Yangshuo: Li River, Karst Country, and How to Avoid the Tourist Strip Yangshuo is a small county town in Guangxi Province, 65 km south of Guilin along the Li River. The landscape around it - karst limestone peaks rising 200-300 metres from flat paddy fields and river bends, the peaks sometimes shrouded in morning mist, reflected in the river below - is what appears on the Chinese 20-yuan note. It...

The London Eye: What It Actually Is and Whether It’s Worth Your Time The London Eye opened in March 2000 as a temporary structure built for the millennium. It was never removed. Twenty-five years later it is one of the most recognised structures in Britain, turning slowly on the South Bank of the Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament. The wheel is 135 metres tall. Each of the 32 capsules...

Torre de Belem: The Watch Tower at the Edge of the Known World The Torre de Belem (Belem Tower) stands in the Tagus estuary on the western edge of Lisbon, half-submerged in water at high tide. It was built between 1516 and 1521 during the reign of Manuel I, ostensibly as a fortress to guard the harbour mouth and as a ceremonial gateway marking the departure and return of the great Portuguese...

Golden Gate Bridge: More Than a Photograph The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937 after four years of construction. It cost $35 million, required 83,000 tonnes of steel cable, and was, at the time of completion, the longest suspension bridge in the world. It held that record for 28 years. The colour, International Orange, was chosen partly by designer Irving Morrow for its visibility in fog and...

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 perched on a stone shelf over the lake. The image is the country’s most reproduced: the domed church in warm terracotta stone, the cliff dropping directly to blue water, the...

Paris: Getting Past the Postcard Version Paris has roughly 15 million foreign visitors a year, and most of them spend their time within a two-kilometre radius of the Eiffel Tower. That’s understandable: the 1st, 4th, and 7th arrondissements contain many of the city’s most famous buildings. But a Paris trip built entirely around the tourist circuit - Louvre in the morning, Tower at...

Iguazu Falls: Both Sides, the Logistics, and What to Prioritise Iguazu Falls is the world’s widest waterfall system, spanning approximately 2.7 km along the Iguazu River on the border of Argentina and Brazil. The system consists of 275 individual falls that merge into a near-continuous curtain of water in wet season. The Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat) is the largest single fall:...

+++ title = ‘Morane Lake in the Rocky Mountains’ date = 2026-05-03T08:55:11Z draft = false quad_image = ‘/images/morane-lake-in-the-rocky-mountains-quad.jpg’ featured_image = ‘/images/morane-lake-in-the-rocky-mountains.jpg’ +++ Moraine Lake: What Actually Getting There Requires The photograph is on the old Canadian 20-dollar bill, reproduced on millions of...

Mayreau: The Smallest Inhabited Island in the Grenadines Mayreau has a permanent population of around 250 people, no airport, and approximately 4 square kilometres of land. It receives a fraction of the tourist traffic that goes to Bequia or Mustique, and that is the reason to go. The island sits at the southern end of the Grenadines chain, north of Union Island, with the Tobago Cays Marine Park...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Which Parts Are Worth Your Time The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue is the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere and one of the largest anywhere. The permanent collection contains approximately 1.5 million objects; around 400,000 are on display at any given time across 17 curatorial departments. A visitor who spent 30 seconds looking at each...

Jerusalem: The Old City and What to Do When You Leave It Jerusalem is one of the most visited, most contested, and most complicated cities on earth. Around 3.5 million tourists visit annually. The Old City - 0.9 square kilometres enclosed by Ottoman walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1538 - contains sacred sites central to three religions: the Western Wall (Judaism), the Church of the Holy...

Mount Everest: Getting Close Without a Climbing Permit Everest Base Camp on the Nepal side sits at 5,364 metres. Thousands of trekkers reach it every year. They do not climb Everest; they reach a rocky moraine from which, on a clear day, they can see the Khumbu Icefall and the lower slopes of the summit pyramid above. The summit itself is not visible from Base Camp - the angle is wrong.

