K’gari (Fraser Island): Sand, Dingoes, and Perma-Wet Shoes K’gari – restored in 2023 from Fraser Island to its Butchulla name, meaning “paradise” – is 122 kilometres long, 22 kilometres wide at its broadest, and made entirely of sand. Every road is sand. The beach is the main highway. There are no sealed roads on the island. If you arrive in a regular sedan, you...

Pyramids of Giza, Egypt The three pyramids on the Giza plateau were built over a period of about 85 years in the 26th century BCE, during the reigns of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, at its original height of 146.5 metres, was the tallest structure built by humans for 3,800 years – a record not broken until medieval European cathedral spires in the 14th century. The...

Asturias never became part of the Moorish conquest of Iberia. The Asturian kingdom, founded in the 730s after the Battle of Covadonga, was the starting point of the eight-century Reconquista. That historical isolation helps explain why the region is greener, cooler, and more internally coherent than the Spain most tourists visit. It also has the best cider in Spain, which it pours from a height to...

The San Fermin Running of the Bulls: Hemingway Made It Famous, Local Ordinance Still Fines You for Carrying a Camera The San Fermin Festival in Pamplona runs July 6 to 14 each year. The encierro – the running of the bulls through the old city streets from the Santo Domingo corrals to the Plaza de Toros – takes place every morning at 8am sharp for all eight days. Six bulls, six steers,...

Lake Malawi: Freshwater Snorkelling With More Fish Species Than All of Europe Combined Lake Malawi (Lake Nyasa in Tanzania and Mozambique) is the ninth largest lake in the world by volume, 580 kilometres long and 80 kilometres at its widest. It holds more fish species than any other lake on earth – around 1,000 species, the majority of them cichlids found nowhere else. The mbuna cichlids...

The Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park, British Columbia In 1909, American paleontologist Charles Walcott was riding a horse near the Field area in the Canadian Rockies when his horse slipped on a section of exposed shale. The rock split, revealing fossils of extraordinary detail: soft-bodied marine animals from 508 million years ago, preserved in a completeness that should have been impossible....

The Normandy American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, France 9,388 white marble crosses and Stars of David face the sea at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, each marking one American service member who died in the Normandy campaign. The cemetery occupies 172 acres of bluff directly above Omaha Beach, where on June 6, 1944, the US First and Twenty-Ninth Infantry Divisions came ashore in the face of prepared...

The Minaret of Jam was entirely unknown to the international academic world until 1957, when an Afghan government survey team working in the Ghor province of central Afghanistan reported a 65-metre fired-brick tower standing at the confluence of two rivers in a remote highland valley. The tower had been there since the late 12th century. The Aimaq nomadic people who lived around it had simply not...

King Francis I spent only around 40 days total inside Chambord during his reign, despite ordering the château’s construction in 1519 and spending the equivalent of several years’ worth of the French royal budget on it. The result, 440 rooms and one of the most ambitious architectural projects of the French Renaissance, sat mostly empty for long stretches of its early history. That...

New Orleans: Bourbon Street Is the Worst Place to Experience It Bourbon Street in the French Quarter is the most marketed version of New Orleans and the least representative. The street itself is a block-long sequence of daiquiri bars, strip clubs, and tourist shops primarily aimed at groups celebrating bachelor parties and conventions. It smells of stale alcohol before noon. The jazz you hear...

Great Smoky Mountains: The Most Visited National Park in the US and How to Actually Enjoy It The park charges no entrance fee, requires no reservation for day visits, and draws 13 million visitors per year – more than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined. That single economic fact explains both its popularity and its primary problem. The main roads and popular trails are genuinely overcrowded...

Mosteiro dos Jerónimos: Lisbon’s Manueline Masterpiece The monastery took a century to build and was paid for almost entirely with the proceeds of the spice trade. That context matters when you stand in front of it: Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India in 1498, and within a few years the Portuguese crown was rich enough to commission one of the most elaborate stone buildings in...

Only 30 percent of Choquequirao has been excavated. The site is larger than what’s been uncovered, and what’s visible is more intact than Machu Picchu because almost no one goes there. The four-to-five-day round-trip trek from Cachora that is the only access route is specifically designed to be difficult by the absence of any road or cable car, which means the people who arrive are the...

Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur For six years starting in 1998, the Petronas Twin Towers were the tallest buildings on earth, a fact that matters less now than the quality of the architecture. Argentine-born Cesar Pelli designed each tower on a floor plan of two overlapping squares forming an eight-pointed star, with semi-circular infill panels between the points – a geometric pattern...

Bay of Fundy At Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick, you can walk on the ocean floor at low tide and, six hours later, the same ground will be under 12 metres of water. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world – around 16 metres at the upper reaches – because of a resonance effect: the bay’s natural oscillation period (approximately 13 hours) nearly matches the tidal...

Andros Island, The Bahamas Andros is the largest island in the Bahamas by land area yet remains one of the least visited. That contrast is precisely what draws travellers seeking something genuine. The island stretches across roughly 2,300 square miles of pine forests, mangrove creeks, tidal flats, and ocean-blue inland lakes, 30 miles west of Nassau, with large stretches that remain roadless and...

Whakarewarewa Forest: Giant Californian Redwoods in the Middle of New Zealand The redwoods at Whakarewarewa were planted in 1901 as a forestry trial by the New Zealand government. The experiment was to find which imported species grew fastest for timber use. The Californian coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) that won the informal competition are now over 70 metres tall, the timber angle was...

Wiener Riesenrad: Vienna’s Most Honest Tourist Attraction The Riesenrad was built in 1897 to celebrate the 50th jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph I, which already tells you something about the kind of monarch Franz Joseph was: he commissioned a giant Ferris wheel rather than a triumphal arch. The wheel originally had 30 cabins; after it was destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt, only 15 remained,...

Amber Fort, Jaipur Amber Fort (Amer Fort) rises on a rocky hill 11 kilometres north of Jaipur, visible from the road long before you arrive. The drive along the lake at its base, with the fort reflected in the water and the Aravalli hills rising behind, produces one of the more photogenic approaches to any building in Rajasthan. Construction began in 1592 under Raja Man Singh, a prominent Rajput...

The Amazon: Two Million Square Miles of Forest, and One Critical Logistics Decision You need to decide which gateway city to use. Manaus (Brazil) is the most developed hub, with the most tour operators and the best-connected airport. Iquitos (Peru) is accessible only by air or river – no road connects it to the outside world – which gives visits there a frontier quality that Manaus,...

Chalk Hill Figures of Southern England: Cerne Abbas Giant and Beyond The Cerne Abbas Giant is 55 metres tall, carved into a Dorset hillside above the village of Cerne Abbas, and is anatomically explicit in a way that prevents the National Trust from using a full photograph of it in most promotional materials. The 26-foot phallus has attracted academic papers, fertility legends, and a good deal of...

The Church on the Island at Lake Bled Lake Bled’s island church is one of those places that has been photographed so many times the image has gone slightly abstract in the mind before you arrive. Then you see it from the shore – a small Baroque bell tower rising from a wooded island in an impossibly green alpine lake, mountains behind – and the cliché reasserts itself as plain...

On a July bank holiday weekend, the road into Bowness-on-Windermere can be backed up for 45 minutes. The car parks fill by 11am. The lake itself is ringed with people. Wordsworth would have been appalled. The Lake District earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 2017, partly in recognition of the pastoral landscape that shaped his poetry, and the resulting visitor numbers are working hard to...

Darwin: Bombed in 1942, Flattened by Cyclone Tracy in 1974, Still Going On 19 February 1942, Japanese aircraft carried out the largest foreign attack on Australian soil, killing over 230 people in Darwin in the first of 64 raids. On Christmas Eve 1974, Cyclone Tracy destroyed roughly 70 percent of the city’s buildings in a single night. Darwin has been rebuilt twice in living memory, which...

The name “Bridge of Sighs” was not what Antonio Contino called the bridge when he built it in 1600. That name came from Lord Byron in the 19th century, who imagined prisoners crossing it for the last time and sighing at their final view of Venice through the small windows. In reality, the bridge connected the interrogation rooms in the Doge’s Palace to the New Prison next door,...

