Every Friday evening, the small town of Oistins on the south coast of Barbados holds a fish fry. Locals and visitors crowd around open-air stalls serving fresh-caught fish – flying fish and mahi-mahi primarily – grilled or fried, with rice and peas, macaroni pie, and coleslaw. The prices are reasonable, the sound system is loud, and the experience is what Barbados at its best actually...

Valparaíso: The Vertical City That Rewards Getting Lost Valparaíso was the most important port on the Pacific coast of South America for roughly 40 years. Then the Panama Canal opened in 1914, redirected trans-oceanic shipping away from Cape Horn, and the city entered a long economic decline. This turned out to be architecturally fortunate: Valparaíso couldn’t afford to tear down its...

Bay of Fundy: 100 Billion Tonnes of Water, Twice a Day The statistic is so large it sounds like exaggeration, but it isn’t: the Bay of Fundy moves more water in a single tidal cycle than all the world’s rivers combined. The tidal range reaches 16 metres at its maximum – roughly the height of a five-storey building – and the entire bay empties and refills twice every 24...

The Gateway Arch, St. Louis: Engineering the West’s Symbol The Gateway Arch is 192 metres tall, which makes it taller than the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty. The engineering required to build it between 1963 and 1965 was genuinely difficult: the two legs had to be constructed simultaneously and meet precisely at the apex, which required calculations at the limits of what was...

Kota Kinabalu: The Gateway to Mount Kinabalu and Sabah’s Coast On a clear morning from the KK waterfront, Mount Kinabalu rises 54km to the north and looks, frankly, unlikely. It is 4,095 metres above sea level, the highest peak in Southeast Asia outside New Guinea, and it sits in the same frame as islands you can reach by speedboat in 20 minutes. Kota Kinabalu manages to be both a genuinely...

Bet She’an: Seven Thousand Years Under the Same Sun Stand on the top of Tel Beit Shean and you’re looking down at one of the longest continuously occupied sites in human history: approximately 7,000 years of settlement in the Jordan Valley, from the Chalcolithic period around 4500 BCE through the medieval Islamic era. Most visitors come for the Roman city, Scythopolis, and the Roman...

Atlanta: The City That Burned Down and Built Something Better Atlanta was burned by Union forces in 1864, rebuilt within years, hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics, became the headquarters of Coca-Cola, CNN, Delta, and the CDC, and developed one of the most important civil rights histories of any American city. That last part is underused by visitors who spend three hours at the aquarium and wonder...

The Smithsonian: Which Museums to Actually Prioritise The original Wright Flyer from Kitty Hawk (1903) hangs from the ceiling of the Air and Space Museum’s Milestones of Flight gallery. It is smaller than you expect and more fragile-looking. The wood-and-fabric aircraft that changed what humans do for 7 minutes on December 17, 1903, before the wind damaged it and ended the day’s...

St. Basil’s Cathedral: Russia’s Most Photographed Building Up Close St. Basil’s Cathedral sits at the south end of Red Square, and no photograph prepares you for the colours in person. The nine onion domes are each painted differently: deep reds, greens, yellows, and a twisting pattern that looks like no other church architecture in the Orthodox world. Ivan the Terrible...

Kjeragbolten: The Boulder, the Hike, and What It Actually Takes Kjeragbolten is a boulder roughly the size of a car wedged in a crack on the face of Kjerag mountain, 984 metres above the Lysefjord. The photograph of a person standing on it with the fjord far below and nothing underneath has become one of the defining images of adventure travel in Norway. The question worth asking honestly: is...

Lovers Bridge in Niagara Falls sits along the Niagara Parkway, a landscaped boulevard that follows the Canadian side of the Niagara River from the falls upstream toward the Whirlpool. The bridge itself is a modest pedestrian crossing, but the Niagara Parks Commission land it sits within is genuinely well-kept, and the surrounding area offers some of the better viewpoints on the Canadian side. The...

Phong Nha-Ke Bang: Vietnam’s Cave Country Son Doong, the world’s largest cave by volume, has its own weather system, a subterranean jungle, and an underground river running through a chamber large enough to fit a Boeing 747 and still have space left. It was only surveyed by Western cavers in 2009. Son Doong is in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang karst formation in central Vietnam, and it is only...

