Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre: Zaha Hadid’s Most Accomplished Building In 2014, the Design Museum in London gave its Design of the Year award to the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku. The award went to the building, not to whoever commissioned it. That distinction matters: the centre is named after Azerbaijan’s third president, and acknowledging the extraordinary quality of the...

Rio Carnival 2026: What the Experience Actually Involves Carnival 2026 runs February 13-21, with the main Sambadrome Special Group parades taking place February 15-17. The top 12 samba schools each perform a 65-90 minute spectacle starting around 21:30 and running through until dawn. Everything the school does, costumes, floats, song, choreography, and the thousands of members marching in...

Lhasa: The Paperwork Is Worth It Getting to Lhasa is the most administratively demanding major destination in Asia. Foreign visitors require a Tibet Travel Permit in addition to a standard Chinese visa, obtainable only through a licensed Tibetan tour operator. Independent travel in Tibet is not permitted for foreign nationals; a guide must accompany you at all times. Permits and logistics are not...

By September, the Chobe River is the only significant water source for several hundred kilometres of mopane woodland, and the result is one of the most astonishing concentrations of wildlife on the African continent. The floodplain fills with elephant herds numbering in the hundreds – Chobe has over 120,000 elephants, the largest population anywhere on earth – alongside buffalo,...

Bagan: 2,000 Temples on a Plain The Pagan Kingdom at its 11th-13th century peak built an estimated 3,500 temples on the alluvial plain of the Irrawaddy River in central Myanmar. About 2,000 still stand. Walking or cycling among them as the morning mist clears over the plain, with a balloon drifting silently above, is one of the most otherworldly visual experiences in Southeast Asia. Nothing...

Sydney Opera House: More Than the Photograph Jorn Utzon won the 1957 international design competition with drawings that the engineering community initially said were structurally impossible. The problem was the shells: no one could figure out how to build curved roof forms of that scale with concrete. Utzon solved it by realising all the shells could be designed as fragments of a single sphere...

Tokyo: The City That Runs, and Runs Well Tokyo is the world’s largest metropolitan area, home to roughly 37 million people, and operates with a reliability that visitors from most other global cities find genuinely disorienting at first. The trains run on time to a degree that Japanese rail companies issue formal apologies for delays measured in minutes. Restaurants rarely appear exactly...

Central Park looks natural and is almost entirely artificial. The rolling meadows, the lake, the woodland paths – almost none of it existed before construction began in 1858. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the Greensward Plan competition that year, and their design required moving more than ten million cartloads of stone and soil to create the landscape that now looks like it was...

Los Angeles: How to Not Waste a Week There LA rewards visitors who understand its geography and punishes those who don’t. The city covers 1,300 square kilometres, has no centre in the European sense, and operates almost entirely by car. Planning by neighbourhood is essential: Griffith Park and the Eastside are 25 minutes from the Westside on a good morning and 70 minutes at rush hour. If you...

The Bayeux Tapestry will be in London for the first time in its 950-year history in autumn 2026 – the first time the embroidered linen has ever left France – and the British Museum is where it’s being shown. This is, without exaggeration, the most significant loan of a cultural object in modern museum history, and if you can get a ticket for that exhibition, get one immediately....

Cairngorms: Britain’s Largest National Park and Its Genuinely Subpolar Climate The Cairngorm plateau is the closest thing Britain has to an Arctic landscape. At 1,200 metres above sea level, the high tops experience hurricane-force winds more than 100 days per year, carry snow on their north-facing gullies well into June in a good winter, and support a community of species, mountain hare in...

Blenheim Palace: Too Big to Ignore, Too Interesting to Rush Winston Churchill was born here on 30 November 1874, six weeks early, in a room that is now one of the most visited spots on the estate. His mother had been at a dance in the palace the night before; by morning the most consequential Briton of the 20th century had arrived, prematurely, in an 18th-century baroque palace built as a...

The Library of Congress holds more than 170 million items – the largest library in the world by collection size. Most visitors come for the Thomas Jefferson Building, which is the one that deserves the visit: a late 19th-century Italian Renaissance structure whose Great Hall is among the most elaborate interiors in Washington. Entry is free. The library’s collection contains more than...

