Varanasi: The City That Does Not Look Away Varanasi is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world - or one of them, depending on who you ask - and it has the confidence of something that does not need to justify itself. The Ganges runs wide and brown here. Pyres burn at Manikarnika Ghat around the clock. Men shave their heads for the dead and young priests swing oil lamps in rhythmic arcs...

The Taj Mahal: Visiting Without Being Overwhelmed Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal, was imprisoned in Agra Fort from 1658 until his death in 1666, deposed by his own son Aurangzeb, who considered his father’s spending excessive. From a window in the Musamman Burj tower, Shah Jahan could see the Taj Mahal across the river. Historians debate whether he found this...

Avignon and the Pont Saint-Bénézet: History with a Nursery Rhyme Attached The Pont d’Avignon, properly called the Pont Saint-Bénézet, is the ruined medieval bridge that sticks out into the Rhône and stops about halfway across. Most visitors know it from the French nursery rhyme “Sur le Pont d’Avignon,” which describes people dancing on it. In practice it was never wide...

Hue: Vietnam’s Most Overlooked City and Its Very Good Food Hue was the capital of Vietnam under the Nguyen Dynasty from 1802 to 1945. The Imperial Citadel on the north bank of the Perfume River is the central attraction, but the city’s actual claim is its cuisine: a distinct school of Vietnamese cooking that developed to satisfy an imperial court and that still dominates the local...

Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia The park occupies a compact area of Old City Philadelphia, a few blocks square between Market and Walnut Streets east of Broad Street. It protects the buildings and grounds where the Second Continental Congress met, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, and where the Constitutional Convention produced the United States...

Yakushima: Japan’s Oldest Forest and What It Takes to See It Properly The Jomon Sugi cedar is somewhere between 2,170 and 7,200 years old, and the wide uncertainty range is not carelessness – the inner rings have been dead too long to date accurately. What you can say with confidence is that this tree was already ancient when Rome was founded and was old enough to qualify as venerable...

York Minster: The Cathedral That Keeps Burning Down In 1984, lightning struck the south transept of York Minster at 2am, igniting the roof. The fire burned for four hours and destroyed the 13th-century timber ceiling and much of the medieval glass in the south transept. This was the third major fire in living memory; the previous two were in 1829 and 1840, both the work of arsonists. The current...

At its peak, Tikal had 60,000 to 90,000 people living in a city that is still mostly underground Tikal is the largest excavated Maya site in the Americas and simultaneously one of the most underexcavated – the core archaeological zone covers 16 square kilometres, but the full site beneath the jungle canopy extends considerably further. What has been cleared and consolidated represents a...

Guna Yala (San Blas Islands): Autonomous Territory, Pristine Caribbean, Complicated Access The San Blas Islands are an archipelago of 365 islands along the Caribbean coast of Panama, about 40 kilometres east of Colon. Most are uninhabited. The inhabited ones are home to the Guna people, who have maintained autonomous political control of their territory – now officially called Guna Yala...

The Blue Lagoon: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Whether It’s Worth the Price The Blue Lagoon was discovered accidentally in 1976 when workers at the nearby Svartsengi geothermal power plant noticed that the water leaving the facility was turning the surrounding lava field white and that local people with psoriasis were bathing in it and experiencing improvement. The milky blue-white...

Discovering the Frozen Continent: A Traveler’s Guide to Antarctica Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, using dog sleds, careful logistics, and a systematic approach to polar travel. Robert Falcon Scott arrived 34 days later and died on the return journey. The contrast between the two expeditions – one successful through preparation, one fatal through a...

The Canadian Maritimes: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. At Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick, the tidal range reaches 16 metres twice a day, which means you can walk on the ocean floor between the extraordinary flower-pot rock formations in the morning and those same formations are buried to their shoulders in water by...

Chester’s Roman amphitheatre is the largest exposed Roman amphitheatre in Britain and most visitors walk past it without stopping Chester was the Roman fortress of Deva Victrix, established around 79 CE as one of only three permanent legionary fortresses in Roman Britain (the others were at Eboracum – York – and Isca Augusta – Caerleon). The XX Valeria Victrix legion...

