Madagascar: Logistics First, Wonder After Madagascar has been separated from the African mainland for 88 million years, which is long enough that evolution ran its own experiment in complete isolation. Around 90% of the island’s wildlife exists nowhere else on earth. The lemurs alone – over 100 species – are the primary reason people make the journey, and they justify it without...

Beijing: The Big Three and What to Do After Beijing’s three main attractions, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Temple of Heaven, can be covered in three days. The city itself rewards a much longer visit. The hutong neighbourhoods, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Earth, the 798 Art District, and the food alone justify adding another three days. What follows is a guide that tries...

Easter Island (Rapa Nui): Getting There and Making It Worth the Trip Rapa Nui sits in the South Pacific 3,760 kilometres west of mainland Chile and 4,000 kilometres east of the nearest inhabited Polynesian island. It is one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. The closest comparison is a Chilean meteorological outpost. Getting here requires a LATAM flight from Santiago (5 hours) or, less...

Bioluminescent Australia: Paddling Through Living Light The paddle goes in and comes out trailing blue fire. Not metaphorically, not approximately, each drop of water as it falls from the blade is briefly, unmistakably luminous. The dinoflagellates responsible, Noctiluca scintillans, flash when physically disturbed, and in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria the conditions that produce dense...

Kitzbühel: The Ski Town That Earns Its Reputation Every January, the Hahnenkamm downhill race on the Streif piste produces one of sport’s more extreme spectacles: racers hitting 140km/h through sections with gradients of up to 85%, the Mausfalle launching them airborne for several seconds, and the Hausbergkante section where the course makes a sharp compression that forces g-loads on the...

Banaue Rice Terraces: 2,000 Years of Agricultural Engineering The Ifugao people carved the rice terraces of the Cordillera mountains in northern Luzon more than 2,000 years ago using no mortar, no heavy machinery, and no metal tools, only wooden implements, fire, and the labour of generations. The result is a stacked system of irrigated paddies that follows the mountain contours from valley floor...

Borgarfjörður Eystri: Iceland’s Best Puffin Viewing, Without the Boat Trip Most accessible puffin colonies in Iceland require a ferry or a Zodiac and a degree of distance that makes photography frustrating. Borgarfjörður Eystri, a small fjord village in East Iceland, has a viewing platform built directly over a colony of approximately 10,000 Atlantic puffin pairs, at eye level with the...

Burning Man: The Part Nobody Tells You Burning Man happens in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, 120 miles north of Reno, during the week leading up to Labor Day. In 2026, that runs August 30 through September 7. For eight days, 70,000-80,000 people build and inhabit a temporary city on a dry alkaline lake bed, dismantling it completely by the time they leave. The city has streets, an airport, a...

Kilauea volcano’s Episode 48 of the current eruption series began at 4:40am on June 1, 2026, with lava fountains reaching 200 metres and a plume rising 7,600 metres. It lasted 9 hours. This eruption has now produced more fountaining episodes than any episodic eruption ever recorded, including the decades-long Pu’u’O’o eruption that reshaped the island’s southeast...

Meteora: Six Monasteries on Impossible Rocks The sandstone pillars at Meteora rise up to 400 metres from the Thessaly plain, and the monasteries on top of them are among the most peculiar constructions in Europe. The first hermit monks arrived in the 11th century, living in the cave faces. By the 14th century, communities were establishing permanent monasteries on the summits. At peak there were...

The Blue Mosque: Why Sultan Ahmed Built Six Minarets and Why That Caused a Problem Sultan Ahmed I was 19 years old when construction of his mosque began in 1609, and he made a decision that created a diplomatic incident before the building was even finished. He commissioned six minarets. At the time, the mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, had only six minarets. Constructing an equivalent...

Washington Union Station: Gateway to a City Worth Using Union Station opened in 1907 as the main railway terminal for Washington D.C., designed by Daniel Burnham in the Beaux-Arts style that dominated American civic architecture of the era. The main hall, 96 metres long, barrel-vaulted ceiling 29 metres high, was modelled partly on the Baths of Diocletian in Rome. It’s one of the...

