Iguazu Falls: Both Sides, the Logistics, and What to Prioritise Iguazu Falls is the world’s widest waterfall system, spanning approximately 2.7 km along the Iguazu River on the border of Argentina and Brazil. The system consists of 275 individual falls that merge into a near-continuous curtain of water in wet season. The Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat) is the largest single fall:...

The Terracotta Army: 8,000 Soldiers Nobody Knew Existed Until 1974 In March 1974, farmers drilling a well near Xi’an broke through into a chamber containing life-sized clay soldiers. Not one soldier, not a dozen: approximately 8,000 warriors, 130 chariots, 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, all buried with the First Emperor of Qin, Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210 BCE. Each face is...

Accra: The African Capital That Punches Above Its Profile Most Western travellers arrive in Accra expecting a difficult city and leave surprised by how liveable it is. The roads are chaotic, the traffic during rush hour is genuinely painful, and the gap between the colonial narrative and the lived reality takes some adjustment. But Accra is warm, English-speaking, historically layered, and...

Wadi Rum: Jordan’s Desert on Its Own Terms Wadi Rum has been used as a film location so many times (Lawrence of Arabia, The Martian, Dune, Rogue One, and more) that some visitors arrive expecting something theatrical. The real landscape is considerably more disorienting and more interesting: rust-red sandstone massifs rising 300-800 metres from a flat desert floor, narrow canyons, Nabataean...

Tasmania: More Than Just a Stopover Tasmania sits 240km south of mainland Australia across the Bass Strait, and that distance is part of the appeal. The island runs its own schedule, grows its own food, and doesn’t much care whether the mainland has heard of it. About a third of the island has UNESCO-protected wilderness. You can drive from Hobart to Queenstown on the west coast and not see...

The Great Wall: Not One Wall The Great Wall is a series of walls, fortifications, and trenches built by different dynasties over roughly two millennia, stretching approximately 21,000km in total including all sections and branches. The Ming dynasty sections (14th-17th centuries) are what most visitors to Beijing see. Some are fully restored and managed; some are crumbling and largely inaccessible;...

The pyramids are enormous. That sounds obvious but it genuinely isn’t – every photograph flattens them into something comprehensible. When you stand at the base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu and tilt your head back, the scale is disorienting in a way that takes a moment to process. The limestone blocks at the base are taller than a person. The original structure, completed around 2560...

Greek Islands: Which One and Why Greece has 227 inhabited islands and several thousand more rocks with enough grass to argue the point. The practical question isn’t “should I go to the Greek Islands?” It’s which one, when, and for how long. These are genuinely different destinations with different characters, different price points, and different expectations about what a...

Grand Central Terminal: How to Actually Use It It is not Grand Central Station. That’s a post office nearby, and using the wrong name will earn mild corrections from New Yorkers. Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913 at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, handles around 750,000 people daily, and is both a functioning transit hub and one of the finest Beaux-Arts buildings in...

Banff: Canada’s First National Park, Still Its Most Spectacular Canada designated Banff as its first national park in 1885 after railway workers discovered hot springs at the base of Sulphur Mountain. The decision was partly commercial and partly visionary: the Canadian Pacific Railway needed tourist traffic to justify the line through the Rockies, and the mountain scenery turned out to be...

Tiger’s Nest (Paro Taktsang): The Hike That Justifies the Trip The first clear view of Paro Taktsang stops most hikers on the trail. The monastery appears to grow directly from the cliff face at 3,120 metres – white walls and golden roofs seemingly suspended between rock and air, 900 metres above the Paro valley floor. Photography cannot prepare you for the scale of the geological...

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral: Sofia’s Orthodox Landmark and Its Crypt Museum The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was built between 1882 and 1912 to commemorate the Bulgarian liberation from Ottoman rule, achieved in 1878 with Russian military assistance. It is dedicated to the 13th-century Russian Orthodox warrior-prince Alexander Nevsky as an acknowledgement of that debt. The building is...

The Acropolis: What Changed in 2025 and What to Actually Do The Parthenon was completed in 432 BC, and the craftsmen who built it introduced subtle optical refinements that modern engineers still debate: the columns are slightly thicker in the middle, the stylobate (base platform) curves almost imperceptibly upward toward the centre, the columns lean very slightly inward. These adjustments correct...