Sheesh Mahal – the Hall of Mirrors – contains thousands of convex mirror tiles set into the ceiling and walls. A single candle is said to have lit the entire chamber through reflection, the light bouncing between surfaces until the room glowed. The engineering is 16th-century, using polished glass with backed silver and gold, arranged in patterns that include arabesques, flowers, and...

New York City: An Honest Visitor’s Guide New York City gets overhyped in ways that can set you up for disappointment and underhyped in ways that mean most visitors miss the best parts. The city is neither the romantic lead in a film you have already seen nor the dangerous, expensive obstacle it gets caricatured as by people who’ve been there once and had a bad time. It is a genuinely...

The Three Gorges Dam: Engineering, Displacement, and the Yangtze Cruise The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River was completed in 2006 after 17 years of construction. It is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world by installed capacity at 22,500 megawatts, and the reservoir it created stretches 660km upstream to Chongqing. The construction flooded 1,000 towns and villages and required the...

Bhaktapur Durbar Square: The Kathmandu Valley’s Least Overrun Treasure Of the three Durbar Squares in the Kathmandu Valley, Bhaktapur gets the fewest visitors and, by most honest accounts, deserves the most. Kathmandu’s square has become something of a tourist staging area; Patan is excellent but densely known. Bhaktapur feels like an actual medieval city that people still live in -...

Bryce Canyon technically isn’t a canyon. The formations here were carved not by a river cutting downward but by frost wedging and chemical erosion working simultaneously on different layers of limestone and sandstone – a process that produces the hoodoos (tall, thin rock spires) in a way that differs from the river-carved slot canyons and valleys elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau. The...

Sedlec Ossuary: Bones, History, and the Edges of Taste In 1870, a local woodcarver named Frantisek Rint was commissioned to arrange the human bones stored in the crypt of a Gothic church in Sedlec, on the edge of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. He made chandeliers from them. He made a coat of arms for the Schwarzenberg family. He made garlands for the pillars. And in the corner, he signed his...

Luskentyre Beach, Harris: The Real Thing Travel magazines routinely put Luskentyre in lists of the world’s most beautiful beaches, which sounds like hyperbole until you’re actually there. The sand is a pale cream-white that shades into turquoise water, backed by machair grassland and with the hills of Harris rising beyond. On a sunny day in June with low tide exposing a kilometre of...

Mutrah Souq: Muscat’s Old Market, Still Working The same alley in Mutrah Souq that sells tourist frankincense is the one where a Baluchi fisherman fills his prescription and a carpenter orders hardware. That detail is what separates this from most of the “traditional markets” that exist primarily for visitors: Mutrah is an actual working market that tourists happen to also love....

Green Park: The Royal Park That Doesn’t Try Too Hard Green Park is the simplest of the central London Royal Parks and the better for it. No lake, no formal gardens, no cafe in the middle. Forty hectares of grass, mature plane and lime trees, and deck chairs for hire in summer. The absence of spectacle is the point. Wedged between Westminster and Mayfair, it functions as a corridor and a...

Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park: Art That Becomes Reef Jason deCaires Taylor placed the first sculptures in Molinere Bay in 2006 with a specific intention: to create artificial reef substrate that would transfer authorship to the Caribbean Sea over time. The sculptures, more than 65 life-sized cement figures in 3-8 metres of water, were designed not to remain as he made them. Fifteen years of...

Franz Josef Glacier: What You Can and Can’t Do There Now The town of Franz Josef (population approximately 300) on New Zealand’s West Coast exists because of the glacier. The glacier descends from the Southern Alps to within about 19 km of the Tasman Sea, unusual for a glacier at this latitude, and at the right vantage point you can see dense temperate rainforest and a 3,000-metre ice...

At dawn, before the tourist groups arrive, the circumambulatory path around Boudhanath belongs to the monks, the elderly Tibetan pilgrims, and the prayer flags. The stupa rises 36 metres above the concentric circles of people moving clockwise, spinning bronze prayer wheels as they walk, murmuring mantras. By 9am, the coffee shops with their rooftop views are filling up with trekkers, and by noon...

