Perth is the most isolated large city on the planet, closer to Singapore than to Sydney, and it has spent decades building a dining, arts, and beach culture that owes nothing to what is happening on the east coast. Visitors who arrive expecting a smaller Melbourne leave surprised. The city is its own thing entirely. Arriving: Airport to the City Perth Airport (PER) is about 12 km from the CBD....

Spain 4-Day Itinerary Spain’s three most visited monuments, the Alhambra, the Real Alcazar, and the Prado, all require timed entry tickets booked well in advance. The Alhambra sells out months ahead in summer; the Alcazar sells out days to weeks ahead. Book all three before you book your flights, and this itinerary works. Skip this step and you will spend your trip staring at “no...

Paraguay receives fewer international tourists per year than any other country in South America, which is either a warning or an invitation depending on how you travel. The infrastructure is thin, the distances are real, and the rewards tend to be proportional to the effort. This itinerary assumes you fly into Asuncion, have a week, and are willing to move. Day 1: Asuncion, Arrival and the Old...

The Black Cuillin is made of gabbro, a volcanic rock so rough and grippy that mountaineers describe it as the best rock to climb on in Britain. The Black Cuillin is also the only mountain range in Scotland where a compass is unreliable: the gabbro contains enough iron to deflect the needle. This makes the ridge, at 12 kilometres long with 11 Munros, one of the most technically demanding in the...

A bowl of pho from the stall at 49 Bat Dan Street costs around 60,000 VND. The same bowl, served from a tourist-facing restaurant 200 metres away near Hoan Kiem Lake, can cost 400,000 VND. That fivefold difference is the single most important thing to understand before arriving in Hanoi: the city has two price systems operating simultaneously in the same streets, and navigating between them is the...

Budapest: What the Guidebooks Get Right, and What They Miss Budapest is one of the more photogenic capitals in Europe, and it knows it. The Parliament building lit up at night, the Chain Bridge, the thermal bath steam rising over Neo-Baroque tile work: these images have been circulating for decades and they are accurate. What the standard guides underplay is how much the city rewards slowing down,...

Four days is enough to move through the three cities that define Sweden’s western and southern geography: Stockholm in the east, Gothenburg on the west coast, and Malmö in the south, 20 minutes by train from Copenhagen. The country is expensive by most European standards, card-only in most venues, and English-friendly to a degree that makes navigation essentially frictionless. The mistake...

Six days is more time than most people spend in Bruges, and that is the point. Two days is enough to see the Markt, climb the Belfry, and eat waffles near the canal. Six days is enough to stop performing tourism and start actually being somewhere. The city rewards slowness in a way that a weekend rush cannot. Getting There Most visitors fly into Brussels Airport (BRU). The direct train from...

Sri Lanka 3-Day Itinerary Sri Lanka has the highest density of leopards of any protected area on Earth, a train journey rated among the world’s most scenic, and a coastline that swaps between monsoons on a six-month rhythm. Three days is genuinely not enough, but with the right routing you can see Galle’s Dutch colonial fort, the Ella highlands, and at least one sunrise over a tea...

The London Eye was assembled lying flat in the River Thames, floated into position on barges, then tilted upright over several weeks using strand jacks at a rate of two degrees per hour. Engineers paused the lift at 65 degrees for a full week to check the structure before completing the raise. When it finally stood vertical in 1999, it was the largest observation wheel in the world and an...

Pattaya, Thailand: 5-Day Travel Itinerary Pattaya sits 150 kilometres southeast of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand and has spent decades trading on a reputation that puts many people off going. That reputation is not entirely unfair, but it obscures a city with genuinely good beaches nearby, a credible cultural and art scene, and some of the best seafood restaurants in eastern Thailand. The key is...

Serbia 4 Day Itinerary Belgrade has more working riverfront club boats than any city in Europe, a Byzantine-era fortress above a major river confluence, some of the cheapest Michelin-quality food on the continent, and a coffee culture so serious that a 45-minute espresso in a good kafana is not considered slow service. This four-day itinerary covers Belgrade properly, then moves to Novi Sad and...