Auschwitz-Birkenau: How to Visit In 2025, more than 2.3 million people visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. That number deserves a moment of reflection: it means the site is doing something important, generating attention and engagement with history that resists forgetting. It also means that visiting requires planning, and that visiting without a guide leaves most people significantly under-prepared for...

Battle Abbey: The Abbey Built on the Spot Where Harold Fell William the Conqueror’s act of conscience was unusually specific. After the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, he did not build a general monument to the dead or dedicate a generic abbey to the Norman cause. He founded Battle Abbey in 1067 with its high altar positioned precisely on the spot where King Harold Godwinson fell - a...

The Grand Erg Occidental: Algeria’s Great Sand Sea The Grand Erg Occidental is one of two major erg (sand sea) regions in Algeria, covering roughly 78,000 square kilometres in the northwest Sahara between the Atlas foothills and the Saharan interior. Erg landscapes are what most people picture when they think of the Sahara: continuous dunes, some reaching 300 metres in height, arranged in...

Amsterdam: What the Canals Don’t Tell You Amsterdam’s canal ring was built primarily during the 17th century as a deliberate urban expansion project, laid out in concentric arcs with land allocated by economic status. The whole thing took decades of engineering to build through low-lying peat land below sea level. The merchant houses that line the canals are narrow because land was...

Atlantic City Boardwalk: The Original American Entertainment Strip Atlantic City’s boardwalk, built in 1870 to keep sand off the floors of beachfront hotels, was the first boardwalk in the United States and briefly the entertainment capital of the East Coast. Harry Houdini performed here. The Miss America pageant started here in 1921. The Boardwalk was the inspiration for Monopoly’s...

Big Sur: Highway 1 and the 90 Miles That Justify the Drive Highway 1 through Big Sur has been closed or partially closed multiple times in the past decade due to landslides, fires, and storm damage. The road runs on top of unstable coastal cliffs above the Pacific, and the forces that make the scenery dramatic are the same forces that periodically close the highway for months or years. Check...

Siena and the Piazza del Campo: The Best Medieval Square in Italy The Piazza del Campo is a shell-shaped brick-paved square in the centre of Siena, sloped gently toward the base where the Gothic Palazzo Pubblico stands. It was built in the 13th and 14th centuries and has been the civic heart of Siena ever since. Twice a year, July 2 and August 16, it becomes the track for the Palio di Siena: a...

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park: The Mountain Gorilla Permit and Everything After A mountain gorilla trekking permit for Bwindi costs $700 USD per person as of 2024, issued by the Uganda Wildlife Authority. This is not negotiable and is not low. It is the most expensive single element of an African wildlife trip that many experienced travellers consider to be among the most significant...

Madagascar: Logistics First, Wonder After Madagascar has been separated from the African mainland for 88 million years, which is long enough that evolution ran its own experiment in complete isolation. Around 90% of the island’s wildlife exists nowhere else on earth. The lemurs alone – over 100 species – are the primary reason people make the journey, and they justify it without...

Beijing: The Big Three and What to Do After Beijing’s three main attractions, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Temple of Heaven, can be covered in three days. The city itself rewards a much longer visit. The hutong neighbourhoods, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Earth, the 798 Art District, and the food alone justify adding another three days. What follows is a guide that tries...

Easter Island (Rapa Nui): Getting There and Making It Worth the Trip Rapa Nui sits in the South Pacific 3,760 kilometres west of mainland Chile and 4,000 kilometres east of the nearest inhabited Polynesian island. It is one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. The closest comparison is a Chilean meteorological outpost. Getting here requires a LATAM flight from Santiago (5 hours) or, less...

Bioluminescent Australia: Paddling Through Living Light The paddle goes in and comes out trailing blue fire. Not metaphorically, not approximately, each drop of water as it falls from the blade is briefly, unmistakably luminous. The dinoflagellates responsible, Noctiluca scintillans, flash when physically disturbed, and in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria the conditions that produce dense...

