Bora Bora: The Overwater Bungalow Invented Here and the Cost of Getting It The overwater bungalow was pioneered in French Polynesia in the late 1960s by a hotel developer who built a few rooms on stilts above the lagoon at Bora Bora. The idea has since been replicated at hundreds of properties across the Maldives, Fiji, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. But Bora Bora remains the original, and the...

Semmering Pass: The Railway That Changed What Mountains Meant for Engineering The experts said it couldn’t be done. A steam locomotive climbing steep gradients through serious Alpine terrain, in 1854, was considered physically impossible by most of the engineering establishment. Carl Ritter von Ghega proved them wrong, and the Semmeringbahn became the first mountain railway in the world...

Swimming Pigs of Exuma: The Island, the Reality, and the Experience Nobody agrees on how they got there. Some say a ship wrecked nearby and the pigs swam ashore. Others say sailors left them on Big Major Cay with plans to come back for dinner and never returned. A third version involves a nearby resort chef who decided the island made a better pig habitat than a kitchen. The origin is genuinely...

The Hermitage: Three Million Objects and Nowhere Near Enough Time Catherine the Great bought 225 paintings from a Berlin merchant in 1764 to settle a debt, and that transaction is where the Hermitage begins. What followed was two and a half centuries of acquisition on a scale that makes the Louvre look restrained: around 3 million objects total, roughly 70,000 of which are on display at any one...

Stirling: The Castle, the Monument, and the Bridge Between Them Stirling is the hinge of Scotland. The volcanic crag that the castle sits on stands 75 metres above the River Forth floodplain at the precise point where movement between Scotland’s Highlands and Lowlands has always been forced to pass through a narrow corridor. Control this crag and you control that movement. The castle exists...

Neuschwanstein: The Castle That Bankrupted Its Builder and Opened to Tourists 47 Days After His Death Ludwig II of Bavaria occupied Schloss Neuschwanstein for a total of 172 days. He commissioned it in 1869 as a homage to Wagnerian mythology - the throne room alone contains 2.5 million individual mosaic tiles, and the royal bedroom took 14 woodcarvers more than four years to complete. Ludwig died...

CN Tower: A Practical Guide to Visiting Toronto’s Most Recognisable Structure The CN Tower held the world’s tallest free-standing structure record from 1976 to 2009, when the Burj Khalifa took it. At 553 metres, it remains the tallest in the Western Hemisphere. The views from the observation decks on a clear day are genuinely exceptional: Lake Ontario spreading south, the Toronto grid...

The Seine: Walk It Before You See Anything Else in Paris The Seine runs 775 kilometres total. The 13 kilometres through Paris is the city’s spine: Notre-Dame on the Ile de la Cite in the middle of the river, the Louvre facing the Right Bank, the Musée d’Orsay facing the Left Bank from a converted railway station. Walk the quais from the eastern tip of Ile Saint-Louis west to the...

Krabi: The Limestone Towers, the Crowded Beaches, and the Places to Go Instead The photographs of Krabi’s limestone karsts do not lie, which is both the province’s gift and its problem. Those vertical towers rising directly from Andaman Sea water are real – extraordinary, in fact – and once you’ve seen them, nothing about the surrounding infrastructure surprises you:...

Aldous Huxley called Lake Atitlán “the most beautiful lake in the world” in 1934, and that quote has been in every guidebook about the place ever since. The lake sits at 1,560 metres in the Guatemalan highlands, surrounded by three dormant volcanoes – Atitlán, Tolimán, and San Pedro – and about a dozen Maya villages around its shores. The combination of the dark water, the...

Geysir: The Original Geyser and the Golden Circle Every word form of “geyser” in every language traces back to one Icelandic hot spring: the Great Geysir in the Haukadalur valley in southwestern Iceland. The name comes from the Old Norse “gjósa,” to gush. Geysir has been erupting intermittently for at least 800 years; historical accounts describe columns reaching 80 metres....

Museum of Anthropology: The Best Museum in Vancouver by a Comfortable Margin The Museum of Anthropology (MOA) sits on the University of British Columbia campus at Point Grey, about 40 minutes from downtown Vancouver by bus. The building itself, designed by Arthur Erickson in 1976, is a sequence of post-and-beam concrete halls with 15-metre-high glass walls facing Howe Sound and the North Shore...