Guide to Exploring Historic Centre of Mexico City and Xochimilco A City Built on a Lake That No Longer Exists Mexico City sits where a lake used to be. When the Aztecs established Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325, they built it on a marshy platform in the middle of a high-altitude basin, connecting it to the mainland via three great causeways. The city that greeted Hernán Cortés...

Every tour guide in Agra will tell you Fatehpur Sikri was abandoned because it ran out of water. Historians disagree. The water-shortage story collapses under scrutiny: Babur chose this ridge as a camp in 1527 precisely because it had plentiful water, and the Mughal court maintained the site for decades after Akbar left. The real story is more political and more interesting. In 1585, Akbar’s...

Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte in Braga The Staircase That Was Never Meant to Be Easy The 583 steps of the Bom Jesus staircase were not built for convenience. They were built to exhaust you, and for several centuries, pilgrims have climbed them barefoot or on their knees, sometimes praying aloud at each step, earning the indulgences that Pope Clement XIV granted to this site in 1773. The idea...

They have been staring at the desert horizon for 4,500 years, and still, when you round the last bend of the Giza plateau and get your first unobstructed view, you stop walking. The Pyramids of Giza are not a disappointment. That in itself is remarkable. What most travel writing skips: the plateau looks utterly different from how photographs suggest. The three main pyramids are enormous in a way...

Visiting Uluru: What You Actually Need to Know Before You Go What you see at Uluru is only a fraction of what is there. The sandstone monolith rising 348 metres above the Northern Territory desert floor extends up to six kilometres underground, making it more akin to an iceberg than a rock. Most visitors grasp this fact intellectually and then forget it as soon as they are standing at the base,...

Bahamas 4-Day Itinerary The Bahamas is 700 islands and only a handful of them have roads. The tourists who arrive and leave disappointed are almost always the ones who stayed on Paradise Island and judged an archipelago by one resort’s swim-up bar. Four days done right means at least one full day away from Nassau, ideally on the water. Arrival: Getting from the Airport Without Getting Ripped...

Almaty sits at the foot of the Zailiysky Alatau range of the Tian Shan Mountains, at an altitude of 650 to 900 metres, which means snow-capped peaks are visible from the city centre on any clear day. It received more than 1.14 million tourists in the first half of 2025 alone, a 6.5 percent increase year on year, largely because it is finally on the radar of travellers who have exhausted the more...

Karnak Temple Complex covers roughly 100 hectares on the east bank of the Nile at Luxor. Construction began under Senusret I around 1971 BC and continued, with additions and modifications by successive pharaohs, until the Ptolemaic period ending around 30 BC. That is approximately 2,000 years of continuous building by rulers who each wanted to outdo or obliterate their predecessors. The result is...

Burj Khalifa On the morning of January 4, 2010, a building named Burj Dubai was officially renamed Burj Khalifa, after Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. The timing was not coincidental. Abu Dhabi had just delivered roughly twenty-five billion dollars in emergency funding to keep Dubai solvent after the 2008 financial crisis nearly brought the emirate to its knees. The...

Six horses, twelve crates, six huge wagons each pulled by thirty-two horses: that is what it took to move the Brandenburg Gate’s Quadriga from Paris back to Berlin in 1814. Do the arithmetic and you get 192 horses hauling a looted bronze chariot across Europe because a Prussian general had outwitted Napoleon. The gate itself was already twenty-three years old by then. It had been built as a...

Prehistoric Pile Dwellings Around the Alps What makes these lake villages extraordinary is not the fact that people lived on stilts over water five thousand years ago. It is what has survived. Stone tools survive anywhere. But the waterlogged sediment beneath Alpine lakes has preserved wood, textiles, seeds, leather, rope, and even the remains of meals. Archaeologists have identified what specific...

Hoi An’s Ancient Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the electricity goes off once a month and 1,000 silk lanterns take over. On those full-moon evenings the alleyways of the old trading port, built by Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese merchants in the 15th to 19th centuries, look the way they probably did before electric light arrived. The rest of the time, Hoi An is the kind of...

4-Day Itinerary for Exploring Bologna, Italy Bologna operates on the assumption that you already know what you want to eat. Its residents rank pasta above monuments, have been making ragù for centuries in ways they will defend loudly at dinner, and live under 40 km of medieval porticoes that are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Four days here is enough to eat well, walk everything important, and...

