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....

The Antikythera mechanism is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens: a 2,000-year-old bronze device recovered from a shipwreck in 1901, designed to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and planets. It is a clockwork computer from the 2nd century BCE that required mechanical precision no one thought ancient Greek metalworkers possessed. Looking at it in its glass case – corroded...

The Basilica of Saint Francis, Assisi: Giotto’s Revolution in Plaster Two earthquakes in September 1997 killed four people inside the basilica and brought sections of the vaulted ceiling of the Upper Church crashing down, destroying part of a Cimabue fresco in the process. Italian restorers spent years gathering and digitally cataloguing thousands of fresco fragments from the rubble,...

Kinkaku-ji: The Most Famous Building in Kyoto and Why You Should Visit It Last In 1950, a novice monk burned Kinkaku-ji to the ground. He had become obsessed with the building’s perfection and decided, in the logic of young men in the grip of ideas they can’t fully articulate, that the only response was to destroy it. He tried and failed to die in the fire. The building was...

St. Peter’s Basilica: The Largest Church in the World, Free to Enter Let’s settle this first: St. Peter’s Basilica is free to enter. There is no admission fee. The Vatican Museums next door require expensive advance booking and there’s genuine confusion - thousands of visitors every year book museum tickets expecting them to include the Basilica. They do not. The Basilica...

The Alps: The Honest Visitor’s Scale Problem The Alps stretch 1,200 kilometres from Nice to Vienna, span eight countries, and contain 82 peaks above 4,000 metres. Any post that tries to cover “the Alps” as a single destination is necessarily providing an overview rather than a guide. What follows is an attempt to give you the most useful orientations within a mountain range that...

San Antonio: The Alamo, the River Walk, and the Parts That Make It Genuinely Good San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States and the most visited city in Texas. Its tourism identity rests primarily on two things: the Alamo and the River Walk. Both are worth your time. Neither is the whole story, and the city has grown enough in the past decade that the parts beyond the central...

Parts of the Atacama Desert haven’t had measurable rainfall in recorded history. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observatory on the Puna de Atacama plateau sits at 5,050 metres above sea level, above most of the atmosphere’s water vapour, making it one of the best astronomical observation sites on Earth. These two facts – the aridity and the altitude – produce a...

Auckland is built on a volcanic field. More than 50 volcanic cones punctuate the city, some obvious (Rangitoto Island in the harbour, a perfectly symmetrical 260-metre shield volcano formed just 600 years ago), some less obvious (the gentle hill of Maungawhau/Mount Eden in the middle of the suburbs, its summit crater now a public reserve). The city occupies a narrow isthmus between two harbours...

Socotra Island: The Galapagos of the Indian Ocean, With Some Caveats The Dragon Blood Tree (Dracaena cinnabari) looks like a living umbrella that forgot to fold. Its canopy is dense and flat, its branches silver-grey and waxy, and when you cut the bark it bleeds a deep crimson resin that has been collected for use in dye, varnish, and traditional medicine for thousands of years. Stands of dragon...

Chartwell House: Churchill’s Country Home in Kent Churchill bought Chartwell in 1922 for its views across the Weald of Kent, over the explicit objections of Clementine, who thought the house was too expensive and needed too much work. He won the argument, spent the next forty years there, and made it the most personally revealing historic house in England. What distinguishes Chartwell from a...

The name is the problem. The Bridge of Sighs in Venice sounds deeply romantic – prisoners sighing as they glimpsed freedom for the last time through the bridge’s small windows – and the Romantic poets leaned hard into this interpretation (Byron referred to it in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812). In reality, the bridge was built in 1602 to connect the Doge’s Palace...

Lake Wakatipu and Queenstown: The Scenery Is Real Lake Wakatipu has a geological peculiarity: it’s one of the deepest lakes in the world by lake-floor depth below sea level. The lake sits at 310 metres above sea level, and the deepest point of the lake floor is 80 metres below sea level – meaning the bottom is lower than the ocean. The long narrow trough was carved by glacier action...

On February 20, 2026, the cross was installed atop the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Familia, completing the external works of the central tower and bringing the basilica to its full height of 172.5 metres – making it the tallest Christian church in the world, surpassing Ulm Minster in Germany. The church Gaudí began in 1883 is architecturally complete for the first time in its...

Camp Nou is currently undergoing a major renovation that is one of the most ambitious stadium reconstruction projects in European football. The Espai Barca project, which began with structural work from 2023, will transform the existing 99,354-seat stadium into a modern covered facility with a capacity of approximately 105,000. The renovation is being done in stages while keeping the stadium...

The Torre de Belem has been closed for restoration since late 2025, which is worth knowing before you plan your Lisbon visit around it. The Mosteiro dos Jeronimos, 600 metres east along the waterfront, is open and is the better building in any case. But the Tower’s current closure makes the Belem district’s other attractions – the Padrao dos Descobrimentos, the Pasteis de Belem...

Mount Roraima: Venezuela’s Impossible Summit Mount Roraima sits at the tripoint where Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana converge, at 2,810 metres the highest of the tepuis – those ancient flat-topped sandstone mountains that have been isolated from the surrounding landscape long enough for evolution to run its own experiments. The carnivorous plants, the black frogs (Oreophrynella...

The Pantheon, Rome: Built in 125 AD, Still Standing The Pantheon is the best-preserved ancient building in the world. Originally built as a temple to all the gods of Rome around 125 AD under Hadrian, it was converted to a Christian church in 609 AD and has been in continuous use ever since. That uninterrupted occupancy is the reason it survived while most of antiquity crumbled: a building in...

Mount Fuji: What the Climb is Actually Like Mount Fuji is the most climbed mountain in the world. About 300,000 people summit it every year during the official climbing season (early July through mid-September). It is not a technical climb – no ropes, no ice axes – but it is a serious 5-8 hour ascent on loose volcanic scree at altitude, frequently done overnight to reach the summit for...

Oia, Santorini: The Postcard Is Real, the Crowds Are More So Oia is the postcard village of Santorini: white cube houses, blue domes, caldera edge. The images you’ve seen are accurate. What the images don’t convey is that from June through August, the 3,000 people who live here share the main pedestrian lane with somewhere around 10,000 daily visitors, most of them moving in the same...

Discover the Charm of Cartagena Cartagena sits on the Caribbean coast of Colombia behind walls built to repel pirates, and it still has that sense of guarded treasure. The old city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but that designation does not quite prepare you for the heat and colour that hits you the moment you step through one of the ancient stone gates. Bougainvillea tumbles from wrought-iron...

Pizza in Naples: What to Order, Where to Go, and What to Ignore In 2017, UNESCO added Neapolitan pizza-making to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list. This is either a fitting recognition of a centuries-old tradition or the most Neapolitan thing that has ever happened to pizza – the city’s craftsmen finally getting international institutional validation for something they were already...