Haad Rin, Ko Pha Ngan: The Full Moon Beach and What Surrounds It The Full Moon Party has been running at Haad Rin Beach on Ko Pha Ngan since the mid-1980s, when a small group of backpackers held a spontaneous beach celebration and the format repeated itself the following month. Attendance grew from a few dozen to a few hundred to thousands; current events draw 10,000 to 30,000 people per night.

Dresden’s Zwinger: One of Europe’s Great Baroque Complexes Raphael’s Sistine Madonna hangs in the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister inside the Zwinger, and most people who know it know only the two small bored angels in the lower foreground that have appeared on tote bags, posters, and coffee mugs for decades. The painting is very large. Seeing it at full scale, the Madonna and Child...

Þingvellir: Where Two Continents Pull Apart at 2 Centimetres Per Year The ground at Þingvellir is splitting. The Eurasian and North American tectonic plates diverge here at roughly 2 centimetres per year, and the Almannagjá gorge you walk through – a rift valley with 30-metre basalt walls on each side – is the visible surface record of that process. The fissures continue below the...

Andros: The Cycladic Island That Greek Shipping Families Built and Kept for Themselves The Museum of Contemporary Art in Andros Town holds a serious international collection, Picasso, Chagall, Miro, and major Greek 20th-century artists, in a purpose-built museum in a small island town of a few thousand people. This doesn’t happen without specific money and specific intent. The shipping...

Arashiyama: Kyoto’s Western District and Why You Should Arrive Before 8am The Sagano Bamboo Forest at 7am is one of the genuinely quiet places in tourist Kyoto. The path is empty, the stalks are still damp, and the low hollow sound the wind makes in the canopy, which the Ministry of Environment has officially listed among Japan’s hundred best soundscapes, is audible rather than drowned...

Quirimbas Archipelago: Mozambique’s Least Visited Indian Ocean Islands The Quirimbas Archipelago consists of 32 islands off the northern coast of Mozambique, roughly 2,400 km north of Maputo. The distances are real: getting here involves flying to Pemba (the provincial capital), then connecting by small plane or boat. That distance is the main reason the Quirimbas remain genuinely uncrowded...

Taipei: The Friendliest Major City in Asia Taiwan legalised same-sex marriage in 2019, the first country in Asia to do so. The 2018 referendum on the question actually failed – Taiwanese voters rejected marriage equality – and the Constitutional Court ruled the existing law unconstitutional anyway. The resulting legislation was more complex than a simple marriage bill but has...

St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland: What the International Version Gets Wrong The global version of St. Patrick’s Day, green beer, shamrock hats, “Kiss Me I’m Irish”, was largely invented by Irish-Americans in the 19th century as an expression of immigrant identity. In Ireland, the holiday was until relatively recently a quieter, more religious occasion; pubs were legally...

Amber Fort’s Sheesh Mahal was designed so that a single candle would fill the chamber with reflected light – a 16th-century special effect that still works The Sheesh Mahal (Hall of Mirrors) in Amber Fort, just outside Jaipur, is one of the more remarkable interior spaces in Rajasthan. The walls and ceiling are covered with convex mirror fragments and semi-precious stone inlays in...

Torre de Belém, Lisbon Under the northwest corner turret of the Belem Tower, carved into the stone where the wall meets the water, there is a rhinoceros head. It is thought to be the first rhinoceros sculpture in European architecture. The basis for it was a live specimen named Ganda that arrived in Lisbon from India in 1515 as a diplomatic gift from the Sultan of Gujarat to King Manuel I.

Ko Tao: The Cheapest Place in the World to Learn to Dive, and What Else Is There Ko Tao produces more PADI certified divers than anywhere else on earth. The PADI Open Water certification costs 10,000-13,000 baht (around USD 270-350) for a 3-4 day course that includes classroom sessions, confined water training, and four open water dives. The same certification costs USD 400-700 in most Western...

Borobudur, Central Java, Indonesia Borobudur was built during the Sailendra dynasty in the 9th century, abandoned around the 10th century for reasons that remain uncertain (volcanic eruption, political upheaval, religious shift), and covered by volcanic ash and jungle for roughly nine centuries. It was “rediscovered” and documented by a Dutch colonial commission in 1814 under Thomas...