Lake Atitlán: The Caldera Lake That Aldous Huxley Called the Most Beautiful in the World Aldous Huxley visited Lake Atitlán in 1934 and wrote that it was “too much of a good thing,” exceeding what he’d been led to expect from Como and Maggiore. That comparison stands. The lake sits at 1,560 metres in a volcanic caldera in Guatemala’s western highlands; three volcanoes...

Grand Central Terminal: A Building That Refuses to Be Just a Train Station Grand Central was nearly demolished in the 1960s. Penn Station was torn down in 1963 to build Madison Square Garden, and the same fate was planned for Grand Central. Jackie Kennedy led the preservation effort; the building was designated a landmark in 1967 and the Supreme Court upheld the designation in 1978. The city had...

British Virgin Islands The mooring balls at The Baths, the famous boulder field at the southern tip of Virgin Gorda, fill by 9am on calm-weather days in high season. There are roughly 15 day-use balls in the National Parks Trust mooring field; they are first-come, first-served; anchoring in the park area is prohibited to protect the seagrass. If you arrive by chartered yacht at 11am in February...

Tikal: Waking Up in the Oldest Maya City in the Forest Temple IV at Tikal is 70 metres tall, the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the Americas that visitors can climb. When George Lucas filmed the establishing shot of the Rebel Alliance base in Star Wars in 1976, he shot it from the top of Temple IV looking over the jungle canopy. The temples visible in that shot are real. The film came out...

Lima: The Food Capital Peru Built Almost by Accident Lima is grey. The garúa, a coastal fog that sits over the city for most of the year, gives the sky a flat white quality that photographs badly and discourages people from appreciating what is actually one of the most rewarding cities in South America. The food alone justifies the flight. Central, run by Virgilio Martínez, has regularly appeared...

Tubbataha Reef: The Philippines’ Remote UNESCO Dive Site and What It Takes to Get There Tubbataha Reef was one of the first marine protected areas established in the Philippines, protected since 1988. In 2013, the USS Guardian, a US Navy minesweeper, ran aground on the reef and destroyed approximately 4,000 square metres of coral. The US government agreed to pay approximately USD 1.4 million...

The Vasa Museum: A Warship That Sank 20 Minutes Into Its Maiden Voyage A stability test was conducted on the Vasa before it left Stockholm harbour. Sailors ran back and forth across the deck to test how the ship responded; it rocked so dramatically that the test was stopped before completion. The naval commander at the scene knew the ship was dangerously unstable but also knew that telling King...

The Little Mermaid Statue, Copenhagen: Managing Your Expectations The Little Mermaid (Den Lille Havfrue) is a bronze sculpture 80 cm tall, sitting on a rock at the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen. She has been vandalised, decapitated twice (1964 and 1998), had her right arm sawn off (1984), and has been repeatedly painted by activists. She was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen of the...

Picasso spent the autumn of 1946 in a Grimaldi castle above the sea and left behind 23 paintings, 44 drawings, and 2 tapestries in three months There is a version of the French Riviera that has been sold to tourists since the Victorian era – the azure water, the parasol pines, the oyster lunches on a terrace – and Antibes has all of that. But it also has something more specific: it was...

Yellowstone: How to See the Park in Four Days Without Doing It Wrong Yellowstone sits over a supervolcano caldera covering 3,468 square miles across Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. It contains half the world’s geothermal features, the largest concentration of geysers on earth, and one of the best places in North America to see wolves, grizzly bears, and bison in the wild. It also gets 4-5...

Ipanema: The Beach Has Postcodes and the Postcodes Have Social Meaning “The Girl from Ipanema” was written in 1962 about a real person: Heloisa Pinheiro, then 17, who walked past the Bar Veloso on Rua Montenegro each morning on her way to the beach. Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes were regulars and wrote the song from observation. The bar is now called Garota de Ipanema, after the...

Chitwan’s one-horned rhinoceros population has recovered from fewer than 100 animals in the 1960s to over 700 today – one of the more successful conservation stories in Asia The greater one-horned rhinoceros in Nepal was hunted almost to extinction by the mid-20th century, partly for sport, partly for the horn’s supposed medicinal properties. Chitwan National Park was established...