Kitzbühel: The Ski Town That Earns Its Reputation Every January, the Hahnenkamm downhill race on the Streif piste produces one of sport’s more extreme spectacles: racers hitting 140km/h through sections with gradients of up to 85%, the Mausfalle launching them airborne for several seconds, and the Hausbergkante section where the course makes a sharp compression that forces g-loads on the...

Banaue Rice Terraces: 2,000 Years of Agricultural Engineering The Ifugao people carved the rice terraces of the Cordillera mountains in northern Luzon more than 2,000 years ago using no mortar, no heavy machinery, and no metal tools, only wooden implements, fire, and the labour of generations. The result is a stacked system of irrigated paddies that follows the mountain contours from valley floor...

Borgarfjörður Eystri: Iceland’s Best Puffin Viewing, Without the Boat Trip Most accessible puffin colonies in Iceland require a ferry or a Zodiac and a degree of distance that makes photography frustrating. Borgarfjörður Eystri, a small fjord village in East Iceland, has a viewing platform built directly over a colony of approximately 10,000 Atlantic puffin pairs, at eye level with the...

Burning Man: The Part Nobody Tells You Burning Man happens in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, 120 miles north of Reno, during the week leading up to Labor Day. In 2026, that runs August 30 through September 7. For eight days, 70,000-80,000 people build and inhabit a temporary city on a dry alkaline lake bed, dismantling it completely by the time they leave. The city has streets, an airport, a...

Kilauea volcano’s Episode 48 of the current eruption series began at 4:40am on June 1, 2026, with lava fountains reaching 200 metres and a plume rising 7,600 metres. It lasted 9 hours. This eruption has now produced more fountaining episodes than any episodic eruption ever recorded, including the decades-long Pu’u’O’o eruption that reshaped the island’s southeast...

Meteora: Six Monasteries on Impossible Rocks The sandstone pillars at Meteora rise up to 400 metres from the Thessaly plain, and the monasteries on top of them are among the most peculiar constructions in Europe. The first hermit monks arrived in the 11th century, living in the cave faces. By the 14th century, communities were establishing permanent monasteries on the summits. At peak there were...

The Blue Mosque: Why Sultan Ahmed Built Six Minarets and Why That Caused a Problem Sultan Ahmed I was 19 years old when construction of his mosque began in 1609, and he made a decision that created a diplomatic incident before the building was even finished. He commissioned six minarets. At the time, the mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, had only six minarets. Constructing an equivalent...

Washington Union Station: Gateway to a City Worth Using Union Station opened in 1907 as the main railway terminal for Washington D.C., designed by Daniel Burnham in the Beaux-Arts style that dominated American civic architecture of the era. The main hall, 96 metres long, barrel-vaulted ceiling 29 metres high, was modelled partly on the Baths of Diocletian in Rome. It’s one of the...

Victoria Peak: The View That Earns Hong Kong’s Skyline Its Reputation Victoria Peak sits 552 metres above sea level on Hong Kong Island, and on a clear day the view across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon and the New Territories is one of the best city panoramas anywhere. The operative phrase is “clear day.” Hong Kong’s humidity means a genuine clear morning is rarer than the...

Caye Caulker: The Split, the Lazy Lizard, and How the Island Actually Works At sunset, the whole island converges on the Split. Not figuratively – literally. The handful of blocks that make up Caye Caulker’s tourism side can be crossed in 15 minutes on foot, and when the sky turns gold and pink over the channel, everyone who’s here is here: standing in the shallows with a cold...

Andaz Amsterdam Prinsengracht: A Hyatt Hotel That Actually Has a Point of View The exterior of the Andaz Amsterdam Prinsengracht is a 1970s concrete public library building on the Prinsengracht canal, which is not a promising start. Inside, designer Marcel Wanders has created something genuinely unusual: moon-like orbs hanging from the glass-roofed atrium lobby, giant murals of gasping herring...

Ben Nevis: The Reality of Britain’s Highest Mountain The summit of Ben Nevis is in cloud for roughly 355 days a year. That statistic appears frequently in warnings about the mountain, but it deserves to sit at the front rather than the back of any account of it, because it shapes the experience more than any single other fact. Most people who reach the top at 1,345 metres will stand in a...