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tallinn The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral sits at the top of Toompea Hill, directly opposite the entrance to the Estonian Parliament, and it was designed to be seen from everywhere in the lower city. Built between 1894 and 1900 by the Russian Imperial authorities, it was an explicit statement of Russian cultural and political dominance over Estonia at a time when...

Osaka Castle: The Original Was Better, but This One Is Still Worth Your Morning Toyotomi Hideyoshi built the original Osaka Castle in 1583 as a deliberate architectural statement of unification, the largest castle in Japan, on the largest stone base, surrounded by the widest moats. The castle changed hands and was rebuilt several times before the current tower was constructed in 1931 using...

Auschwitz: What You Need to Know Before You Go Between January and May 1945, as Soviet forces advanced westward, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz. Around 60,000 surviving prisoners were forced on death marches toward camps in Germany. Thousands died on the roads. On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and found approximately 7,500 survivors too sick to walk. They...

Big Ben is a bell, not a tower, and almost nobody calls it by its correct name The tower on the north end of the Houses of Parliament is called Elizabeth Tower – it was renamed in 2012 to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, having previously been called simply the Clock Tower. Big Ben is the name of the Great Bell inside it, a 13.7-tonne cast iron bell that first rang in 1859.

Tortuguero: Costa Rica’s Caribbean Canal System and Its Sea Turtles Tortuguero National Park occupies the northern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, a 35,000-hectare system of rivers, lagoons, swamps, and beaches that has almost no road access. The village of Tortuguero, on a narrow strip of land between the ocean and the main canal, is reached exclusively by boat or small plane. This...

Sedona: Red Rock Country With a Wellness Industry Growing Around It The popular trailheads around Sedona now close their parking lots on busy spring and autumn weekends before 7am, which should tell you something about how to plan your day here. The city and the Coconino National Forest introduced a free shuttle system running Thursday through Sunday from around 7am to 5:30pm to Cathedral Rock,...

Havana Right Now: What You Need to Know Before You Book As of June 2026, Visa and Mastercard payments have been suspended in Cuba after U.S. sanctions severed connections with the state payment processor FINCIMEX. All Canadian airlines have suspended service to Cuba until further notice. Power blackouts in some parts of the country are running 20 hours a day. Tourist arrivals in early 2026 were...

Kolkata, West Bengal Durga Puja transforms Kolkata every October into something that has no equivalent anywhere else in India. For four days, the city installs thousands of elaborately constructed pandals, temporary structures housing hand-made clay idols of the goddess Durga, each commissioned to an architectural or artistic theme chosen by the neighbourhood committee. The pandals range from...

Mir Castle: Belarus’s Best Medieval Monument and Why It’s Worth the Detour Mir Castle (Myrski Zamak) stands in the small town of Mir, about 100 kilometres south-west of Minsk in the Grodno region of Belarus. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, built between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and is among the finest examples of fortified castle architecture in Eastern Europe. If...

Abu Dhabi Desert Safari: The Rub’ al Khali and the Liwa Oasis The Empty Quarter (Rub’ al Khali) is the largest continuous sand desert in the world: 650,000 square kilometres across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen. Its northwestern edge reaches into Abu Dhabi emirate, where the Liwa Oasis sits on the edge of the sand sea. The dunes here are among the largest in the world: Moreeb...

Brandenburg Gate: The 233-Year-Old Structure That Changed Meaning Three Times The Brandenburg Gate was completed in 1791, a neoclassical triumphal arch at the western end of Unter den Linden, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans after the Propylaea gateway of the Athenian Acropolis. The Quadriga copper horse-and-chariot on top arrived in 1793. Napoleon had it removed to Paris in 1806 after his...

Castle Urquhart, Loch Ness Urquhart Castle was largely destroyed in 1692 by Jacobite forces retreating before government troops to prevent it being used as a government stronghold. Before that, it had changed hands between Scottish kings, English invaders, the Bruce and Balliol factions, clan disputes, and the Grants for three centuries. Its strategic position on a rocky peninsula jutting into...

Aoraki / Mount Cook A suspension bridge spans the Hooker River at 189 metres, scheduled to open late July or August 2026 – until then, the upper section of the Hooker Valley Track remains closed beyond the Mount Sefton Lookout due to flood damage from April 2025. The lower section, about one hour return from the carpark, is still accessible and still very good. This is relevant upfront...