Bagan, Myanmar: 3,500 Temples and the Problem of Too Many Choices At sunrise on the Bagan plain, you might be watching from the top of an 11th-century pagoda as hot air balloons drift above a landscape of several thousand temples in every direction – and there will be thirty other people next to you on the same pagoda doing the same thing. Bagan receives enough visitors now that the...

Segovia is the correct Madrid day trip. Not Toledo, which is overcrowded and overpriced; Segovia, which is 28 minutes by Avant high-speed train from Chamartín, costs around EUR 15 to 20 return, and has a Roman aqueduct, a Disney castle, and the best roasted suckling pig in Castile all within a 30-minute walk of each other. The Aqueduct The Roman Aqueduct runs through the city for approximately 900...

Palais des Papes: For 68 Years, This Was the Centre of Western Christianity Between 1309 and 1377, the papacy relocated from Rome to Avignon. Seven consecutive popes lived here, moved by a combination of Italian political instability and French royal pressure. The palace built for them is consequently enormous: the largest Gothic building in Europe at 15,000 square metres across two main...

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: The Current Situation and What the Site Holds Tours to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are suspended as of mid-2026. The zone, about 100 km north of Kyiv in northern Ukraine, has been inaccessible to civilians since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Russian forces occupied the site in the war’s early days before withdrawing, and the damage to...

The Las Vegas Strip The Strip is a 4.2-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South running from Mandalay Bay at the south end to the Stratosphere at the north. Everything of consequence in tourist Las Vegas sits on or within a short walk of this corridor. The casinos are the architecture; most of the major ones are large enough to require 15-20 minutes to cross on foot from one end to another.

The Smithsonian: 19 Museums, All Free The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum complex: 19 museums, 21 libraries, 9 research centres, the National Zoo, and approximately 155 million total objects in the collections. Annual visitors number around 28 million. Everything on the National Mall is free. The question is not whether to go but which museums to prioritise, given that...

Charles Bridge (Karlův most) was begun under Emperor Charles IV in 1357. The date of the first stone was apparently chosen by Charles himself with astrological precision: 9 July 1357 at 5:31am, which reads as a numerical palindrome 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1 and was believed to give the bridge magical protection. Whether or not this worked depends on your view of numerological protection, but the bridge...

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota The BWCAW covers over 1 million acres of lake and forest along the Minnesota-Canada border, with more than 1,200 lakes connected by a maze of canoe routes and portage trails. No motorboats are permitted in most of the area. No roads lead to the interior. Entry requires a permit. That’s the appeal: genuine wilderness that takes actual effort to...

Torres del Paine: Planning the Trip That Actually Works The 2025-2026 season at Torres del Paine introduced stricter daily capacity limits, tighter regulations on unguided hikers, and booking systems that punish planning gaps. Popular January dates sold out within days of reservation windows opening in April 2025. If you want to hike the W Trek in December or January, booking 9-12 months ahead is...

Cappadocia: The Volcanic Landscape That Early Christians Carved Their Churches Into About 30 million years ago, three volcanoes erupted repeatedly over what is now central Anatolia, depositing thick layers of ash that compressed into soft tuff rock. Wind and water erosion over millennia shaped it into the landscape of fairy chimneys, cones, and pillars that defines Cappadocia today. Early...

Meiji Jingu: 70 Hectares of Forest in the Middle of Tokyo Meiji Jingu receives three million visitors on the first three days of January, making it the most-attended Hatsumode (first shrine visit of the New Year) in Japan. The queue on January 1 can mean a three-hour wait to approach the prayer hall. This fact is worth knowing not as a deterrent but as a context: Meiji Jingu on an ordinary weekday...

The Black Forest cake (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte) you can buy at a bakery in Triberg is a genuinely different thing from what is sold under the same name most of the world. The original is made with specific local Schwarzwald cherries, Kirschwasser (cherry schnapps) from the region, and a whipped cream proportion that looks architecturally improbable. The commercial versions exported everywhere...

Capri The honest version of Capri is two islands in one. The one that exists during daytime in July – crowded, expensive, full of daytrippers who’ve paid 25 euros each way from Naples just to stand in line for limoncello – is real but not the whole story. The one that exists after the last ferry leaves in the evening, when the Piazzetta clears and the light goes gold over the...