Pienza: The Ideal Renaissance Town and Why It Still Works Pienza is a small hilltop town in the Val d’Orcia in Tuscany - population around 2,200 - that was largely rebuilt by Pope Pius II (born Enea Silvio Piccolomini in the village) starting in 1459. Pius II wanted to demonstrate Renaissance civic planning principles in practice: he commissioned the architect Bernardo Rossellino to create...

Juliet’s Balcony in Verona: Managing Your Expectations Let’s be direct about what Juliet’s Balcony is and what it isn’t. The Casa di Giulietta at Via Cappello 23 in Verona is a 14th-century house that has no documented connection to Shakespeare’s play, which was written in 1594 and set the action in a fictional version of Verona. The balcony itself was added in 1937,...

Semmering Pass: Austria’s First UNESCO Railway and a Weekend Worth Taking The Semmering Pass at 985 metres sits on the boundary between Lower Austria and Styria, about 100 km southwest of Vienna. The pass itself is not the point. The railway is the point. The Semmeringbahn, completed in 1854, was the first mountain railway in the world to be built with a steam locomotive over a high mountain...

Chartwell House: Churchill’s Country Home in Kent Located in Westerham, Kent, Chartwell House was the beloved country residence of Sir Winston Churchill for over forty years, from 1922 until his death in 1965. Churchill purchased Chartwell for its sweeping views across the Weald of Kent, a landscape he would paint repeatedly throughout his long life. Today the property is managed by the...

Saint Louis: The City That Keeps Surprising St. Louis sits at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the middle of the country, 380 km south of Chicago and 950 km north of New Orleans. It was the staging point for the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804 and the westernmost city of consequence in the US for several decades afterward - the “Gateway to the West” label...

Geysir: The Original Geyser and the Golden Circle The word “geyser” comes from Geysir, the Icelandic hot spring that lent its name to the phenomenon worldwide. The Great Geysir in the Haukadalur valley in southwestern Iceland has been erupting intermittently for at least 800 years; historical accounts describe eruptions reaching 80 metres. It is currently mostly dormant - decades pass...

Encontro das Aguas: Where the Amazon’s Two Biggest Rivers Refuse to Mix About 10 km east of Manaus, the Rio Negro meets the Amazon (Rio Solimoes) and for several kilometres the two rivers flow side by side without mixing. The Rio Negro runs black - coloured by tannins from decomposing forest matter, like tea - and the Amazon runs sediment-brown, its water dense with Andean silt. The...

Washington, D.C.: The Free Museums and What Else Is Worth Your Time Washington DC is the world’s only capital city where most of the major museums are both free and world-class. The Smithsonian Institution operates 19 museums and the National Zoo on an annual congressional appropriation, and they charge nothing for general admission. This is not the case for any equivalent capital city -...

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 its construction around 1598, was not underestimating. The square measures 512 metres long and 163 metres wide - the second-largest public square on earth after Tiananmen - and it is enclosed on all four sides by monuments from the peak of...

Hollywood Boulevard: Real Tips for a Street That Mostly Disappoints Be honest with yourself before you go: Hollywood Boulevard is not the glamorous movie-land of your imagination. The sidewalk is often grimy. The Walk of Fame runs past pawnshops, souvenir stores, and people in dirty character costumes who expect a dollar for a photograph. The TCL Chinese Theatre is impressive and genuinely...

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),...

The Eiffel Tower: The Practical Truth Gustave Eiffel’s iron lattice tower was built in 1889 as the entrance arch for the World’s Fair and was supposed to be demolished after 20 years. The critics of its day called it the “iron asparagus” and worse. It survived because it was useful as a radio transmission tower. Today it receives roughly 7 million visitors per year, which...