Pacific Islands: Which One and Why It Matters “Pacific Islands” covers approximately 25,000 islands scattered across Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia in an ocean larger than all Earth’s landmasses combined. The generic category is useful for travel searches but tells you almost nothing useful. Each archipelago has its own distinct culture, price point, infrastructure, and...

The Mezquita of Cordoba: A Building That Refuses to Be One Thing When Charles V came to Cordoba to inspect what the local diocese had done with the Great Mosque in 1523, inserting a full Gothic cathedral into the centre of it, he reportedly said: “You have destroyed something unique to build something ordinary.” This is the most honest review of the Mezquita-Catedral ever written, and...

Nizwa: Oman’s Ancient Capital and One of the Country’s Most Rewarding Day Trips Nizwa sits 165km south of Muscat in the Hajar Mountains and was the historical capital of Oman for much of the country’s history, the seat of the Ibadi Islamic imams who held combined religious and temporal authority. It is the most historically significant city in Oman and gives a more complete...

Sydney: Better Than Its Reputation Prepares You For Sydney is expensive, sprawling, and takes two or three days to start understanding properly. It is also one of the most enjoyable cities in the world if you know where to direct your attention, and the harbour is genuinely one of the great urban bodies of water - 240 kilometres of foreshore, the bridge and the opera house framing each other...

Camber Sands: The Only Sand Dune Beach in East Sussex Camber Sands does something most English beaches cannot: it looks like the coast of Portugal if you photograph it right. The dune system reaches 30 metres high in places, the sand is proper soft beach sand rather than the shingle that dominates the Kent and Sussex coastlines, and at low tide the sea retreats far enough that the beach triples in...

The Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) is not actually a cathedral in the episcopal sense – it has never been the seat of a bishop. It’s a Protestant church, built as the principal place of worship for the Hohenzollern imperial family and completed in 1905, when the German Empire was at its political and symbolic peak. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted something that could compete visually with...

Dublin: What to See, What to Skip, and How to Spend Your Days Dublin is a compact capital of about 1.4 million people, sitting at the mouth of the Liffey River on Dublin Bay, and you can see most of the significant sites on foot in two or three focused days. The city divides on either side of the Liffey: the Southside (Trinity College, St Stephen’s Green, Grafton Street, most expensive...

Salta Province: Northwest Argentina’s Geological Spectacle In 1999, archaeologists found three perfectly mummified Inca children on the summit of Cerro Llullaillaco in Salta Province, at 6,739 metres. They had been sacrificed approximately 500 years earlier as part of the capacocha ritual – left with food, clothing, and offerings at the highest altitude Inca ceremonial site ever...

Torres del Paine: The Logistics Are Worth It Torres del Paine National Park sits about 2,000km south of Santiago in Chilean Patagonia, and reaching it requires a connection to Punta Arenas or Puerto Natales and then road travel into the park. All of that is true. It is also one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the Southern Hemisphere, and the difficulty of getting there is part of what...

Every Friday evening, the small town of Oistins on the south coast of Barbados holds a fish fry. Locals and visitors crowd around open-air stalls serving fresh-caught fish – flying fish and mahi-mahi primarily – grilled or fried, with rice and peas, macaroni pie, and coleslaw. The prices are reasonable, the sound system is loud, and the experience is what Barbados at its best actually...

Valparaíso: The Vertical City That Rewards Getting Lost Valparaíso was the most important port on the Pacific coast of South America for roughly 40 years. Then the Panama Canal opened in 1914, redirected trans-oceanic shipping away from Cape Horn, and the city entered a long economic decline. This turned out to be architecturally fortunate: Valparaíso couldn’t afford to tear down its...

Bay of Fundy: 100 Billion Tonnes of Water, Twice a Day The statistic is so large it sounds like exaggeration, but it isn’t: the Bay of Fundy moves more water in a single tidal cycle than all the world’s rivers combined. The tidal range reaches 16 metres at its maximum – roughly the height of a five-storey building – and the entire bay empties and refills twice every 24...

The Gateway Arch, St. Louis: Engineering the West’s Symbol The Gateway Arch is 192 metres tall, which makes it taller than the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. The engineering required to build it between 1963 and 1965 was genuinely difficult: the two legs had to be constructed simultaneously and meet precisely at the apex, which required calculations at the limits of what was...