The Atacama Desert has weather stations at certain interior plateaus that have never recorded rain. Not less than average rain; literally zero. It is the driest non-polar desert on earth, spanning over 1,000 kilometres of northern Chile between the Andes and the Pacific. The aridity that makes it hostile is the same quality that makes it one of the best places on earth to look at the sky, which is...

Bulgaria gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, after a war in which Russia provided the decisive military support. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was built between 1882 and 1912 as a memorial to the 200,000 Russian soldiers who died in that war. The dedication to a Russian saint reflected genuine gratitude; Bulgaria and Russia had religious and cultural ties through Orthodox...

Gorges du Verdon, Provence The Verdon Gorge is the largest canyon in Europe – carved by the Verdon River through the limestone plateau of Haute-Provence over several million years. At its deepest point the gorge drops about 700 metres. The water at the bottom is a startling turquoise, produced by dissolved minerals and the clarity of a river fed by snowmelt. From the rim road, looking down,...

Atlantic City Boardwalk: America’s Oldest, Survived Prohibition, the Depression, and the Atlantic Ocean The boardwalk was built in 1870 to solve a specific problem: hotel guests were tracking sand from the beach into the lobby of the United States Hotel, and the management was tired of it. The solution was a temporary wooden walkway connecting the hotels to the shore. The...

Pulpit Rock (Preikestolen): The Reality Behind the Photograph The photograph of Preikestolen shows a flat rock jutting over Lysefjord 604 metres below, with one or two people standing at the edge looking impossibly calm. In peak summer, reality is closer to sixty people standing there simultaneously. That is not a reason to skip it; the view is still extraordinary. It is a reason to think...

Amalfi Coast: The Drive Is the Problem and the Point The SS163 coastal road is a single lane in each direction, carved into cliff faces above the Tyrrhenian Sea, with hairpin bends designed for donkey carts rather than tourist coaches. In July and August it reaches a condition somewhere between gridlock and a slow-motion fistfight. The Amalfi Coast is beautiful in the way that things are beautiful...

The Great Orme Tramway has run from Llandudno town to the summit of the Great Orme headland since 1902 using the same cable-hauled system, the same original wooden double-deck Edwardian cars, and substantially the same route. It is the only cable-hauled street tramway still operating in the United Kingdom. At 12 km/h up a 207-metre headland above the Irish Sea, it is slow, loud, and about as far...

Salzwelten: Salt Mines in the Austrian Alps Important update for visitors planning to see the Hallstatt salt mine: it closed in September 2025 for comprehensive reconstruction, including a new funicular railway, and is not expected to reopen until late June 2026. If you visit before July 2026, you cannot enter the Hallstatt mine. A bus shuttle to the Altaussee mine is available during closure....

In 1348, the Black Death killed roughly half of Siena’s population and permanently ended the city’s ambition to build the largest cathedral in Tuscany. Construction of a vastly expanded new nave had begun in the 1330s; the abandoned walls and the roofless Facciatone facade still stand on the south side of the cathedral square today, marking what would have been the most ambitious...

Brussels and the Manneken-Pis The Manneken-Pis is a 61-centimetre bronze boy urinating into a fountain. It has been doing this since 1619. The original statue is now in the Brussels City Museum for safekeeping and a copy stands at the corner of Rue de l’Etuve and Rue du Chene, five minutes’ walk southwest of the Grand Place. Visitors make a pilgrimage from across Europe to see it, and...

Chichen Itza: Going Beyond the Crowd Chichen Itza is one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world and one of the worst managed from a visitor experience perspective. The combination of UNESCO status, New Seven Wonders designation, and location on a day-trip circuit from the Cancun resorts means the site receives thousands of visitors per day in high season, concentrated between 10am...

Staying on the Prinsengracht rather than the more famous Herengracht or Keizersgracht is a genuine preference rather than a compromise. The Prinsengracht is the fourth and westernmost of Amsterdam’s main canals, running alongside the Jordaan neighbourhood: smaller houseboats, more neighbourhood cafes, the Westerkerk tower, and proximity to the Anne Frank House. The Andaz Amsterdam is the...