most seafood dumplings...

Tokyo 4-Day Itinerary The tuna auction moved out of Tsukiji in 2018, permanently, to a sterile new complex on a man-made island called Toyosu, and yet Tsukiji itself never actually closed. What tourists loved about the old market, the tamagoyaki stalls, the knife shops, the standing sushi counters, stayed exactly where it was. Anyone still writing about “Tsukiji Fish Market or the new Toyosu...

You cannot pop out for dinner at the Ithaa Undersea Restaurant while based in Male, it sits five meters below the surface at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island resort, a 30 minute seaplane flight away from the capital, not a stroll from your hotel. That mix-up shows up in a lot of generic Maldives itineraries and it matters, because it points to a bigger truth about this trip: Male itself is a...

7-Day Itinerary: Exploring the United States (US) Philadelphia to Niagara Falls by Amtrak is not a seven-hour hop, it is closer to twelve hours with a connection, which makes any plan that tries to squeeze Philadelphia, Niagara Falls, and Chicago into the tail end of a one-week trip a logistical trap rather than a realistic itinerary. Distances in the US are the thing first-time visitors...

Forget exchanging money before you land. The Bahamian dollar has been pegged one to one with the U.S. dollar since 1966, both currencies circulate side by side everywhere, and most hotels and restaurants take either without blinking. This itinerary sticks to Nassau, New Providence, and Grand Bahama rather than chasing four separate islands in five days, since inter-island flights run only a few...

As of 2026, the US State Department has Lebanon at Level 4, Do Not Travel, its highest advisory tier, citing airstrikes, drone activity, and rocket fire occurring in the south, in parts of Beirut, and specifically in the Beqaa Valley, which is exactly where a Baalbek and Ksara Winery day trip would take you. Non-emergency US government personnel were ordered out of the country earlier this year...

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...

Damascus, Syria: 6-Day Itinerary Read the advisory situation before reading anything else in this guide. Bashar al-Assad’s government fell in December 2024, and the new administration has since opened visa-on-arrival access and reopened sites like Krak des Chevaliers and Palmyra to tourists for the first time in over a decade. That is real and worth noting. It does not mean Damascus is a...

A smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz’s now runs close to 17 dollars, up from the roughly 9 or 10 it cost a decade ago, and the line still wraps down Saint-Laurent most afternoons regardless. That’s the honest starting point for a Montreal trip: prices have moved, some landmarks are mid-renovation, and a plan built on outdated information will waste real hours of a short visit. Day 1: Old...

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...

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...

US and EU passport holders can enter Serbia visa-free for up to 90 days within a six-month window, no ETIAS or advance application needed, just a passport valid at least 90 days past your departure date. That single fact removes most of the planning friction for this trip; the harder part is deciding how much of the north to fit into six days. Day 1: Belgrade Land at Nikola Tesla Airport and take...

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...

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...

5-Day Itinerary for Exploring Quito, Ecuador Mindo cloud forest and Cotopaxi volcano sit on opposite sides of Quito, roughly two hours out in entirely different directions, and no itinerary that puts them on the same afternoon has actually driven either road. Combined, the driving alone runs five to six hours before you’ve hiked a single trail. Pick one per day. This version does exactly...