Giverny: Monet’s Garden and Why Timing Is Everything Giverny is a village in Normandy, 80 kilometres west of Paris, that Claude Monet moved to in 1883 and never really left. He spent the last 43 years of his life here, creating the garden that became both his primary source of subjects and one of the most deliberate works of art of the late 19th century. The water garden with its...

Grand Bazaar, Istanbul The Grand Bazaar has been trading since 1461, when Mehmed II ordered its construction shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. The current structure covers around 30,000 square metres across 61 covered streets, with somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 shops depending on who’s counting. It sees around 40 million visitors per year, which tells you everything...

Aiguille du Midi: The Cable Car to 3,842 Metres The cable car from Chamonix to the Aiguille du Midi summit station climbs 2,807 vertical metres in about 20 minutes. That is one of the largest single cable car elevation gains in the world. At the top you are at 3,842 metres, above most of the visible clouds, with the full mass of Mont Blanc – at 4,808 metres the highest peak in the Alps...

Shanghai: Two Centuries of Reinvention Happening Simultaneously Shanghai has more coffee shops than any other city in the world – more than New York, more than London, more than Tokyo. That statistic, which sounds like a marketing claim, tells you something real about the French Concession’s plane-tree-lined streets: this is a city that absorbs influences at extraordinary speed and...

The Burj Al Arab: What “Seven Stars” Actually Costs, and Whether You Need to Stay The Burj Al Arab invented the phrase “seven-star hotel” as a marketing category that applies exclusively to itself. No official hotel rating system has ever awarded seven stars; the Jumeirah Group simply decided that the five-star scale didn’t capture what they were attempting. You can...

Halong Bay: Choosing the Right Cruise Over the Wrong One The 1,969 limestone karst towers rising from the water at Halong Bay were formed over 500 million years by tectonic uplift, erosion, and the dissolution of carbonate rock. Local legend gives a different explanation: a dragon sent from heaven breathed fire and jewels into the sea, the jewels hardened into islands, and the dragon’s tail...

Castle Howard: The House That Started Without an Architect Castle Howard was the first building that John Vanbrugh ever designed. He had no architectural training. He was a playwright and a soldier, and in 1699 the third Earl of Carlisle asked him to design a house to replace the one at Henderskelfe that had burned down. What emerged over the following decade, with Nicholas Hawksmoor doing the...

Windsor Castle has been continuously occupied since 1070, which means it has been someone’s home for roughly twice as long as the United States has existed William the Conqueror built the first castle here as part of a ring of defensive fortresses around London. Forty monarchs have lived in it since then – remodelling, expanding, rebuilding after fires, and adding state apartments that...

Shwedagon Pagoda: Rangoon’s Gold Mountain and What You Need to Know The Shwedagon Pagoda sits on Singuttara Hill in Yangon, rises to 98 metres, and is covered in real gold. Not gold paint, not gold leaf applied for effect: 27 metric tonnes of gold tiles encasing the structure, with a jewelled hti (crown) at the tip containing thousands of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. At sunset, when the...

The Dead Sea The water level has dropped more than 50 metres since 1930. By 2025 the surface sat at roughly 439 metres below sea level, and it falls at about one metre per year. Old photographs show shorelines that are now several hundred metres inland. Sinkholes have opened along sections of beach that were accessible a decade ago. The Dead Sea is the most visited body of water in the Middle East...

Belfast Belfast has done something that most post-conflict cities fail to do: turned its difficult history into a genuine tourist asset without sanitising it. The murals on the Falls Road and Shankill Road – painted during the Troubles, added to since, still being created – are among the most politically charged public art anywhere in the world. The black cab tours that take visitors...

The Edinburgh Fringe started in 1947 as eight uninvited companies performing outside the International Festival and is now the largest arts festival on earth The official story of the Edinburgh International Festival begins with Rudolf Bing in 1947, who founded it as a postwar cultural renewal – a deliberate act of civilisation after years of destruction. The more interesting story begins at...

Drottningholm Palace: Sweden’s Royal Residence, Open to Visitors The Drottningholm Court Theatre, completed in 1766, is one of the most perfectly preserved 18th-century theatres in the world, the original stage machinery, painted backdrops, and backstage areas with wigs, costumes, and props still in place. While other European courts stripped and rebuilt their theatres in the 19th century to...