There were never twelve. The Twelve Apostles on Victoria’s southwest coast have been marketed under that name since the 1960s (they were previously called the Sow and Piglets), but the actual count at the time of renaming was eight. Coastal erosion has reduced the number further – one stack collapsed in 2005 – and current counts range from seven to nine depending on the tide....

Canterbury Cathedral: Murder, Pilgrimage, and One of England’s Most Important Buildings On December 29, 1170, four knights acting on a misread command from King Henry II hacked Thomas Becket to death inside his own cathedral. Within three years, the Pope had canonised Becket. Within a decade, Canterbury had become one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in medieval Europe. Within...

The bas-reliefs along Angkor Wat’s third enclosure wall run for 800 metres and contain some of the most detailed narrative carving in the world. The south wall’s Battle of Kurukshetra panel alone shows 1,500 figures in a composition that took years to complete – armies meeting in detail that includes individual facial expressions, weapons, and the aftermath of combat depicted in...

Reunion Island: The Indian Ocean’s Volcano That Erupts Like Clockwork Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island erupts roughly three to five times per year and has been doing so continuously since at least the 18th century. These are not explosive eruptions - the lava is effusive, flowing rather than blasting, which makes watching an active eruption (when the prefecture permits access) one of...

Washington Monument: The Marble Changes Colour a Third of the Way Up The Washington Monument is a 169-metre marble obelisk - the tallest obelisk in the world - and if you look at it carefully, the marble changes colour about a third of the way up. Construction began in 1848, halted in 1854 due to funding problems and political complications, and resumed in 1877 after a 23-year gap. The marble for...

Mansudae Grand Monument: Visiting North Korea’s Most Symbolic Site Two 20-metre bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il stand on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang, backed by a 70-metre mosaic mural of Mount Paektu. The original Kim Il-sung statue was erected in 1972; a statue of Kim Jong-il was added in 2012 following his death, and the Kim Il-sung figure was modified at the same time to wear a...

Auyuittuq: The Land That Never Melts, and What That Costs You to See The name Auyuittuq means “land that never melts” in Inuktitut, and while climate change has been making the permafrost progressively less permanent, the scale of what the park contains makes the name feel appropriate. Nineteen thousand square kilometres of Baffin Island’s spine: the Penny Ice Cap, which still...

The Great Sphinx of Giza The Great Sphinx is 73 metres long, 20 metres high, and carved from a single mass of limestone bedrock. It faces due east. It was built during the Old Kingdom, almost certainly during the reign of Pharaoh Khafre around 2500 BC, though the exact dating and the identity of the face depicted have been argued about for centuries. What’s certain is that it’s the...

Ha Long Bay: The Three-Day Cruise vs the One-Day Tour Ha Long Bay, 1,600-plus limestone karsts rising from the Gulf of Tonkin in northeastern Vietnam, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of the most photographed seascapes in Southeast Asia, is something you experience properly only from the water. The tour you choose matters enormously, and the one-day tour from Hanoi (the cheapest, most common...

Page, Arizona: The Slot Canyons, the Reservoir, and the Permit Reality Page, Arizona sits on the Colorado Plateau near the Utah border, surrounded by some of the most distinctive sandstone scenery on Earth. The concentration of remarkable formations within 20 kilometres of this small town is unusual even by the standards of the Colorado Plateau, which is itself one of the most geologically...

Giant’s Causeway: The Basalt Formation on the North Antrim Coast The hexagonal columns at the Giant’s Causeway are not cut or carved. They are a product of thermal contraction physics that produces hexagonal fracturing in cooling lava as reliably as bees produce hexagonal honeycombs in wax: the same geometry arising from completely different processes. Approximately 40,000 interlocking...

In October 1961, American and Soviet tanks faced each other across a 100-metre gap at Checkpoint Charlie for sixteen hours. This was the closest the two superpowers came to direct military confrontation at any point during the Cold War. Neither side blinked; both sides eventually withdrew. The standoff was triggered by a dispute over whether East German guards had the right to check the identity...

Isle of Wight: A Day Out That Earns a Weekend The Island Line trains run between Ryde and Shanklin on rolling stock originally built for the London Underground in 1938 – the same tunnels they were designed for simply got too narrow when modern trains arrived, so the Isle of Wight got them instead. Riding the Island Line is one of those genuinely odd British transport experiences that rewards...