Lake Toba: The Supervolcano Caldera and Batak Heartland Lake Toba is the largest volcanic lake in the world, measuring 100 km long by 30 km wide and sitting at 905 metres elevation in the highlands of North Sumatra. The lake fills a caldera created by a supervolcanic eruption approximately 74,000 years ago - one of the largest known eruptions in the past two million years, large enough that it...

Sedlec Ossuary: Bones, History, and the Edges of Taste Not many travel experiences stop you cold at the door. Sedlec Ossuary does. The moment you descend into the lower chapel of this small Gothic church on the edge of Kutna Hora, you’re confronted with 40,000 human skeletons arranged into chandelier, coat of arms, and garland. It’s extraordinary. It’s also deeply strange. The...

Franz Josef Glacier: What It Actually Is in 2024 The town of Franz Josef (pop. approximately 300) exists because of the glacier. The glacier - officially Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere in Maori - descends from the Southern Alps to within about 19 km of the Tasman Sea, a feat unusual in the world for a glacier at this latitude. At its peak, you can look at rainforest and a 3,000-metre ice field within...

Reunion Island: The Indian Ocean’s Most Underrated Destination Reunion is a French overseas department sitting 800 km east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Most travellers heading to that part of the world default to Mauritius (25 minutes away by plane) or the Seychelles. That’s their loss. Reunion has a 3,069-metre active volcano that erupts several times a year, some of the most...

Petronas Twin Towers: The Building, the Sky Bridge, and Kuala Lumpur Around It The Petronas Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004, when they were surpassed by Taipei 101. At 452 metres (with spires), they remain the tallest twin towers in the world. Argentine architect Cesar Pelli designed them for the Malaysian national oil company Petronas; the Islamic geometric...

Exploring the Iconic Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin Introduction Located in the Mitte district of Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous crossing point between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. Operated by American forces from 1961 until German reunification in 1990, it stood at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse as a focal point of Cold War tensions. Today the...

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

Venice’s Grand Canal: What You’re Actually Looking At The Grand Canal is Venice’s main waterway, an S-shaped channel approximately 3.8 km long and 30-70 metres wide, running from the Santa Lucia train station at the northwest end to the San Marco/Salute basin at the southeast. It was the main commercial artery of the medieval and Renaissance city - the Venetian equivalent of a...

Delphi: The Centre of the Ancient World The ancient Greeks called Delphi the omphalos - the navel of the world. A conical stone, the omphalos stone itself, was kept in the sanctuary as physical proof. For a period spanning roughly the 8th to 4th centuries BC, this rocky hillside on the southern slope of Mount Parnassos was the most important religious site in the Greek world. Kings, generals, and...

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...

Kota Kinabalu: The Gateway to Mount Kinabalu and Sabah’s Coast Kota Kinabalu (universally called KK) is the capital of Sabah, the Malaysian state on the northern tip of Borneo, with a population of around 550,000. It sits on the South China Sea coast with Mount Kinabalu (4,095 metres, the highest peak in Southeast Asia outside New Guinea) visible on clear mornings from the waterfront, 54 km...

Monte Carlo Casino: What to Know Before You Go The Casino de Monte-Carlo is one of the most photographed buildings in Europe, which means most people who visit Monaco see it from the Place du Casino while trying to get a Ferrari in the frame. A smaller number actually go inside. The fee to enter the main gaming rooms is 17 euros, and for that you get access to the Belle Epoque salons, the atrium...

Giant’s Causeway: The Basalt Formation on the North Antrim Coast The Giant’s Causeway is a formation of approximately 40,000 interlocking basalt columns on the north coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland, formed around 60 million years ago when lava flows cooled and contracted, fracturing into the distinctive hexagonal columns. The columns vary from 15 to 40 centimetres across and...

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: The Best Museum You Haven’t Heard Of The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art sits on the Oresund coast 35 km north of Copenhagen in the small town of Humlebaek. It is not in Louisiana. The name comes from the three successive owners of the 18th-century country house that preceded the museum, all of whom were named Louise. The museum opened in 1958, expanded several...