Sapporo does not behave like other Japanese cities. It was built on a North American grid plan by Meiji-era developers who hired foreign advisors from the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the wide boulevards that resulted make it feel unexpectedly spacious compared to Tokyo or Osaka. What it is famous for, miso ramen, fresh seafood, snow sculpture, and very good whisky, is all real...

On July 14, 1865, Edward Whymper and six companions reached the Matterhorn’s summit for the first time. It was the last of the great Alpine peaks to be climbed, the holdout, the one that had defeated Whymper seven times in four years. On the descent, Douglas Hadow slipped, pulling guide Michel Croz, Charles Hudson, and Lord Francis Douglas off the ridge. The rope connecting them to Whymper...

In July 2025, Tiwai Island and the Gola Forest were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, making Sierra Leone the most recent African country to gain such recognition. Most travellers still have not heard of either. For a country that spent the 1990s defined by conflict, Sierra Leone’s recovery has been remarkable and its beaches, wildlife corridors, and colonial-era history deserve a...

Mzab Valley What You Are Looking At Le Corbusier visited the M’Zab Valley twice, in 1931 and 1933, and came away with ideas that surfaced decades later in his most famous buildings. The spatial logic of the ksour, the way streets narrow and compress before opening into communal squares, the relationship between the mosque tower and the surrounding roofscape, the stripping away of ornament in...

Strasbourg manages to be the seat of the European Parliament, a major university city, and one of the most photographed canal districts in France without feeling confused about what it is. The German-French identity is not a tension here; it is the product, visible in the food, the language mixing on street signs, and the architecture. Six days is enough time to move past the postcard version....

Guadeloupe is shaped like a butterfly, which is not just a picturesque detail: it means the island’s two main halves, Grande-Terre and Basse-Terre, are separated by a narrow sea channel called the Riviere Salee, and they are completely different in character. One is flat, dry, and lined with resort beaches; the other is forested, volcanic, and topped with an active stratovolcano. Most...

San Francisco, USA 2 Day Itinerary Two days in San Francisco is a test of discipline. The city is compact enough to walk significant chunks of it yet varied enough that you can spend the entire time in three neighbourhoods and never feel like you have wasted your time. The fog is real, the hills are steeper than photographs suggest, and the food scene is legitimately excellent once you move away...

Jane Austen’s House Museum, Chawton Jane Austen wrote in secret. She worked at a small twelve-sided walnut table by the dining room window, on small pieces of paper that could be slipped under a blotter whenever visitors arrived. The door to the room had a notoriously audible squeak, which her nephew later recorded she deliberately left unrepaired, because its noise gave her warning enough...

Exploring the Ancient Wonders of Bagan Twelve centuries ago, a Burmese king began building on a dusty meander of the Ayeyarwady River and set in motion one of the most peculiar acts of collective devotion in human history. By the time the Pagan Empire fell in the late 13th century, more than 10,000 religious monuments had risen from the red-earth plain. Today, somewhere around 3,500 survive:...

The Eden Project, Cornwall The whole thing started with a sketch on a napkin in a pub in 1996. Tim Smit, who had already rescued and restored the Lost Gardens of Heligan nearby, was talking through an idea for a botanic garden inside a derelict china clay pit. The pit was 60 metres deep, its sides were unstable, and it sat 15 metres below the local water table. The design went through several...

Slovakia sits between Austria and Poland, shares a border with Hungary and the Czech Republic, and has somehow remained a secondary destination while its neighbours fill up with tour groups. That is an oversight worth exploiting. The capital is genuinely charming without being exhausting, the High Tatras are among the most dramatic mountain landscapes in Central Europe, and Spis Castle is one of...

Gardens by the Bay, Singapore: What the Brochure Gets Wrong One of the 18 Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay functions as a chimney. Most visitors photograph it without knowing that. Beneath the climbing plants and the LED lighting rig, that particular steel-and-concrete structure expels non-toxic fumes from a biomass boiler where plant waste from the gardens is burned for fuel. The whole operation...

