South Beach’s Art Deco Historic District represents the largest collection of 1930s-40s architecture in the world. Around 800 buildings survive from the period when Miami Beach was transforming itself from a winter resort for the wealthy into a major American leisure destination. The buildings are small by modern standards – typically three to four storeys – with pastel facades,...

Timgad: The Best-Preserved Roman City Nobody Has Heard Of Pompeii gets a million visitors a year. Timgad, which some historians argue is better preserved, gets a fraction of that. The Roman city of Thamugadi, founded in 100 AD under the Emperor Trajan as a settlement for legionary veterans, was abandoned around the 7th century and covered by sand blown from the Algerian high plateau. When French...

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg: Too Big for One Day Walking every gallery in the Hermitage would cover approximately 22 kilometres. Nobody does this. The museum holds around 3 million objects across five interconnected buildings on the Palace Embankment in St. Petersburg, and the building itself is as significant as what’s inside it: the Winter Palace, the baroque primary residence of Russian...

The Washington Monument: Getting Inside, and What Surrounds It The Washington Monument stands 169.3 metres (555 feet and 5/8 of an inch) on the National Mall and was the tallest man-made structure on Earth when it was completed in 1884. It remains the tallest stone structure in the world and the tallest obelisk anywhere. If you look carefully at the exterior marble, there is a slight colour...

London: The Honest Guide London is the largest city in Europe, has been producing and exporting culture for several centuries, and is a genuinely excellent place to spend a week provided you understand a few things going in. The cost of living is high. The weather is not reliable. The tube is mostly reliable but old and prone to overcrowding. The free museums are among the best in the world. The...

David Gareja sits about 110km southeast of Tbilisi on the edge of the Gareja Desert, a semi-arid plateau that spills into Azerbaijan. Getting there takes roughly 2 hours by car on roads that are fine until the last stretch, which is dirt track. There is no public transport that goes all the way; shared taxis from Tbilisi’s Isani or Samgori metro stations serve nearby villages, but...

Redwoods at Whakarewarewa: California Trees in a Rotorua Forest In 1901, a small experimental plot of California coast redwoods was planted on the edge of Whakarewarewa State Forest near Rotorua, New Zealand. The experiment was straightforward: the New Zealand Forest Service wanted to know whether redwoods would grow in the North Island’s volcanic soil. They grew. By the 2020s, the original...

Mumbai: The City That Rewards Stubbornness Mumbai is genuinely exhausting to navigate, and the visitors who find it transformative are usually the ones who stopped fighting that reality early on. The heat, the density, the traffic, the sensory overload - these are not problems to manage around but conditions to move through. Give the city your full attention and it repays you. Try to optimise it...

Angel Falls: The Highest Waterfall in the World, Reached by Canoe In 1937, American aviator Jimmie Angel crash-landed his monoplane on the summit plateau of Auyan-tepui in southeastern Venezuela while searching for gold. He and his crew were stranded for 11 days before walking out through the jungle. The waterfall he had spotted from the air and reported was later measured at 979 metres, making it...

Samarkand and Bukhara: The Silk Road Cities That Survive Uzbekistan opened significantly to tourism after 2016 when the government changed and visa restrictions eased. The country has seen substantial visitor growth since then, and the infrastructure in both Samarkand and Bukhara has developed accordingly. These cities are no longer the challenging off-the-beaten-path destinations they were in the...

Climbing Uluru was permanently closed in October 2019. This is worth knowing before you arrive with expectations shaped by older photographs and guidebooks showing visitors on the rock face. The Anangu people – the traditional custodians of the land – had been asking for the closure for decades. The climb is not a tradition or a right of passage; it is something that was permitted over...

The Hermitage: Three Million Objects in Six Buildings on the Neva Catherine the Great started the collection in 1764 by purchasing 225 Dutch and Flemish paintings from a Berlin merchant to settle a debt. The paintings were housed in a small hermitage building (a private retreat) adjacent to the Winter Palace, which is the origin of the museum’s name. The 3 million objects that followed over...

İshak Paşa Sarayı: An Ottoman Palace Against Mount Ararat İshak Paşa Sarayı sits on a crag at 1,685 metres above sea level outside Doğubayazıt in eastern Turkey, and on a clear day the backdrop is Mount Ararat, the 5,137-metre stratovolcano whose white summit dominates the landscape from Iran to Armenia. The juxtaposition of the ornate palace and the mountain is one of the more dramatic...