Victoria Peak: The View That Earns Hong Kong’s Skyline Its Reputation Victoria Peak sits 552 metres above sea level on Hong Kong Island, and on a clear day the view across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon and the New Territories is one of the best city panoramas anywhere. The operative phrase is “clear day.” Hong Kong’s humidity means a genuine clear morning is rarer than the...

Caye Caulker: The Split, the Lazy Lizard, and How the Island Actually Works At sunset, the whole island converges on the Split. Not figuratively – literally. The handful of blocks that make up Caye Caulker’s tourism side can be crossed in 15 minutes on foot, and when the sky turns gold and pink over the channel, everyone who’s here is here: standing in the shallows with a cold...

Andaz Amsterdam Prinsengracht: A Hyatt Hotel That Actually Has a Point of View The exterior of the Andaz Amsterdam Prinsengracht is a 1970s concrete public library building on the Prinsengracht canal, which is not a promising start. Inside, designer Marcel Wanders has created something genuinely unusual: moon-like orbs hanging from the glass-roofed atrium lobby, giant murals of gasping herring...

Ben Nevis: The Reality of Britain’s Highest Mountain The summit of Ben Nevis is in cloud for roughly 355 days a year. That statistic appears frequently in warnings about the mountain, but it deserves to sit at the front rather than the back of any account of it, because it shapes the experience more than any single other fact. Most people who reach the top at 1,345 metres will stand in a...

Branson, Missouri: The Live Entertainment Capital That Doesn’t Pretend to Be Something Else Branson is about 9,000 permanent residents and more than 50 live entertainment theatres. It receives around 8 million visitors a year, almost all of them American, almost all of them driving from within a day’s journey, and almost all of them there specifically for the country music shows, the...

Amalienborg Palace: Where the Danish Royals Actually Live Amalienborg is four identical Rococo palaces arranged symmetrically around an octagonal courtyard in the centre of Copenhagen, facing the harbour. They were built between 1750 and 1760 as townhouses for Danish nobility and have been the primary residence of the Danish royal family since 1794, when a fire at Christiansborg Palace forced the...

Golden Gate Bridge: More Than a Photograph The colour is International Orange and it was chosen partly by designer Irving Morrow for its visibility in San Francisco’s notorious fog, and partly because the primer used during construction happened to be that shade and the consulting Navy officer who came to inspect it in 1933 approved of how it looked against the water and sky. The bridge...

Bay Islands, Honduras: The Caribbean’s Most Underrated Dive Destination Utila, the smallest of Honduras’s Bay Islands, has a well-established claim to being the cheapest place in the world to get a PADI open water diving certification. You can complete the course in 4-5 days for roughly $300-400 USD including equipment, exams, and four open water dives on a reef that is part of the...

Wawel Cathedral, Krakow: Where Poland’s History Is Literally Buried Wawel Hill above the Vistula has been the most politically and spiritually significant site in Poland for roughly a thousand years. The cathedral has served as the coronation church for Polish monarchs since the 11th century; the royal castle beside it was the seat of the court until the capital moved to Warsaw in 1596....

Callanish: The Standing Stones That Predate Stonehenge The standing stones at Callanish were erected around 2800-3000 BCE, making them roughly contemporary with Egypt’s Old Kingdom and several centuries older than Stonehenge. They stand on a ridge overlooking Loch Roag on the west coast of Lewis, the largest of the Outer Hebrides islands, in a landscape of Atlantic moorland and peat bog that...

Avebury: Stonehenge Is More Famous, But Avebury Is More Interesting The Avebury stone circle is larger than Stonehenge in almost every dimension. The henge (the circular earthwork bank and ditch) is approximately 420 metres across. The outer stone circle originally had about 100 stones arranged within this henge; roughly 27 survive. Two smaller inner stone circles were built within the outer one,...

Amalfi Coast: The Most Photographed Coastline in Italy and How to Get There Without Misery The Amalfi Coast is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, 50 kilometres of cliffs dropping into the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sorrento and Salerno, with villages perched on the rock faces and lemon groves covering every viable slope. The photographs are accurate. So are the problems: the SS163 coastal road is one lane...

