Piazza San Marco: Venice’s Main Square, Done Without Being Done By It Napoleon called it “the finest drawing room in Europe.” What it is from May through September is one of the most densely packed tourist areas in the world. Cruise ship passengers arrive in thousands, tour groups fill every corner, and the combination of St. Mark’s Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, the...

The first night in a ryokan is, for most Western visitors, a small dislocation from everything familiar about sleeping and eating. Dinner arrives in your room at a set time, multi-course, while you’re sitting on the floor in a cotton robe. The bed, when laid out later by the same staff who brought dinner, is a futon on tatami mat. The bath requires washing before you get in and you’ll...

The Arena di Verona is the third-largest Roman amphitheatre in the world, built in the 1st century CE and capable of holding approximately 30,000 spectators. Unlike the Colosseum in Rome, which lost its outer ring of arches to earthquakes, the Verona Arena’s main structure survived almost intact, giving it better acoustics and a more complete sense of the original space. This is the reason...

The Twelve Apostles: Victoria’s Most Photographed Coastline, Correctly Named or Not There are not twelve of them. There were originally nine stacks still standing when the site was formally named the Twelve Apostles in 1922 (it was previously called Sow and Piglets, which gives a sense of the naming committee’s creativity). Since then the number has declined: one collapsed dramatically...

The Pantanal: The Best Wildlife Destination You’re Not Going To During peak dry season – August and September – operators running small boats along the Porto Jofre corridor in the northern Pantanal report jaguar sighting success rates above 90% over a three-day trip. That number should stop you. The Amazon gets the coverage, the tours, and the visitor infrastructure. The...

St. Mark’s Basilica: How to Actually See It St. Mark’s Basilica is covered in 8,000 square metres of gold mosaic accumulated between the 11th and 13th centuries. When the afternoon light comes through the western windows at a low angle, the entire interior appears to emit gold rather than reflect it, an effect that neither photography nor description does justice to. The building has...

Jerusalem: The Old City and What to Do When You Leave It Jerusalem is one of the most visited, most contested, and most complicated cities on earth. Around 3.5 million tourists visit annually. The Old City - 0.9 square kilometres enclosed by Ottoman walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1538 - contains sacred sites central to three religions: the Western Wall (Judaism), the Church of the Holy...

Shackleton’s Hut: The Most Improbable Building You Will Ever Visit Getting to Shackleton’s hut requires booking passage on an expedition cruise to the Ross Sea, the remote eastern sector of Antarctica that most Antarctic tourist voyages don’t reach. This matters before reading further: the Ross Sea is not on the standard Antarctic Peninsula route. Getting there means a longer...

Mount Everest: Getting Close Without a Climbing Permit Everest Base Camp on the Nepal side sits at 5,364 metres. Thousands of trekkers reach it every year. They do not climb Everest; they reach a rocky moraine from which, on a clear day, they can see the Khumbu Icefall and the lower slopes of the summit pyramid above. The summit itself is not visible from Base Camp - the angle is wrong.

Two Medusa heads sit at the base of columns in the northwestern corner of the Basilica Cistern, each used as a column base in different orientations – one turned sideways, one turned upside down. The reason for this is debated. One theory is that their orientation was intentional, neutralising the mythological gaze that turns viewers to stone (Medusa’s power only works when you look...

Bwindi Impenetrable Forest: The Gorillas Are Worth Every Dollar In February 2026, Uganda Wildlife Authority introduced a discounted permit tier: gorilla trekking in Bwindi during April, May, and November now costs $600 per permit for foreign non-residents, reduced from the standard $800. This matters because the permit is the single largest cost of a gorilla trek and the single most common barrier...

Caernarfon Castle was built as a statement of English military power in conquered Wales, and it still reads that way. Edward I built it from 1283 onwards specifically to dominate the town and the Menai Strait – not primarily for military defence in the ordinary sense but as an architectural declaration: this is how England wanted Wales to understand the new order. The polygonal towers with...

In 1922, American palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews found the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered in the orange-red cliffs of Bayanzag in the Mongolian Gobi. He called them the Flaming Cliffs. The eggs were Protoceratops. The discovery changed the understanding of dinosaur reproduction. Chapman Andrews is considered a partial inspiration for Indiana Jones, which gives the Mongolian Gobi a...