The Aleutian Islands: The Chain That Made WWII’s Pacific Theater Geography In June 1942, Japanese forces occupied the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska, the only occupation of American soil during World War II. The subsequent US campaign to retake them involved nearly 35,000 troops, brutal weather, and the Battle of Attu in May 1943, which cost over 500 American lives and killed more than...

Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica National Geographic once called Corcovado National Park the most biologically intense place on earth. The figure that gives weight to that description: approximately 2.5% of the world’s biodiversity exists in this 40,000-hectare reserve occupying about 40% of the Osa Peninsula. That concentration – 140 mammal species, 400 bird species, 117 reptile species, and...

Riga Cathedral: Latvia’s Most Important Building and the City Around It The organ installed in Riga Cathedral in 1884 had 6,768 pipes, which made it the largest pipe organ in the world at the time. It no longer holds that record, but it still fills the stone nave with a sound that the building was essentially designed for. Evening organ concerts here are among the better inexpensive...

The Space Needle: What Seattle Built for Its 1962 World’s Fair The Space Needle is 184 metres tall (605 feet), weighs 9,550 tons, and was built in 13 months for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition World’s Fair. The design was sketched on a napkin by Edward Carlson, the exposition’s chairman, who wanted something that looked like a flying saucer with a tower. The architect John Graham...

Ometepe Island: Two Volcanoes in a Lake Ometepe appears in the pre-Columbian mythology of the region as a sacred island, a place where the Nahuatl-speaking Nicarao people carved petroglyphs into the volcanic rock, some of which are still visible on the Maderas flank. The island was a destination before it was a tourism destination, which is a distinction worth holding onto when you arrive. It is...

Redwoods Whakarewarewa Forest: Rotorua’s Most Underrated Attraction The California coastal redwoods at Whakarewarewa Forest were planted as a forestry trial in 1901 to assess which tree species might work commercially in New Zealand’s North Island. The trial was eventually abandoned as uneconomic, the trees grew well but the harvest wasn’t practical at scale. What the forestry...

The Houses of Parliament, London The building you see on the London skyline along the Thames was designed in the 1840s by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin after a fire destroyed most of the medieval palace in 1834. What replaced it was Gothic Revival on a monumental scale: the long riverside facade, the Victoria Tower at the south end, and Elizabeth Tower at the north containing Big Ben –...

Aitutaki: The Lagoon That Justifies the Journey Most people who visit Aitutaki have already been to Fiji, Bora Bora, or the Maldives. They visit Aitutaki and say it’s better. The lagoon, 45 square kilometres of shallow turquoise water enclosed by a coral reef, is genuinely extraordinary, and the island has none of the resort-industrial infrastructure that has smoothed Bora Bora’s...

The Angel of the North: 208 Tonnes of Weathering Steel Above a Former Coalfield You see it from the train before anything else. The East Coast Main Line passes within a few hundred metres of the Angel of the North as it runs south into Gateshead, and the sight of a 20-metre steel figure with 54-metre wings appearing suddenly out of the embankment has been startling passengers since February 1998....

Stirling: The Crossroads of Scotland and Why That Matters In 1297, William Wallace positioned his army at Stirling Bridge with about 5,000 men facing an English force of perhaps 15,000, professional soldiers, cavalry, archers. Wallace waited until roughly half the English army had crossed the narrow wooden bridge, then attacked. The English cavalry on the Scottish bank had no room to manoeuvre;...

Centre Pompidou: The Inside-Out Building and Its Collection When the Centre Pompidou opened in 1977, the Parisian establishment was appalled. Newspapers called it a “gas refinery” and a “catastrophe.” The Académie des Beaux-Arts issued formal protests. The architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, both in their late 30s, had won the international competition with a design...

Uluru (Ayers Rock): What You’re Actually Looking At Uluru extends about 2.5 kilometres underground. What you see above the desert floor – a 348-metre sandstone monolith rising from the flat plain of the Northern Territory – is only a fraction of the total formation, which continues deep into the earth as a single connected mass of arkosic sandstone about 550 million years old....