Travel advisory (as of June 2026): Both the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the US State Department advise against all travel to Russia. The US State Department lists Russia at Level 4: Do Not Travel. Reasons include the ongoing war in Ukraine, drone strikes affecting civilian areas across the country, a documented risk of arbitrary detention for Western nationals, and...

Munich is not the cheap, rough-edged city that Berlin gets credit for being, and it does not try to be. It is expensive, orderly, extremely good-looking, and has the largest urban park in Europe, the oldest beer garden culture on the continent, and three world-class art museums within a ten-minute walk of each other. Five days here is enough time to get under the surface rather than just...

Seoul, South Korea 4 Day Itinerary Seoul is one of the easiest major cities in Asia to navigate as a first-time visitor: the subway system covers almost everywhere you need to go, English signage is widespread, and the food culture rewards curiosity at every price point. The challenge is not logistics but scope. This is a city of ten million people with five UNESCO-listed royal palace complexes,...

The Drakensberg: 40,000 Paintings, a 3,482-Metre Summit, and the Most Underrated Hiking in Africa The rock shelters of the Drakensberg hold roughly 40,000 individual San paintings across 600 recorded sites between Royal Natal National Park in the north and Bushman’s Neck in the south. Some of those images are 2,000 years old. Didima Gorge near Cathedral Peak, barely five kilometres long, has...

Brussels is the capital of a country that technically does not have a shared national identity, a city split between French and Dutch speakers that somehow became home to both the EU and NATO, and a place where the most famous monument is a small bronze child urinating into a fountain. It should not work, but it does. Four days here rewards curiosity and punishes anyone who stays only in the...

Anne Frank House tickets sell out weeks in advance and the museum will not let you in without a timed-entry booking. This is the single most important logistical fact about a first trip to Amsterdam. Book as soon as the date window opens, check the website by 10:30am on Tuesdays when new slots release, and do not assume you can sort it on arrival. Everything else in the Netherlands is...

Two days is not enough time for Austria. That said, you can do Vienna and Salzburg in 48 hours without feeling like you rushed, as long as you are honest with yourself about how many palaces a person can reasonably absorb before switching to coffee and cake. Getting into Vienna Vienna International Airport (VIE) is 19 km east of the city centre. The cheapest option that is also fast is the S-Bahn...

Walt Disney originally envisioned Epcot as a real city: a planned community of 20,000 residents living under a climate-controlled dome, working for corporations that would test experimental urban technology. He called it the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow and spent years developing detailed blueprints before his death in 1966. What opened in 1982 bore no resemblance to that vision,...

The Howrah Bridge carries roughly 100,000 vehicles and over 150,000 pedestrians every single day, making it by some calculations the busiest cantilever bridge on earth. It contains not a single nut or bolt: the entire 26,500-ton steel structure is riveted together. When it was built during World War II, 23,000 of the 26,000 tons of steel required were supplied not from England but from Tata Steel,...

Taiwan has more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than almost anywhere in Asia, yet the cheapest meal you will eat all week will almost certainly be the best. Seven days in Taipei is enough time to move beyond the tourist checklist and into a city where convenience stores function as community centres and a NT$50 bowl of noodles at a street stall regularly beats what you pay NT$500 for...

In October 2025, thieves disguised as construction workers broke into the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon through a window and stole eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels in under eight minutes. The heist, valued at approximately 88 million euros, forced the museum to close for two days and led to the resignation of its director in early 2026. As of mid-2026, the stolen jewels have not...

Exploring the Ancient Landscape: A Tourist’s Guide to Avebury Stone Circle Few prehistoric sites in the world match the scale and atmosphere of the Avebury Stone Circle in Wiltshire, England. While Stonehenge tends to draw the biggest crowds, Avebury is in fact the larger monument: and many archaeologists regard it as the more significant one. The henge itself covers around 28 acres,...

In 1635 the Windermere ferry capsized and 47 people drowned. It is the kind of detail that gets left out of the visitor information, but it says something real about a lake that has been central to English life for centuries. Today the car ferry still crosses on the same line between Ferry Nab and Far Sawrey, now carrying up to 18 vehicles per crossing and taking under ten minutes, and the...