Cape Tribulation: Where Two UNESCO World Heritage Sites Share a Coastline Captain James Cook named this headland “Cape Tribulation” in 1770 after his ship struck a reef nearby. The name stuck. What he couldn’t have known is that the reef that troubled him was the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef - and that the rainforest immediately behind the beach where his crew made...

Paris: The City That Requires Preparation to See Properly Paris receives around 30 million visitors annually and is, city for city, the most visited place on Earth. The concentration of significant art, architecture, and food in a walkable urban core is unmatched anywhere. The problem is that the tourist infrastructure is calibrated for those 30 million visitors and most of what’s laid on...

Istanbul: Two Continents, One City, No Shortage of Opinions on Which Side to Stay On The ferry from Karakoy to Kadikoy takes 20 minutes and costs almost nothing, and for that price it gives you the best view of the Istanbul skyline – the minarets and the dome of Hagia Sophia, the towers of Topkapi, the whole layered medieval-Ottoman-modern panorama – from a deck with fish sandwich...

Dublin: An Honest Assessment Dublin is compact enough to cover mostly on foot, has excellent food and drink in the right places, and can be genuinely great or genuinely exhausting depending on when you arrive and where you spend your evenings. The stag and hen party traffic on Temple Bar on Friday night is not the city’s finest hour. Everything else is fairly solid. What’s Worth Your...

Lascaux: Why You Cannot See the Original Cave (and What to Do Instead) The original Lascaux cave near Montignac in the Dordogne has been closed since 1963. Four teenagers discovered it in September 1940, following their dog down a collapsed tree root shaft. When it opened to visitors in 1948, the cave received 1,200 visitors per day. Within a decade, the carbon dioxide and humidity from those...

Some buildings in Baarle Nassau have their front door in the Netherlands and their back door in Belgium. The buildings are not large. The two countries share a kitchen, or a hallway, or a dining room wall. This is not a tourist installation – it is the actual legal and geographical situation that results from medieval land treaties never being properly resolved, and it has been this way for...

Glacier Bay: What 200 Years of Retreat Looks Like, Compressed Into One Place In 1750, the entirety of what is now Glacier Bay was covered by a single vast ice mass more than a kilometre thick. George Vancouver sailed past the entrance in 1794 and found only 5 kilometres of open water. When John Muir arrived in 1879, the bay had opened 77 kilometres. Today the bay extends 105 kilometres and the...

Cenotes: The Yucatan’s Sacred Wells, and How to Visit Them Well The word cenote comes from the Mayan term d’zonot, meaning sacred well. The ancient Maya didn’t use that word as a description of a nice swimming hole. These sinkholes were the primary freshwater source across a limestone peninsula with no surface rivers, and they were ritual spaces where the Maya made offerings to...

Pembrokeshire: The Only Coastal National Park in Britain Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was designated in 1952 specifically for its coastline, which makes it unique among British national parks. The 299km Coast Path from St Dogmaels in the north to Amroth in the south takes around 15 days to walk end-to-end; the total elevation gain is roughly equivalent to climbing Everest. Individual day...

Kailash Kher and the Music of Delhi Kailash Kher’s voice sounds like it was quarried from somewhere. He trained in Hindustani classical tradition, spent years struggling in Delhi – reportedly doing manual work and occasionally giving up on music entirely – before breaking through in 2003 with “Allah Ke Bande” on a Bollywood soundtrack. Since then he’s released...

The Gaspe Peninsula: Quebec’s Wild Eastern Tip The Gaspe Peninsula (La Gaspesie in French) extends 200 km into the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the eastern end of Quebec, with the St. Lawrence River on its north shore and Chaleur Bay on the south. The land is mountainous in the interior (the Chic-Choc Mountains, part of the Appalachian chain, reach 1,268 metres at Mont Jacques-Cartier),...

Kolkata: India’s Most Underrated Major City Every major Indian city has a reputation that precedes it. Delhi has power and monuments; Mumbai has money and ambition; Jaipur has forts and tourists. Kolkata gets sadness and decay, which is unfair and increasingly outdated. The city that served as British India’s capital for nearly a century has extraordinary colonial architecture, a...

Clovelly: The Devon Village Where Cars Cannot Go Clovelly in North Devon is a fishing village built on a cliff face so steep that the main street is effectively a cobbled staircase descending 120 metres to the harbour. No wheeled vehicles enter. Residents use sledges to move supplies down. Donkeys were historically used for the same purpose; they’re still kept here and appear in the...