The Vatican: How to See It Without Losing Your Mind Seven million people visit the Vatican Museums each year. Most of them want the Sistine Chapel, which sits at the far end of a 7km circuit. To reach it, you funnel through the same corridors as every other visitor, past maps and tapestries and the Gallery of Candelabra, until you arrive in a room packed so tightly that the guards spend most of...

Important: Tibet access requires current research. Tibet Autonomous Region requires a separate Tibet Travel Permit in addition to a Chinese visa. The permit must be arranged through a licensed Tibetan travel agency before arriving in Tibet; it cannot be obtained on arrival. The region closes to foreign visitors at politically sensitive dates (the anniversary of the 1959 uprising in March, Tibetan...

Stockholm: A City That Rewards Slowing Down Stockholm is built on 14 islands where Lake Malaren meets the Baltic Sea, and the water is present in the city in a way that constantly restructures your sense of distance and direction. Bridges and ferries connect the islands; neighbourhoods that are 10 minutes apart as the crow flies take 25 minutes to reach on foot because of the waterways. Once you...

Discover the Beauty of Chesil Beach Located on the Dorset coastline in southern England, Chesil Beach is one of the most remarkable landforms in the British Isles. This 18-mile shingle barrier beach stretches from the Isle of Portland in the east to West Bay in the west, forming a continuous ridge of flint and chert pebbles that has been shaped by wave action over thousands of years. Behind the...

Whitsunday Islands: 74 Islands, One Perfect Beach The Whitsunday Islands sit off the central Queensland coast halfway between Brisbane and Cairns, scattered across the Coral Sea in a rough 100-kilometre arc. Of the 74 islands, most are uninhabited national park. About a dozen are accessible by boat. One, Whitsunday Island itself, has a beach that appears in Australian tourism campaigns so reliably...

Perhentian Islands: Southeast Asia’s Best Budget Dive Destination The Perhentian Islands (Perhentian Besar, the big island, and Perhentian Kecil, the small one) sit off northeast Malaysia in Terengganu, 21km from the mainland. The marine park contains some of the best snorkelling and diving in Southeast Asia at prices that make Bali look expensive. Water visibility regularly exceeds 20...

The Brandenburg Gate was inaccessible for 28 years. It stood precisely on the border between East and West Berlin, and neither side could approach it: the Wall ran directly beside it on the east, and the death strip between the Wall and East Berlin proper made the immediate area a killing zone. For nearly three decades, the gate – built in 1791 as a symbol of Prussian power and named after...

The Alhambra: Book Months Ahead, Then Give It a Full Day The Alhambra sells out. Not occasionally, not just in high summer, but reliably and well in advance for the Nasrid Palaces - the heart of the complex that most people come specifically to see. Tickets are available through the official website (alhambra-patronato.es) and sell in timed entry slots that go 60 days ahead. When those slots are...

Valle de la Luna: Atacama Geology at Its Most Surreal The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest non-polar desert on Earth. Parts of it receive less than 1mm of rainfall per year. The combination of this extreme aridity, altitude (around 2,400 metres above sea level), and the action of wind and occasional flash floods on salt-rich sedimentary layers has produced a landscape that erodes...

Masjid al-Haram: The Logistics and Meaning of the World’s Largest Mosque Masjid al-Haram in Mecca is the largest mosque in the world by capacity: approximately 356,800 square metres of covered and open prayer space, with capacity for more than 1.5 million worshippers simultaneously during Hajj periods, expanding to 4 million when the surrounding areas are included. Non-Muslims cannot enter...

Chatuchak Weekend Market, Bangkok The first thing you notice, walking in from the Mo Chit BTS station at 9am on a Saturday, is that you have already underestimated this market. Fifteen thousand stalls across 35 acres and up to 200,000 visitors every weekend: the numbers are correct, but they don’t translate until you’re standing at an intersection of covered corridors with no clear...

Cape Cod: The Crowds Are the Point, Until They’re Not Here is something the Cape Cod tourism industry will never tell you: the experience degrades measurably as you move toward July Fourth weekend, and the best version of it happens in May and September, when the water is still swimmable (the Gulf Stream keeps it warmer than you’d expect), the restaurants actually have tables...