Branson, Missouri: The Live Entertainment Capital That Doesn’t Pretend to Be Something Else Branson is about 9,000 permanent residents and more than 50 live entertainment theatres. It receives around 8 million visitors a year, almost all of them American, almost all of them driving from within a day’s journey, and almost all of them there specifically for the country music shows, the...

Amalienborg Palace: Where the Danish Royals Actually Live Amalienborg is four identical Rococo palaces arranged symmetrically around an octagonal courtyard in the centre of Copenhagen, facing the harbour. They were built between 1750 and 1760 as townhouses for Danish nobility and have been the primary residence of the Danish royal family since 1794, when a fire at Christiansborg Palace forced the...

Golden Gate Bridge: More Than a Photograph The colour is International Orange and it was chosen partly by designer Irving Morrow for its visibility in San Francisco’s notorious fog, and partly because the primer used during construction happened to be that shade and the consulting Navy officer who came to inspect it in 1933 approved of how it looked against the water and sky. The bridge...

Bay Islands, Honduras: The Caribbean’s Most Underrated Dive Destination Utila, the smallest of Honduras’s Bay Islands, has a well-established claim to being the cheapest place in the world to get a PADI open water diving certification. You can complete the course in 4-5 days for roughly $300-400 USD including equipment, exams, and four open water dives on a reef that is part of the...

Wawel Cathedral, Krakow: Where Poland’s History Is Literally Buried Wawel Hill above the Vistula has been the most politically and spiritually significant site in Poland for roughly a thousand years. The cathedral has served as the coronation church for Polish monarchs since the 11th century; the royal castle beside it was the seat of the court until the capital moved to Warsaw in 1596....

Callanish: The Standing Stones That Predate Stonehenge The standing stones at Callanish were erected around 2800-3000 BCE, making them roughly contemporary with Egypt’s Old Kingdom and several centuries older than Stonehenge. They stand on a ridge overlooking Loch Roag on the west coast of Lewis, the largest of the Outer Hebrides islands, in a landscape of Atlantic moorland and peat bog that...

Avebury: Stonehenge Is More Famous, But Avebury Is More Interesting The Avebury stone circle is larger than Stonehenge in almost every dimension. The henge (the circular earthwork bank and ditch) is approximately 420 metres across. The outer stone circle originally had about 100 stones arranged within this henge; roughly 27 survive. Two smaller inner stone circles were built within the outer one,...

Amalfi Coast: The Most Photographed Coastline in Italy and How to Get There Without Misery The Amalfi Coast is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, 50 kilometres of cliffs dropping into the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sorrento and Salerno, with villages perched on the rock faces and lemon groves covering every viable slope. The photographs are accurate. So are the problems: the SS163 coastal road is one lane...

Silfra and Þingvellir: Geology You Can Swim Through Þingvellir sits about 50km northeast of Reykjavik, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart at roughly 2cm per year. The rift that separates them is a geological feature you can walk along, kayak, snorkel, or dive through depending on your preference. The water that fills Silfra fissure filters through lava rock for 40-100...

Easter Island: 3,700 Kilometres From Anywhere, and Worth Every One The most remote inhabited island on Earth sits equidistant between the Chilean coast and Tahiti, and the isolation is not a minor detail you adapt to - it shapes every aspect of being there. Prices are high because almost everything is imported. The population is around 6,000. LATAM operates the only commercial route, direct from...

Ngorongoro Crater: The Best Game Drive in Africa, with Caveats The Ngorongoro Crater is a collapsed caldera 19 kilometres across and 600 metres deep. About 25,000 large animals live on its floor year-round because the crater walls provide natural containment. There is no migration here: what you see is what’s resident permanently. The lion density is among the highest on the African...

Siena Cathedral: Go Early, Stay Long The striped black-and-white marble of the Duomo di Siena runs all the way through the walls. This is not a veneer applied to a brick core – it’s structural marble from quarries in the hills south of the city, and the effect inside is disorienting in the best possible way: the interior banding changes the spatial weight of the building, making it...

The Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte – Black Forest cake – was invented in the region in the 1930s and is required to contain Schwarzwälder Kirschwasser (cherry schnapps from this specific area) to legally carry the name under German food law. The version served in most European countries is a reasonable approximation. The version served in the Black Forest from a bakery that has been making...