The Grand Palace, Bangkok: What You’ll Actually See and How to Navigate It The Grand Palace complex occupies 218,000 square metres on the eastern bank of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok’s Rattanakosin Island district, the historical heart of the city. Construction began in 1782 when King Rama I moved the capital from Thonburi across the river. The compound contains not only the Grand...

Kjeragbolten: The Boulder, the Hike, and What It Actually Takes Kjeragbolten is a boulder the size of a small car wedged in a crack on the face of Kjerag mountain, 984 metres above the Lysefjord. Climbers and hikers have been balancing on it for photographs since the early 1990s. The photograph - person standing on the boulder, fjord far below, nothing underneath - has become one of the defining...

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 to the public since 1963. It was discovered in September 1940 by four teenagers following their dog down a collapsed tree root shaft and opened to visitors in 1948. Within a decade, the carbon dioxide and humidity from 1,200 daily visitors had triggered...

Pembrokeshire Coast National Park: Walking the Only Coastal National Park in Britain Pembrokeshire is the only national park in Britain designated specifically for its coastline. The Pembrokeshire Coast Path runs 299 km from St Dogmaels in the north to Amroth in the south, following cliffs, beaches, harbour towns, and offshore island viewpoints along southwest Wales. The path is challenging in...

Whistler Blackcomb: North America’s Largest Ski Resort and How to Navigate It Whistler Blackcomb is the largest ski resort in North America by skiable terrain: 8,171 acres across two mountains (Whistler and Blackcomb), connected by the PEAK 2 PEAK Gondola. The resort sits 125 km north of Vancouver in British Columbia, at an elevation that keeps the ski season running from late November to...

The Zambezi River: Four Countries, One Journey The Zambezi is Africa’s fourth longest river, running 2,574 km from its source in northwestern Zambia through Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and finally into the Indian Ocean near Chinde. Most travellers encounter only a short section: the stretch through Livingstone and Victoria Falls is where the tourism infrastructure...

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, 24-carat gold chandeliers hanging from the ceilings, and a capacity for 41,000 worshippers. The mosque was completed in 2007 after 12 years of construction and designed by...

Sutton Bank and the White Horse: The Escarpment at the Edge of the Moors The Hambleton Hills form the western escarpment of the North York Moors, and the most dramatic viewpoint on that escarpment is Sutton Bank - a near-vertical face of limestone dropping about 150 metres from the plateau edge to the Vale of Mowbray below. The view west from the Sutton Bank viewpoint takes in the Vale of York,...

Perhentian Islands: Southeast Asia’s Best Budget Dive Destination The Perhentian Islands - Perhentian Besar (Big Perhentian) and Perhentian Kecil (Small Perhentian) - sit off the northeast coast of Malaysia in Terengganu, about 21 km from the mainland. The two islands together cover about 20 sq km and between them hold a marine park with some of the best snorkelling and diving in Southeast...

Pooh Bridge and Ashdown Forest: The Real Hundred Acre Wood A.A. Milne wrote the Winnie-the-Pooh stories between 1926 and 1928, drawing on the landscape around his country home at Cotchford Farm near the village of Hartfield in East Sussex. The forest he walked with his son Christopher Robin - the real one, not the story’s character - was Ashdown Forest, a high heathland plateau 10 km wide in...

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, that the sea physically cuts off the island from the mainland at high tide, shapes every visit you’ll have here. Get the tide times wrong and you’re either stranded or stuck on the beach in Marazion waiting for the water to drop. Get...

Kitzbühel: The Ski Town That Earns Its Reputation Kitzbühel is an Austrian ski resort town in Tyrol, 750 metres elevation, surrounded by the Kitzbüheler Alps. The medieval old town centre (the Innenstadt, a pedestrian zone of Gothic buildings painted in pale yellow and white) predates the skiing by several centuries. The skiing made it famous internationally; the town’s architectural quality...