Arenal hasn’t erupted since 2010, and that’s either a relief or a disappointment depending on why you came. The volcano spent most of the 20th century in full theatrical mode – lava flows, ash clouds, pyroclastic drama – before going quiet. What remains is a near-perfect 1,633-metre cone rising from the Alajuela highlands of northwestern Costa Rica, still steaming...

Karnak: The Largest Ancient Religious Complex in the World, and It Needs Half a Day The Karnak Temple Complex at Luxor is not a single temple but a collection of temples, chapels, pylons, and structures built across approximately 2,000 years. Construction began around 2000 BC in the Middle Kingdom and continued through the New Kingdom, the Late Period, and the Ptolemaic era. The complex covers...

Anakena Beach: Where the Moai Meet the Pacific Seven moai stand with their backs to the ocean at Ahu Nau Nau, looking inland as all moai do, watching over the white coral sand and the coconut palms at Anakena Beach. This is reportedly where the legendary first king of Rapa Nui, Hotu Matu’a, landed his canoes around 1200 CE after the long crossing from eastern Polynesia. Whether that...

Venice Simplon-Orient-Express: What the Money Actually Buys The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is not a reproduction. Belmond operates the train using actual 1920s and 1930s Wagons-Lits carriages that ran the original Orient Express routes between the wars, restored with marquetry woodwork, Lalique glass panels, white tablecloths in the dining car, and the specific narrow corridor smell of...

Churchill, Manitoba: Polar Bears, Beluga Whales, and Aurora Churchill, Manitoba has a population of around 900 people and is the polar bear capital of the world – not as a tourism slogan but as a geographic reality. Every autumn, between 800 and 1,200 polar bears congregate on the western shore of Hudson Bay near the town, waiting for the sea ice to form so they can return to hunting seals....

Da Nang: Vietnam’s Most Liveable City Done Right Da Nang’s position on Vietnam’s central coast makes it an unusually practical base. Hoi An is 30km south, Hue is 100km northwest through mountain passes, and the city itself has 30km of beach running through its urban centre. Vietnamese domestic travellers have always known this; international visitors are recognising it more...

Bannau Brycheiniog: The National Park That Changed Its Name (and Why That Matters) In April 2023, the Brecon Beacons National Park formally changed its name to Bannau Brycheiniog (pronounced Ban-eye Bruck-ein-iog, meaning “The Peaks of Brychan’s Kingdom”), abandoning the English name that had been in use since the park was established in 1957. The reasoning was simple: the...

The Drake Passage earns its reputation about 30% of the time, according to the expedition operators who cross it regularly. The other 70% of crossings run through what sailors call the Drake Lake – two days of open ocean that are rough but manageable, with albatrosses flying parallel to the ship and the temperature dropping noticeably as you push south. When the Drake Shake hits, however, it...

The Buddha head at Wat Mahathat – enclosed in fig tree roots that grew around it over centuries, the stone face looking out from between the serpentine wooden walls – is one of the more reproduced images in Southeast Asian travel. The arrangement is accidental: after the Burmese sacked Ayutthaya in 1767, destroying the capital and leaving statues decapitated, a fig tree slowly grew...

Yangshuo: Li River, Karst Country, and How to Avoid the Tourist Strip The karst landscape around Yangshuo appears on the Chinese 20-yuan note: limestone peaks rising 200-300 metres from flat paddy fields, peaks reflected in the Li River below, morning mist occasionally moving between the columns of rock. It is one of the most striking landscapes in China and arguably anywhere. The problem is that...

Kruger National Park: Self-Drive vs Guided Safari and How to Plan Kruger National Park covers 19,485 square kilometres of savanna, bushveld, and riparian forest in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, on South Africa’s border with Mozambique. It is the size of Wales. It is one of the few large African national parks where self-drive safari is both practical and common: the road network inside...

The Cerne Abbas Giant: Older Than Anyone Expected The National Trust commissioned optically stimulated luminescence dating of sediment within the figure’s outline, publishing results that placed his creation between 700 and 1100 AD - the late Saxon period. This decisively overturned the long-standing theory that he was a 17th-century satirical portrait of Oliver Cromwell, and opened up new...