Loch Ness: The Monster Is a Marketing Asset, The Loch Is Real The 1934 “Surgeon’s Photograph” of the Loch Ness Monster, which drove the legend into international consciousness, was exposed in 1994 as a hoax: a toy submarine fitted with a plasticine head, staged by a man seeking revenge against the Daily Mail. This debunking has had essentially no effect on visitor numbers. The...

St Michael’s Mount: Cornwall’s Tidal Island Worth the Timing The causeway to St Michael’s Mount disappears twice a day. That basic fact, the sea physically cutting off the island from the mainland at high tide, shapes every visit. Get the tide times wrong and you’re either stranded or waiting on the Marazion beach for the water to drop. Get them right and you walk across an...

Anfield: What It Feels Like When 61,000 People Sing Together The “This Is Anfield” sign hangs above the tunnel through which Liverpool’s players walk onto the pitch. The tradition is that players touch it on the way out; visiting teams do not. This tiny piece of theatre has been repeated before every Liverpool home match for decades, and when you stand in the tunnel on the...

Banaue and Batad: The Ifugao Rice Terraces in Practice The Ifugao rice terraces of the Cordillera region in northern Luzon have been in continuous cultivation for more than 2,000 years. The Ifugao people carved approximately 20,000 square kilometres of mountainside into a stacked system of irrigated paddies fed by a network of wooden channels and aqueducts flowing from the forests above. The...

Monument Valley: Recognisable Before You Arrive John Ford discovered Monument Valley in 1938 while scouting locations for Stagecoach. He returned for eight more films. By the time he finished with The Searchers in 1956, he had constructed so much of the visual vocabulary of the American Western around those sandstone buttes that the landscape was already mythologised before most Americans had ever...

Theresienwiese: Munich’s Famous Field, 11 Months of the Year Oktoberfest is not held in October. The dates were shifted to September in the 19th century for better weather, so the 16-18 days that fill Theresienwiese every year start the penultimate Saturday of September and end the first Sunday of October. The name has been wrong for 150+ years and nobody is particularly bothered. Most...

To Sua Ocean Trench: Samoa’s Most Photographed Swimming Hole To Sua (the name means “big hole” in Samoan) is a large ocean trench on the south coast of Upolu, connected to the sea by underground lava tubes. The water inside is deep blue-green, the walls are lush, and a long wooden ladder is the only way down. It’s a 30-second swim across and back. It’s also genuinely...

N Seoul Tower: A View from Namsan, With Some Caveats N Seoul Tower sits on top of Namsan Mountain at an elevation of about 480 metres, giving it a meaningful advantage over other Seoul observation points. The tower itself adds 237 metres. On a clear day you can see Bukhansan to the north, the Han River snaking through the city, and on winter days after rain has cleared the air, the edge of the...

Changdeokgung: The Palace Most Visitors Skip, to Their Own Loss Most first-time visitors to Seoul head to Gyeongbokgung because it’s larger and the photos are more immediately dramatic. That’s a defensible choice, but Changdeokgung Palace rewards visitors in ways that its more famous rival doesn’t. The buildings here have a more organic relationship with the hill they sit on. The...

South Georgia: The Southern Ocean’s Most Extraordinary Island Salisbury Plain on South Georgia holds roughly 100,000 breeding pairs of king penguins – 200,000 birds moving, calling, and navigating each other while elephant seals sleep in the grass among them. This is the largest king penguin colony on Earth by some estimates. The sound is continuous and the scale is genuinely...

Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery: The Ground Where History Is Still Visible The beach looks peaceful now. Tidal flats, sand, dunes, the grey-green Atlantic beyond. It takes a specific kind of attention to register that the men who died here on June 6, 1944, were crossing roughly 300 metres of open beach under fire from bluffs you can walk to in ten minutes. When you stand on those bluffs at...

L’Anse aux Meadows: Where the Viking Expedition Ended The mounds at L’Anse aux Meadows looked unusual to Helge Ingstad in 1960. He was flying over the northern tip of Newfoundland and the shapes in the boggy headland seemed wrong for natural features. He landed, investigated, and began the excavations that proved what he suspected: the remains of Norse sod-and-timber structures from...