The Shard: Is the View Worth £40? The Shard is 310 metres of glass and steel designed by Renzo Piano, completed in 2012 on the South Bank at London Bridge. It is the tallest building in the United Kingdom. The view from the observation experience on floors 68-72 is exceptional on a clear day. The question is whether it justifies the ticket price compared to free alternatives. Honest answer: yes,...

Corcovado National Park: How to Actually Get There and What to Expect Scarlet macaws (Ara macao) are common throughout the Corcovado National Park and the Osa Peninsula buffer zone. The Osa holds one of the largest scarlet macaw concentrations in Central America. You don’t need to travel far into the park to see them – the canopy around Sirena Station and on the coastal trail from La...

Leptis Magna: The Roman City That Libya Has Left Mostly Alone There is an argument that Leptis Magna is the most important unvisited Roman city in the world. By unvisited, this is not hyperbole: in the peak years before Libya’s 2011 revolution, fewer than 50,000 tourists saw the site annually. By comparison, Pompeii receives around 3 million visitors a year. The comparison is instructive...

Gangnam: What the Song Got Right and What It Got Wrong PSY’s 2012 song introduced “Gangnam Style” to the world and associated the neighbourhood with a particular vision of Korean nouveau riche culture: designer goods, expensive grooming, ostentatious consumption. That vision was always somewhat satirical (PSY was born in Gangnam and the song is a critique of the aspirational...

Hollywood Boulevard: Real Tips for a Street That Mostly Disappoints Hollywood Boulevard is not the glamorous movie-land of your imagination. The sidewalk runs past pawnshops, souvenir stores, and people in dirty character costumes who expect a dollar for a photograph. The TCL Chinese Theatre is impressive and genuinely historic; everything immediately around it ranges from chaotic to actively...

Swarovski Crystal Worlds: Art Installation or Theme Park, Depending on Your Expectations Swarovski Kristallwelten (Crystal Worlds) opened in Wattens in 1995 as a brand attraction marking the company’s 100th anniversary, designed by media artist André Heller. The original concept was surrealist: rooms inside a hill accessed through a water-spouting giant head, each room designed by a...

The Manneken-Pis is 61 centimetres tall. That’s the size of a toddler, cast in bronze, urinating into a fountain at the corner of Rue de l’Etuve and Rue du Chene, two minutes’ walk from the Grand Place. You will have seen photographs. The photographs do not adequately prepare you for the experience of arriving at what is supposedly one of the world’s most famous monuments...

Ocean Park Hong Kong: The Theme Park That Takes the Harbour View Seriously Ocean Park sits on a headland on the south side of Hong Kong Island, split across a mountain into two sections: the Waterfront area near the entrance and the Summit area at the top, connected by cable cars with views across the South China Sea. The setting is unusual for a theme park. This is not a flat concrete lot;...

Hanoi’s Old Quarter: Navigating the 36 Streets In 2016, Anthony Bourdain brought Barack Obama to Bun Cha Huong Lien on Hang Manh Street to eat bun cha – grilled pork in fish sauce broth with rice noodles and herbs – for around $6 per person. The restaurant has been fully leaning into the association ever since, with photographs of the moment on every wall. The food is still good....

Hampton Court Palace: Henry VIII’s Favourite Residence, and Worth Every Minute of the Journey Hampton Court is 35 minutes from London Waterloo by South Western Railway, and it is one of those places that earns the trip every time. The palace is enormous, sprawling across centuries of royal use by multiple monarchs, and the grounds alone justify the entry fee. What most people don’t...

Auschwitz-Birkenau: What the Visit Requires of You More than 2.3 million people visited Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in 2025, making it one of the most visited sites in Europe. That number is worth sitting with. It says something about the place’s enduring necessity as a site of historical education and remembrance, but it also means that a visit requires planning, not because...

The Alhambra, Spain: Architecture as a Continuous Argument The Alhambra complex sits on a red-earth ridge above Granada, and the argument it makes has never been adequately refuted. Islamic architecture reached something close to perfection here in the 13th-15th centuries under the Nasrid sultans, producing spaces that combine mathematical precision, sensory richness, and philosophical coherence...