Polonnaruwa: Sri Lanka’s Medieval Capital, Better Than Sigiriya for a Full Day Polonnaruwa is less famous than Sigiriya and that is a mistake made by most Sri Lanka itineraries. The ancient city served as the island’s capital from the 11th to 13th centuries, and what survives across the 3,600-acre site represents a more coherent medieval urban culture than the dramatic rock fortress an...

Reims Cathedral: The Coronation Church Reims is 45 minutes from Paris by TGV (Gare de l’Est, roughly every hour, around €25-45 depending on when you book) and is consistently overlooked by tourists who go to Versailles, Giverny, or Mont Saint-Michel for their day trip from the capital. This is a mistake. Reims has a Gothic cathedral arguably more important to French history than Notre-Dame...

Honolulu: Beyond Waikiki The USS Arizona Memorial floats over the sunken battleship hull where 1,177 crew members died on December 7, 1941. Oil still seeps from the wreck, rising slowly to the surface in what the National Park Service calls “the tears of the Arizona.” Visiting the white memorial structure, watching that oil, registers differently than most WWII historical sites because...

Queenstown: Very Good at What It Does Queenstown is very good at extracting money from tourists who are having too much fun to notice. This is not a complaint. The scenery on Lake Wakatipu with the Remarkables range above is among the best in the Southern Hemisphere, and the infrastructure for adventure activities is legitimately world-class. Go in knowing it’s expensive and you’ll...

Las Vegas: Making Sense of Four Miles of Deliberate Excess The Las Vegas Strip is not actually in Las Vegas. The 4.2-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South runs through unincorporated Clark County, which is why the hotels were built to the scale they were – no municipal planning restrictions, no zoning fights, just desert real estate and capital. The legal quirk shaped everything. The...

The Duomo, Florence: What to Actually Do When You Get There When Brunelleschi completed his dome in 1436, it was the largest in the world and no one had any real confidence it would work. He refused to share his construction methods, worked without external scaffolding using a system of internal bracing no one had used since antiquity, and supervised the entire project personally over 16 years....

Madrid: What to Do Beyond the Obvious Madrid rewards people who stay for a week rather than a weekend. The Prado alone deserves two full visits, the neighbourhoods are all different, and the city runs on a schedule that will fight your body clock for the first three days. Dinner before 9pm marks you as a tourist. Embrace it or resist it; the adjustment period is actually part of the experience.

The Kaaba and Masjid al-Haram: A Guide for Muslim Travellers Mecca is the holiest city in Islam and entry is restricted to Muslims. Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter the city limits, enforced at checkpoints on all approach roads. This is not a grey area and is not negotiable. Any practical guide to visiting Mecca and the Kaaba is therefore for Muslim travellers specifically - those performing...

Isla Mujeres: Cancun’s Better Neighbour Isla Mujeres is 8 kilometres offshore from Cancun’s Hotel Zone. The ferry takes 15-30 minutes depending on your departure point. That small distance produces a disproportionate change: a 7-kilometre island with no large resort towers, a village centre you can walk across in 10 minutes, and an atmosphere that the mainland strip definitively does...

Centrul Vechi: Bucharest’s Old Town Has More Layers Than the Party Scene Suggests Friday at midnight in Centrul Vechi and the cobblestone streets of Lipscani are at full roar: outdoor terraces packed, music bleeding from three venues at once, the kind of controlled chaos that Bucharest does better than most European capitals at a fraction of the price. Come back at 10am on a Tuesday and...

Mount Rushmore: Sixty-Foot Presidents in the Black Hills The four faces are 18 metres tall each, and you don’t really grasp the scale until you’re standing on the Presidential Trail and your field of vision narrows to just Lincoln’s left nostril. Gutzon Borglum dynamited 450,000 tons of granite to make this happen, starting in 1927 and running until 1941, the year he died. His...

The Jurassic Coast: Fossil Hunting Without the Fuss Mary Anning found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton in the shale cliffs above Black Ven, east of Lyme Regis, in 1811-1812. She was 12 years old. The fossils she collected and sold built her scientific reputation and contributed directly to several foundational debates in 19th-century palaeontology, while the scientific establishment of the...