Amazon Rainforest: How to Actually Visit, Not Just Photograph The Amazon covers approximately 5.5 million square kilometres across nine countries. That number is so large it becomes meaningless. What it means practically is that there is no single “Amazon experience”, the forest along the Rio Negro near Manaus is different from the upper Peruvian Amazon near Iquitos, which is different...

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico Every evening from late May through October, around 400,000 Brazilian free-tailed bats leave the natural entrance of Carlsbad Cavern in a spiral column that takes two to three hours to clear. They fly north, consuming around three tons of insects per night before returning before dawn. You can watch from the amphitheater at no charge beyond the park...

Big Sur, California The Bixby Creek Bridge is one of the most photographed bridges in the world. It was completed in 1932, spans 260 feet across a coastal canyon at a height of 260 feet above the creek, and appears in so many images that visitors sometimes arrive expecting a viewpoint that doesn’t actually exist in the spot the photograph was taken from. The best angle is from a turnout on...

Rye: East Sussex’s Most Photographed Hill Town Rye sits on a sandstone hill above the flat Romney Marsh, looks almost exactly as it would have looked in 1650, and has been quietly hosting English visitors who think they’ve discovered something hidden for the last hundred years. The medieval street grid is intact. The timber-framed houses are intact. The cobblestones on Mermaid Street...

Atacama Desert: The Driest Non-Polar Place on Earth, Where It Hasn’t Rained in 400 Years Parts of the Atacama Desert have no recorded rainfall for longer than any other place on earth. The area around the Yungay weather station in the Chilean Atacama is estimated not to have received measurable precipitation in 400 years. This is not poetry, it’s a geological fact that produces a...

Hong Kong: A City That Rewards Walking Over Planning The classic Hong Kong skyline shot, taken from the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade at night with Kowloon behind you and the towers of Hong Kong Island lit up across the water, is one of the most photographed urban views on earth and also one of the few where the reality exceeds the image. The harbour framing, the density, the scale: you feel it properly...

Capitol Hill, Washington D.C.: The Civic Architecture Worth a Day The Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, completed in 1897, has one of the most extraordinary interiors in Washington. The main reading room, a 160-foot octagonal domed hall with elaborate mosaics, stained glass, and gilded ironwork, was built at a moment when the United States wanted its national library to announce that...

The Eiffel Tower: Managing the Visit Properly Gustave Eiffel built the tower for the 1889 World’s Fair as a demonstration of what could be done with iron. It was supposed to be temporary. Parisians loathed it at first. Then the radio antenna at the top proved militarily useful in World War I, and it stayed. Today it is the most visited paid monument in the world at roughly 7 million visitors...

Milan’s Duomo: Europe’s Third-Largest Cathedral and a Rooftop You Can Walk Construction of the Milan Cathedral began in 1386 and continued for nearly 600 years; the last bronze doors were installed in 1965. That slow accumulation shows in the architecture: Gothic spires and flying buttresses mix with Renaissance and Baroque additions in a way that shouldn’t work but does. The...

Iguazu Falls, Argentina and Brazil Eleanor Roosevelt, on seeing Iguazu for the first time, reportedly said “Poor Niagara.” The comparison is accurate. At peak flow in March and April, around 12,750 cubic metres per second pass over a horseshoe-shaped cliff 2.7 kilometres wide. Niagara’s flow at peak is about 5,700 cubic metres per second across a much narrower crest. Iguazu is...

Dublin Four Nobel Prizes in literature from a city of half a million people – that statistic is either remarkable or, if you’ve spent time in Dublin’s pub culture, entirely predictable. Conversation is the city’s art form, the pub is its performance space, and the line between storytelling and actual lying is considered more of a stylistic choice than a moral question. You...

Giza: The Pyramids Were Built by Paid Workers, Not Slaves, and Other Things Worth Knowing The Great Pyramid of Khufu was the world’s tallest structure for 3,800 consecutive years. It is built from approximately 2.3 million stone blocks averaging 2.5 tonnes each, and the base’s four sides differ by less than 20cm in length. These facts are widely reproduced, but standing at the base...