Silfra and Þingvellir: Geology You Can Swim Through Þingvellir sits about 50km northeast of Reykjavik, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart at roughly 2cm per year. The rift that separates them is a geological feature you can walk along, kayak, snorkel, or dive through depending on your preference. The water that fills Silfra fissure filters through lava rock for 40-100...

Easter Island: 3,700 Kilometres From Anywhere, and Worth Every One The most remote inhabited island on Earth sits equidistant between the Chilean coast and Tahiti, and the isolation is not a minor detail you adapt to - it shapes every aspect of being there. Prices are high because almost everything is imported. The population is around 6,000. LATAM operates the only commercial route, direct from...

Ngorongoro Crater: The Best Game Drive in Africa, with Caveats The Ngorongoro Crater is a collapsed caldera 19 kilometres across and 600 metres deep. About 25,000 large animals live on its floor year-round because the crater walls provide natural containment. There is no migration here: what you see is what’s resident permanently. The lion density is among the highest on the African...

Siena Cathedral: Go Early, Stay Long The striped black-and-white marble of the Duomo di Siena runs all the way through the walls. This is not a veneer applied to a brick core – it’s structural marble from quarries in the hills south of the city, and the effect inside is disorienting in the best possible way: the interior banding changes the spatial weight of the building, making it...

The Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte – Black Forest cake – was invented in the region in the 1930s and is required to contain Schwarzwälder Kirschwasser (cherry schnapps from this specific area) to legally carry the name under German food law. The version served in most European countries is a reasonable approximation. The version served in the Black Forest from a bakery that has been making...

Grand Teton: Wyoming’s Most Vertical Park No American mountain range does what the Tetons do to a first-time visitor. Drive north from Jackson on Highway 191 and the Cathedral Group, specifically Grand Teton, Mount Owen, and Teewinot Mountain, appears suddenly above the sagebrush flats without any foothill transition, a 2,100-metre vertical gain in roughly 10 horizontal kilometres. It is the...

Malbork Castle: The Largest Brick Building in the World Malbork Castle is the largest castle in the world by land area, at 143,591 square metres. The Teutonic Knights built it starting in 1274 and used it as the order’s headquarters for over a century. The numbers are genuinely striking: a medieval military-religious order commanding enough labour and resources to build what is effectively a...

The Loreley: The Rock, the Myth, and the Middle Rhine The Loreley is a 132-metre high slate cliff on the east bank of the Rhine River at the town of Sankt Goarshausen, in the Rhineland-Palatinate state of Germany. It marks the narrowest section of the Upper Middle Rhine, where the river compresses between two steep rock faces and the current has historically been strong enough to wreck ships. The...

The blue haze that gives the Blue Mountains their name is not atmospheric pollution or altitude – it’s eucalyptus oil, dispersed into the air from the leaves of millions of gum trees covering the escarpment and valleys below. The oil particles scatter blue light in the same way the sky does. On a clear morning in spring, when the air is cold and still, the haze can be so dense that the...

Arles: Two Thousand Years in a Town You Can Walk Across in Fifteen Minutes Arles is small enough that you can cover its compact historic centre on foot in an afternoon, yet it contains a Roman amphitheatre that seats 20,000 people, one of the finest Romanesque church facades in France, a section of Roman street grid that has been continuously inhabited since the 1st century, and the neighbourhood...

North Island New Zealand: Two Weeks Done Right New Zealand’s North Island is roughly the size of the United Kingdom and takes at least two weeks to cover properly by car. Most visitors fly into Auckland, hire a vehicle, and drive a circuit taking in the Northland coast, Rotorua’s geothermal zone, Tongariro National Park, and Wellington before ferry or flight to the South Island. This...

Berlin is the only major European capital that was divided by a wall within living memory. The psychological weight of that division – 28 years of two separate cities growing in different political and social directions 100 metres apart – is not resolved. The memorials are serious. The museums are dense. The city has been wrestling with how to remember and interpret its history for 35...

Blue Ridge Parkway: America’s Most Scenic Drive, Without the Toll Booths The Blue Ridge Parkway runs 469 miles through the southern Appalachian Mountains, connecting Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. There are no toll booths, no entry fees, no commercial trucking (prohibited by design), and a 45-mph speed limit that is strictly...