Pooh Bridge and Ashdown Forest: The Real Hundred Acre Wood The original wooden footbridge over Chuck Hatch stream in Ashdown Forest was replaced in 1999 with a replica built to the same design. This is the bridge where Christopher Robin, in A.A. Milne’s stories, invented the game of Poohsticks: dropping sticks off one side and running to the other to see whose emerges first. The game is...

Iguazu Falls: Argentina vs Brazil, and Which Side is Better Iguazu Falls straddles the border between Argentina and Misiones province and the Brazilian state of Parana. Both sides offer access; they are genuinely different experiences and the honest answer is that you should do both if you have two days. The Argentine side has more walking. The circuit system runs along the upper and lower...

Sensoji Temple: Asakusa’s Anchor and What Makes It Worth Visiting Twice Sensoji is Tokyo’s oldest temple, established according to tradition in 645 AD when two fishermen pulled a small statue of Kannon (the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion) from the Sumida River. The current main hall dates from 1958, rebuilt after bombing in 1945. The Nakamise shopping street leading to it and the...

Washington DC: The Free Museums and What Else Is Worth Your Time Washington DC is the only capital city in the world where most of the major museums are both free and world-class. The Smithsonian Institution operates 19 museums and the National Zoo on annual congressional appropriations and charges nothing for general admission. London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, none of them offer the same combination...

The Grand Palace, Bangkok: What You’ll Actually See and How to Navigate It Men near the Grand Palace entrance tell visitors in plain clothes or unofficial-looking uniforms that the palace is closed for a religious holiday or royal ceremony and suggest an alternative. This happens daily. The palace is almost never actually closed. Walk past these people, verify at the gate yourself, and...

The BVI is considered one of the premier bareboat sailing destinations in the world, and the reason is geographic: 50 islands and cays spread across 59 square miles of protected water, with consistent trade winds, reliable anchoring, and almost nothing requiring serious open-ocean passage. You can sail a circuit of the main islands in a week and spend each night in a different anchorage. The...

Tikal: Before the Tour Buses Arrive at 09:00 Temple IV at 64 metres is the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the Americas, and the best reason to be at its base before 06:30 is not the height but what happens around you. Dawn at Tikal begins with sound rather than sight: howler monkeys calling from the canopy before the sky lightens, then the first ocellated turkeys - iridescent birds with...

The Luxor Temple: The Monument That Has Never Stopped Being Used The Luxor Temple is one of the most continuously occupied religious sites in the world. Built primarily by Amenhotep III around 1390 BC and extended by Ramesses II around 1260 BC, the temple was used for Egyptian religious ritual for over a thousand years. Then it was repurposed by the Romans as a fortress garrison. Then a Christian...

Naqsh-e Jahan: Isfahan’s Central Square and What Surrounds It Naqsh-e Jahan means “image of the world” in Farsi, and Shah Abbas I, who ordered the construction around 1598, was not understating his intentions. The square measures 512 metres long and 163 metres wide, the second-largest public square in the world after Tiananmen, enclosed on all four sides by monuments from the...

Newgrange: 5,200 Years Old and Still Making a Point Every year at dawn on the winter solstice, a narrow shaft of light enters a gap above Newgrange’s entrance and travels nineteen metres down the passage to illuminate the floor of the inner chamber for exactly seventeen minutes. This has been happening since approximately 3200 BC, and the fact that it still works perfectly, that the builders...

The Real Alcazar of Seville is the oldest royal palace in continuous use in Europe. The Spanish royal family still use it as the official Seville residence, which means on certain dates the upper apartments are closed to visitors – check before booking. Built primarily by King Pedro I of Castile in the 14th century on the foundations of a Moorish fortification, the palace is a specific...

The SS163 Amalfitana – the road that runs along the Amalfi Coast – is a two-lane highway clinging to cliffs above the Tyrrhenian Sea, shared by buses, tourist coaches, delivery vans, motorcycles, and cars, all attempting to pass each other on corners where two vehicles barely fit side by side. In July and August, the road is at maximum capacity from early morning. The experience of...

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque: What to Know Before You Arrive The numbers at Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque are relentless: 82 marble domes, 1,000 columns faced with semi-precious stones, a main prayer hall carpet weighing 35 tons hand-woven in Iran and assembled in sections on-site, 24-carat gold chandeliers hanging from the ceilings, and capacity for 41,000 worshippers. The mosque was completed in 2007...