Valley of the Kings: Beyond Tutankhamun’s Tomb The Valley of the Kings is a dry ravine on the Nile’s west bank opposite Luxor, used as a royal necropolis for 500 years during the New Kingdom period from the 16th to 11th centuries BC. Archaeologists have identified 63 tombs. Almost every single one was plundered in antiquity. This matters for understanding what you’re visiting:...

Encontro das Aguas: Where the Amazon’s Two Biggest Rivers Refuse to Mix About 10 kilometres east of Manaus, the Rio Negro meets the Amazon (Rio Solimoes) and for the next 6 kilometres the two rivers flow side by side without blending. The Rio Negro runs black – coloured by tannins from decomposing forest matter, like very strong tea – and the Solimoes runs sandy brown, dense with...

Edinburgh’s Royal Mile: What It Covers and What to Skip The Royal Mile is not quite a mile (1.8km, if you’re measuring from the castle esplanade to the gates of Holyrood Palace). It drops about 75 metres in elevation from castle to palace and changes names four times: Castlehill, Lawnmarket, High Street, Canongate. It is also among the most aggressively tourist-facing streets in...

Arequipa: The White City in the Shadow of Three Volcanoes Arequipa sits at 2,335 metres above sea level in a valley between three volcanoes: El Misti (5,822m, perfectly conical, perpetually snow-capped), Chachani (6,057m), and Pichu Pichu (5,664m). The colonial city centre is built almost entirely from sillar, a white volcanic stone quarried from those same volcanoes, which gives the buildings a...

Ruta de las Flores: El Salvador’s Coffee Highlands Route El Salvador is one of the most overlooked countries in Central America for travel, partly because of its history of violent crime and partly because it lacks the Maya ruins that draw people to Guatemala and Mexico. The Ruta de las Flores in the western Apaneca-Ilamatepec mountains deserves more attention than it gets. The route...

Santa Maria del Fiore: The Cathedral That Took 140 Years to Build The Florence Cathedral is so omnipresent in the city’s skyline that locals stop seeing it. Tourists stop seeing it differently: they photograph it from the piazza, check it off the list, and leave without going up. That’s a mistake with real costs, because the dome climb is one of the best tourist experiences in Italy...

Bourbon Street: The Good Parts Are Not on Bourbon Street That’s the thing nobody tells you before the first visit. The best bars in New Orleans, the best live music, the best food in the French Quarter, essentially none of it is on Bourbon Street itself. The street is a pedestrian spectacle of neon signs, open-container culture, and the world’s strongest frozen daiquiris served from...

Chicago’s architecture boat tours are the most efficient thing you can do in any American city. In 90 minutes on the Chicago River, you pass structures by Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, and Jeanne Gang while a knowledgeable guide explains not just who designed what but why Chicago became the city where American architecture was invented. The city burned down in 1871 –...

Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara: Tanzania’s Forgotten Trading Empire In 1331, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited the East African coast and called Kilwa “one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world.” He was not being diplomatic. Kilwa Kisiwani, on a small island about 300km south of Dar es Salaam, was the centre of an Indian Ocean gold trade that...

Tokyo Tower was the world’s tallest freestanding structure when it opened in 1958, modelled on the Eiffel Tower but painted orange and white for aviation safety rather than grey. It held the height record for a decade before being surpassed by Moscow’s Ostankino Tower in 1967. The more recent comparison is Tokyo Skytree, which opened in 2012 at 634 metres – officially the tallest...

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness: 1 Million Acres Without a Road On the second day in the Boundary Waters, after the portage over the ridgeline and down to a lake with no other boats in sight, the quiet becomes something you can hear. Not silence: loons calling, a beaver working the shore somewhere to the north, the small sound of water against the hull. What’s absent is road noise,...

Millau Viaduct: The Tallest Bridge in the World, in the Right Valley The approach from the north on the A75 is the correct way to see the Millau Viaduct for the first time. You crest a rise and the full structure appears ahead of you, spanning the Tarn valley at a height that seems wrong in the way that anything too large for its context seems wrong. The tallest mast rises 343 metres above the...

Cinque Terre: The Photography Is Accurate. So Are the Crowds. Five small villages on a 12km stretch of Ligurian coast: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore. Each built vertically up the cliff face, coloured facades facing the sea. The photographs you’ve seen are accurate representations of what’s there. So are the accounts of summer crowds. Understanding both...