The Eiffel Tower: How to Actually See It Gustave Eiffel wanted to keep the tower after the 1889 Exposition Universelle was over. The contract said it would be demolished in 1909. He saved it by installing a radio transmission antenna at the top in 1898, making it useful to the French government for military communications. This is why the most visited paid monument on Earth still exists: not...

Bermuda: What Makes It Different From Every Other Small Island Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory in the North Atlantic, 1,000km east of North Carolina, with no direct relation to the Caribbean despite frequent assumptions to the contrary. It is one of the wealthiest jurisdictions per capita in the world, with an economy based primarily on international insurance and reinsurance rather than...

Blyde River Canyon: South Africa’s Most Underappreciated Major Landscape The Blyde River Canyon runs approximately 26 kilometres through the Mpumalanga escarpment in South Africa and drops roughly 800 metres from the highveld plateau to the lowveld below. It is the third-largest canyon in the world and the largest green canyon (the others being in desert environments). This last distinction...

Carcassonne: Medieval Fortification and the Restoration Debate Carcassonne’s medieval walled city is one of the best-preserved examples of medieval military architecture in Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s also one of the most contested restorations in French cultural heritage, which changes how you look at it if you know the history. The city’s double ramparts,...

Bhutan: The Country That Charges You $250 a Day to Visit Bhutan’s Sustainable Development Fee is currently $100 per day per visitor (reduced from $250 that applied through 2023; check current rates as they change). This fee, charged on top of accommodation and tour costs, was designed specifically to limit tourist numbers and ensure that those who come contribute substantially to the...

Berlin: The City That Wears Its History on the Outside Most European capitals manage their difficult 20th-century history with varying degrees of displacement: plaques, museums, comfortable distance. Berlin cannot do this. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is in the city centre, a 10-minute walk from the Brandenburg Gate. Checkpoint Charlie is surrounded by a tourist circus but the Cold...

Berlin Museum Island: One Afternoon Is Not Enough Museum Island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site on a small island in the River Spree in Mitte, containing five significant museums built between 1830 and 1930 as part of a deliberate 19th-century project to concentrate Berlin’s classical collections in one place. The collections are extraordinary; the challenge is that the five museums together...

Lisbon: The Hills, the Tiles, and the Things Worth Planning Around Take the train from Cais do Sodre to Belem – seven minutes, departs every 20 minutes, substantially better than the tram that everyone tells you to take. The funiculars are currently suspended following an accident in September 2025 and the Torre de Belem has been closed for restoration since late 2025. These practical...

The Acropolis: The Parthenon Deserves Better Than a Crowd The Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 BCE on a limestone outcrop 156 metres above Athens. The architects Iktinos and Kallikrates made a building with no straight lines: every column curves slightly outward (entasis) to counteract the optical illusion that would make straight columns appear concave. The stylobate (the platform the...

Xochimilco: The Canal Agriculture That Survived the Aztec Empire and Almost Everything Since Xochimilco is the southern borough of Mexico City where the ancient Aztec system of chinampas (artificial agricultural islands built up from lake sediment over centuries) still produces flowers and vegetables for Mexico City’s markets. The chinampas have been in continuous cultivation for roughly...

The Burj Al Arab: Dubai’s Most Recognisable Building and Whether to Stay There The Burj Al Arab Jumeirah stands 321 metres on a small artificial island connected to Jumeirah Beach by a private road. It opened in 1999 and immediately became the shorthand image for Dubai’s ambitions: a hotel shaped like the sail of a traditional dhow at a scale that makes the sail analogy feel literal....

The Canadian Maritimes: The Tides at Hopewell, the Lobster, and the Rest The Bay of Fundy has the highest tidal range on Earth: up to 16 metres between low and high tide at Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick. Twice a day, the tide goes out far enough that you can walk on the sea floor between red sandstone formations that stand 12-15 metres above you. Three hours later, those same formations are...

Art Institute of Chicago: The Painting in Front of You, Not the One You’re Told to Find The Art Institute of Chicago’s most famous painting, Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), is nearly 10 feet tall and 14 feet wide. Standing in front of it at the correct distance, far enough that the individual dots of paint resolve into coherent...