Discover the Natural Beauty of Chitwan National Park, Nepal Introduction Chitwan National Park sits in the Terai lowlands of southern Nepal, roughly 150 km southwest of Kathmandu. Established in 1973 as Nepal’s first national park and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, it spans approximately 932 square kilometers of sal forest, grassland, and riverine habitat along the...

Taipei: The City That Gets Everything Right at Street Level Taipei is one of the best-run cities in Asia for visitors. The MRT announces stations in Mandarin, English, Taiwanese Hokkien, and Hakka. Street food is extraordinary and cheap. The city is safe at any hour. People are consistently helpful to visitors. It is not flawless - air quality can be poor, summer heat is punishing (35 degrees plus...

On the Vesak Day of 2026 – May 31 – the ceremony at Borobudur began at 3:30am with the San Bu Yi Bai ritual, followed by a daylong procession of Buddhist pilgrims and culminating in an evening lantern release when hundreds of paper lanterns rose into the night sky above the stupa crowns. Thousands of Buddhists from across Indonesia and from abroad participate each year. If you happen...

Book your Nasrid Palaces slot before you plan anything else. The Alhambra’s most important section operates on a strict timed-entry system, the official ticket site (tickets.alhambra-patronato.es) is the only source at face value (€22 for the full day ticket in 2026), and peak-season slots sell out 8-12 weeks in advance. July and August can see all Nasrid Palaces slots gone 4-6 weeks ahead....

The Nazca Lines cover approximately 450 square kilometres of the Ica Desert in southern Peru. The largest figure, a pelican, stretches 285 metres. They were made by removing reddish-brown iron-oxide-coated stones to reveal the pale ground beneath – essentially scraping the desert surface to draw in it. The Nasca culture made them between 500 BCE and 500 CE. Nobody can say with certainty why....

Cologne Cathedral: Started in 1248, Finished in 1880, Free to Enter Construction on the Kölner Dom started in 1248, stopped in 1473 when the money ran out, and left a half-finished crane sitting on the south tower for four centuries as Cologne’s unofficial symbol. Work resumed in 1842, driven by German Romantic nationalism and a wave of enthusiasm for medieval Gothic architecture, and the...

Hal Saflieni Hypogeum: The Most Restricted Tourist Site in Europe Daily visitor numbers are capped at 80. The site allows maximum 10 visitors per tour slot, with eight tour slots per day. Tickets sell out months in advance and must be purchased through the Heritage Malta website. Do not arrive expecting to buy a ticket at the door. When planning a Malta trip, book the Hypogeum first, then arrange...

Meteora: Six Monasteries on Top of Rock Pillars That Go Straight Up For the first 300 years after the Meteora monasteries were built, the only way to reach them was by rope nets hauled by windlass, or by removable wooden ladders that the monks pulled up behind them. This was not an inconvenience - it was the point. The 14th and 15th-century monks who built on these sandstone rock pillars in the...

Three Gorges: The Yangtze Cruise and What Came After the Dam The Three Gorges Dam reservoir raised the water level throughout the gorge section of the Yangtze by approximately 100 metres. More than 1.4 million people were relocated from towns and villages that were flooded. The dam, completed in 2012, is the largest hydroelectric facility in the world and generates enough power to replace multiple...

The Great Wildebeest Migration: Planning a Trip That Actually Delivers About 1.5 million wildebeest, plus hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, move in a rough clockwise circuit between the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara in Kenya throughout the year. The marketing around it tends to oversell the drama while underselling how much timing and luck are involved. A river crossing is...

Volcanoes National Park: The $1,500 Gorilla Permit Is Worth Thinking Hard About Rwanda raised its gorilla trekking permit price to $1,500 in 2017 and has kept it there for foreign visitors ever since. A low-season discount exists - $1,050 per person for dates between November and May - but outside that window the full price applies, and Rwanda offers no further reduction for international...

Newport, Rhode Island: Gilded Age Mansions and an Underrated Jazz Festival There is something genuinely strange about standing in the Great Hall of The Breakers, looking up at the 45-foot marble ceiling vaulted and painted to simulate sky, and realising this was a family’s summer house. Not a palace, not a public building – a seasonal residence for ten weeks a year. Newport’s...