Phong Nha-Ke Bang: Vietnam’s Cave Country In 2009, British cavers Howard and Deb Limbert completed the first full survey of Son Doong cave, which they had originally entered in 1994. The survey confirmed it as the world’s largest cave by volume: a single chamber 200 metres tall, 150 metres wide, and 9 kilometres long, large enough to contain a Boeing 747 with room for other aircraft....

Four identical rococo palaces, all built for aristocratic families who never expected a king to need them Amalienborg was not designed as a royal residence. The four rococo buildings arranged around an octagonal courtyard in central Copenhagen were constructed in the 1750s for four prominent noble families, all built identically as part of a grand urban planning project by King Frederik V. The...

The Parthenon: What’s Actually Still There and What Isn’t The Parthenon was blown up in 1687. Venetian forces under Francesco Morosini were besieging the Acropolis, which the Ottomans were using as a fortress. The Ottomans stored their gunpowder inside the Parthenon, believing the Venetians wouldn’t fire on an ancient temple. The Venetians fired on it anyway, 700 barrels of...

The Forth Bridge: Scotland’s UNESCO Cantilever and the Town Below It The phrase “painting the Forth Bridge”, used to mean an endless, never-completing task, was based on the real maintenance schedule of the structure: a team of painters would finish one end and immediately begin again at the other. When an improved epoxy paint system was applied in 2011, the 120-year continuous...

The Lazy Lizard at the Split: Caye Caulker’s Most Honest Bar The sign at Caye Caulker’s water taxi dock reads “Go Slow.” This is not a suggestion about walking pace. Hurricane Hattie split the island in two in 1961, creating the channel at the north end that is now simply called “the Split,” and the general ethos of the place has been operating at a comparable...

North Island, New Zealand: The Geothermal, Maori, and Urban Half New Zealand’s North Island holds roughly three-quarters of the country’s population in about 40% of its land area. It is where Auckland, Wellington, Rotorua, and Northland are; where the geothermal activity concentrates; where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed; and where you arrive if flying into the country’s main...

Dog Sledding in Montana: How It Works and Where to Go The first thing the sled dogs do when you arrive at the kennel is lose their minds with excitement. This is not because of you specifically, they do this whenever harnesses come out. Siberian and Alaskan huskies bred for pulling operate at a baseline enthusiasm that most domestic dogs never approach, and watching six of them transform from...

Wolf’s Lair: Hitler Survived Here Because of a Hot Day and a Misplaced Briefcase On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a bomb-loaded briefcase under a map table inside Hitler’s briefing room at Wolfsschanze. Then an officer named Heinz Brandt, trying to get a better look at the map, nudged the briefcase behind a thick oak table leg. That leg absorbed most of the...

The Kigali Genocide Memorial, Rwanda In 1994, over the course of approximately 100 days, an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans and moderate Hutus were murdered. The killing was systematic, organised, and carried out largely with machetes and agricultural tools by ordinary citizens who had been conditioned over years to see their neighbours as enemies. It is one of the most concentrated...

The Eiffel Tower: What the Queue Doesn’t Tell You Gustave Eiffel won the right to build his tower over fierce opposition from artists and intellectuals who called it a “blot on the cityscape” and a “hollow candlestick.” Guy de Maupassant reportedly ate lunch in the tower’s restaurant daily because it was the one place in Paris from which you couldn’t see...

Ocean Park, Hong Kong The South Island MTR line made Ocean Park dramatically easier to reach when it opened, and the park still doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Most visitors gravitating toward Hong Kong Disneyland miss what makes Ocean Park genuinely distinctive: it is an older, stranger, more authentically Hong Kong institution, built on a dramatic hillside with the city on one side and...

The Aswan High Dam: Engineering, Consequences, and the Sites Nearby The Aswan High Dam was built between 1960 and 1970 with Soviet technical and financial backing – the United States had withdrawn funding after Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956. The dam is 111 metres high and 3.8 kilometres wide. It displaced 90,000 Nubian people from their ancestral lands and created Lake Nasser,...

Bran Castle: The Dracula Castle That Vlad Probably Never Slept In Vlad III, the 15th-century Wallachian ruler whose campaigns against the Ottoman Empire involved methods of execution unpleasant enough to earn him the nickname Tepes (Impaler), almost certainly never lived in Bran Castle. The connection between this specific building and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel is circumstantial at best:...