Kota Kinabalu: The Gateway to Mount Kinabalu and Sabah’s Coast On a clear morning from the KK waterfront, Mount Kinabalu rises 54km to the north and looks, frankly, unlikely. It is 4,095 metres above sea level, the highest peak in Southeast Asia outside New Guinea, and it sits in the same frame as islands you can reach by speedboat in 20 minutes. Kota Kinabalu manages to be both a genuinely...

Bet She’an: Seven Thousand Years Under the Same Sun Stand on the top of Tel Beit Shean and you’re looking down at one of the longest continuously occupied sites in human history: approximately 7,000 years of settlement in the Jordan Valley, from the Chalcolithic period around 4500 BCE through the medieval Islamic era. Most visitors come for the Roman city, Scythopolis, and the Roman...

Atlanta: The City That Burned Down and Built Something Better Atlanta was burned by Union forces in 1864, rebuilt within years, hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics, became the headquarters of Coca-Cola, CNN, Delta, and the CDC, and developed one of the most important civil rights histories of any American city. That last part is underused by visitors who spend three hours at the aquarium and wonder...

The Smithsonian: Which Museums to Actually Prioritise The original Wright Flyer from Kitty Hawk (1903) hangs from the ceiling of the Air and Space Museum’s Milestones of Flight gallery. It is smaller than you expect and more fragile-looking. The wood-and-fabric aircraft that changed what humans do for 7 minutes on December 17, 1903, before the wind damaged it and ended the day’s...

St. Basil’s Cathedral: Russia’s Most Photographed Building Up Close St. Basil’s Cathedral sits at the south end of Red Square, and no photograph prepares you for the colours in person. The nine onion domes are each painted differently: deep reds, greens, yellows, and a twisting pattern that looks like no other church architecture in the Orthodox world. Ivan the Terrible...

Kjeragbolten: The Boulder, the Hike, and What It Actually Takes Kjeragbolten is a boulder roughly the size of a car wedged in a crack on the face of Kjerag mountain, 984 metres above the Lysefjord. The photograph of a person standing on it with the fjord far below and nothing underneath has become one of the defining images of adventure travel in Norway. The question worth asking honestly: is...

Lovers Bridge in Niagara Falls sits along the Niagara Parkway, a landscaped boulevard that follows the Canadian side of the Niagara River from the falls upstream toward the Whirlpool. The bridge itself is a modest pedestrian crossing, but the Niagara Parks Commission land it sits within is genuinely well-kept, and the surrounding area offers some of the better viewpoints on the Canadian side. The...

Phong Nha-Ke Bang: Vietnam’s Cave Country Son Doong, the world’s largest cave by volume, has its own weather system, a subterranean jungle, and an underground river running through a chamber large enough to fit a Boeing 747 and still have space left. It was only surveyed by Western cavers in 2009. Son Doong is in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang karst formation in central Vietnam, and it is only...

Cape Tribulation: Where Two UNESCO World Heritage Sites Share a Coastline Captain James Cook named this headland “Cape Tribulation” in 1770 after his ship struck a reef nearby. The name stuck. What he couldn’t have known is that the reef that troubled him was the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef - and that the rainforest immediately behind the beach where his crew made...

Paris: The City That Requires Preparation to See Properly Paris receives around 30 million visitors annually and is, city for city, the most visited place on Earth. The concentration of significant art, architecture, and food in a walkable urban core is unmatched anywhere. The problem is that the tourist infrastructure is calibrated for those 30 million visitors and most of what’s laid on...

Istanbul: Two Continents, One City, No Shortage of Opinions on Which Side to Stay On The ferry from Karakoy to Kadikoy takes 20 minutes and costs almost nothing, and for that price it gives you the best view of the Istanbul skyline – the minarets and the dome of Hagia Sophia, the towers of Topkapi, the whole layered medieval-Ottoman-modern panorama – from a deck with fish sandwich...

Dublin: An Honest Assessment Dublin is compact enough to cover mostly on foot, has excellent food and drink in the right places, and can be genuinely great or genuinely exhausting depending on when you arrive and where you spend your evenings. The stag and hen party traffic on Temple Bar on Friday night is not the city’s finest hour. Everything else is fairly solid. What’s Worth Your...

Lascaux: Why You Cannot See the Original Cave (and What to Do Instead) The original Lascaux cave near Montignac in the Dordogne has been closed since 1963. Four teenagers discovered it in September 1940, following their dog down a collapsed tree root shaft. When it opened to visitors in 1948, the cave received 1,200 visitors per day. Within a decade, the carbon dioxide and humidity from those...