Kolmanskop, Namibia: Where the Desert Swallowed a Diamond Town Sand has reached window height in some of the rooms. You walk through a hallway where the drifts are hip-deep, past doorways framing walls of fine Namib sand that has been pressing in for 70 years. The ice-making machine – which was, when installed, the only one in southern Africa – sits in a room gradually filling from...

Notre Dame Cathedral: After the Fire, the Rebuild, and the Reopening Notre Dame reopened in December 2024, five years after the April 2019 fire that destroyed the spire and most of the roof. The restoration involved roughly 250,000 craftspeople, conservators, and volunteers, and the rebuilt interior is notably brighter than it was before the fire. The stained glass has been cleaned for the first...

Nyerere National Park (Selous): The Safari You Choose When You’re Done Sharing The Serengeti’s great migration is real, spectacular, and accompanied by a vehicle queue that, on the wrong morning in July, puts you in a traffic jam in the middle of Africa. That is not a metaphor. Nyerere National Park – the former Selous Game Reserve, renamed in 2022 to honour Tanzania’s...

Lake Toba: The Supervolcano Caldera and Batak Heartland About 74,000 years ago, a supervolcanic eruption near what is now northern Sumatra ejected so much ash and material into the atmosphere that it likely triggered a volcanic winter lasting several years. The eruption was large enough that some researchers have linked it to a genetic bottleneck in early human populations; the evidence is...

San Antonio River Walk: What It Is and What It Isn’t The River Walk (Paseo del Rio) is a 25-kilometre network of paths along both banks of the San Antonio River, running through downtown at roughly 1.5 metres below street level. The sunken position means you can hear the city above but not see it, which creates an unusual enclosed quality, particularly at night when lights reflect off the...

Paris: Getting Past the Postcard Version Notre-Dame reopened in December 2024, and the towers followed in September 2025, including the 424 steps to the top and the gargoyles that have always been the better reason to climb than the view. The cathedral’s interior is now brighter than it has been for centuries: the restoration teams removed grime from the stone walls that had accumulated...

Andros is the largest island in the Bahamas and one of the least visited. It has no cruise ship port. Its interior – about 6,000 square kilometres of pine forest, mangrove, and wetland – is largely inaccessible. The Andros Barrier Reef, the third-longest in the world, runs along the eastern shore. The western side drops into the Tongue of the Ocean, a 1,800-metre deep submarine canyon....

Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock): What the Hike Is Actually Like Preikestolen is a flat-topped cliff rising 604 metres above Lysefjord in Rogaland, Norway. The name translates as Pulpit Rock, for the roughly rectangular platform at the summit - about 25 by 25 metres of flat stone with a 604-metre sheer drop on three sides and no barrier or railing of any kind. Around 300,000 people hike to it each year,...

Titanic Belfast: A Museum That Actually Earns Its Reputation Titanic Belfast opened in 2012 on the centenary of the ship’s sinking and immediately became the most popular tourist attraction in Ireland, north or south. It has held that position since. The building itself is architecturally intentional: four prow-like shapes representing the four ships of the White Star Line’s Olympic...

Sveti Jovan Kaneo: The Church on the Cliff at Lake Ohrid Every photographer who visits North Macedonia eventually ends up at the same spot on the hill above Sveti Jovan Kaneo, looking down at the small Byzantine church on its stone shelf over the lake. The image is the country’s most reproduced: the domed church in warm terracotta stone, the cliff dropping to blue water, the Albanian...

Saint Augustine: The Oldest City in the US, With the History to Back It Up Saint Augustine was founded by Spanish colonists in 1565, making it the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States, predating Jamestown by 42 years. Henry Flagler built his Ponce de Leon Hotel here in 1888, now Flagler College, to market the city to Northern industrialists as a winter...

Edinburgh in August: The Festival, the Crowds, and What to Do The Edinburgh Festival Fringe began in 1947 when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to perform on the margins of the new Edinburgh International Festival. They were not on the programme. They performed anyway, in whatever spaces would have them. That founding act of mild anarchy is still the organizing principle: the Fringe has...

Galle Fort: The Dutch Colonial Town on Sri Lanka’s South Coast The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck the Sri Lanka coastline with devastating force. Outside the walls of Galle Fort, the surrounding town was destroyed. Inside, the massive Dutch-built fortifications – 17th-century stonework designed to withstand naval bombardment – absorbed the wave and most structures survived....