Some buildings in Baarle Nassau have their front door in the Netherlands and their back door in Belgium. The buildings are not large. The two countries share a kitchen, or a hallway, or a dining room wall. This is not a tourist installation – it is the actual legal and geographical situation that results from medieval land treaties never being properly resolved, and it has been this way for...

Glacier Bay: What 200 Years of Retreat Looks Like, Compressed Into One Place In 1750, the entirety of what is now Glacier Bay was covered by a single vast ice mass more than a kilometre thick. George Vancouver sailed past the entrance in 1794 and found only 5 kilometres of open water. When John Muir arrived in 1879, the bay had opened 77 kilometres. Today the bay extends 105 kilometres and the...

Cenotes: The Yucatan’s Sacred Wells, and How to Visit Them Well The word cenote comes from the Mayan term d’zonot, meaning sacred well. The ancient Maya didn’t use that word as a description of a nice swimming hole. These sinkholes were the primary freshwater source across a limestone peninsula with no surface rivers, and they were ritual spaces where the Maya made offerings to...

Pembrokeshire: The Only Coastal National Park in Britain Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was designated in 1952 specifically for its coastline, which makes it unique among British national parks. The 299km Coast Path from St Dogmaels in the north to Amroth in the south takes around 15 days to walk end-to-end; the total elevation gain is roughly equivalent to climbing Everest. Individual day...

Kailash Kher and the Music of Delhi Kailash Kher’s voice sounds like it was quarried from somewhere. He trained in Hindustani classical tradition, spent years struggling in Delhi – reportedly doing manual work and occasionally giving up on music entirely – before breaking through in 2003 with “Allah Ke Bande” on a Bollywood soundtrack. Since then he’s released...

The Gaspe Peninsula: Quebec’s Wild Eastern Tip The Gaspe Peninsula (La Gaspesie in French) extends 200 km into the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the eastern end of Quebec, with the St. Lawrence River on its north shore and Chaleur Bay on the south. The land is mountainous in the interior (the Chic-Choc Mountains, part of the Appalachian chain, reach 1,268 metres at Mont Jacques-Cartier),...

Kolkata: India’s Most Underrated Major City Every major Indian city has a reputation that precedes it. Delhi has power and monuments; Mumbai has money and ambition; Jaipur has forts and tourists. Kolkata gets sadness and decay, which is unfair and increasingly outdated. The city that served as British India’s capital for nearly a century has extraordinary colonial architecture, a...

Clovelly: The Devon Village Where Cars Cannot Go Clovelly in North Devon is a fishing village built on a cliff face so steep that the main street is effectively a cobbled staircase descending 120 metres to the harbour. No wheeled vehicles enter. Residents use sledges to move supplies down. Donkeys were historically used for the same purpose; they’re still kept here and appear in the...

Loch Ness: The Monster Is a Marketing Asset, The Loch Is Real The 1934 “Surgeon’s Photograph” of the Loch Ness Monster, which drove the legend into international consciousness, was exposed in 1994 as a hoax: a toy submarine fitted with a plasticine head, staged by a man seeking revenge against the Daily Mail. This debunking has had essentially no effect on visitor numbers. The...

St Michael’s Mount: Cornwall’s Tidal Island Worth the Timing The causeway to St Michael’s Mount disappears twice a day. That basic fact, the sea physically cutting off the island from the mainland at high tide, shapes every visit. Get the tide times wrong and you’re either stranded or waiting on the Marazion beach for the water to drop. Get them right and you walk across an...

Anfield: What It Feels Like When 61,000 People Sing Together The “This Is Anfield” sign hangs above the tunnel through which Liverpool’s players walk onto the pitch. The tradition is that players touch it on the way out; visiting teams do not. This tiny piece of theatre has been repeated before every Liverpool home match for decades, and when you stand in the tunnel on the...

Banaue and Batad: The Ifugao Rice Terraces in Practice The Ifugao rice terraces of the Cordillera region in northern Luzon have been in continuous cultivation for more than 2,000 years. The Ifugao people carved approximately 20,000 square kilometres of mountainside into a stacked system of irrigated paddies fed by a network of wooden channels and aqueducts flowing from the forests above. The...