Moorea, French Polynesia Moorea is where Paul Gauguin arrived in 1891 after leaving Paris on a grant to paint Tahiti, having concluded that Papeete was too European. He was right to leave Papeete, though he eventually settled in the Marquesas Islands further north, where he died in 1903. The landscape that inspired Gauguin’s South Seas paintings, sharp volcanic peaks, lagoon colours,...

Hollywood Boulevard: What’s Worth Your Time (and What Isn’t) Honest assessment first: the boulevard between La Brea and Vine is grittier and more chaotic than first-time visitors expect. The Walk of Fame is a sidewalk through a dense commercial strip packed with costumed characters who work for tips. The souvenir shops sell the same merchandise found in any tourist district. None of...

Phang Nga Bay: Limestone Karsts, Floating Villages, and How to See It Phang Nga Bay is a 400-square-kilometre body of water between Phuket and the Malay Peninsula in southern Thailand. Around 40 limestone karst islands rise from shallow green water, some barely wider than the towers themselves, others large enough for fishing villages and national park forest. The bay is a marine national park (Ao...

Milan’s Duomo: The Rooftop Is the Main Event The Duomo di Milano took nearly 600 years to build; construction began in 1386 and the final bronze doors were installed in 1965. That extended timeline explains the stylistic range: Gothic spires and flying buttresses alongside Renaissance details and 19th-century facade work. The result is eclectic in a way that succeeds because of its ambition...

Gamla Stan, Stockholm In 1520, the Danish king Christian II executed 80 to 90 Swedish nobles and clergy in Stortorget square over three days – an event known as the Stockholm Bloodbath. The executions followed a siege and were presented as a legal proceeding. The response was the Swedish independence movement that ended Danish control of Sweden and led, eventually, to the current Kingdom of...

Sedlec Ossuary, Kutná Hora František Rint, the woodcarver hired in 1870 to organise the Sedlec Ossuary’s accumulated bones, signed his name above the entrance, in bones. Whether this was professional pride, dark humour, or both is not recorded. What he created in the small Gothic chapel in Kutná Hora remains one of the more extraordinary objects in Central Europe: a chandelier containing at...

The Alhambra, Granada The Nasrid Palaces inside the Alhambra were built in the 14th century by rulers who knew their empire was in decline. The Reconquista had been pushing south for centuries; the Nasrid dynasty was the last remaining Moorish kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. The result was a palace built not as a military statement but as the most sophisticated pleasure architecture in medieval...

Viaduc de Millau, France The tallest mast of the Millau Viaduct reaches 343 metres, which is 19 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower. For a road bridge to be taller than the most famous structure in France took until 2004, and even then it slipped through without much national controversy, possibly because the engineering is so obviously beautiful. Norman Foster designed it; Michel Virlogeux...

The Atomium: A Monument That Was Supposed to Be Temporary and Became Permanent Because Brussels Is Like That The Atomium was built for the 1958 World’s Fair as a demonstration piece: iron crystal structure magnified 165 billion times, nine steel spheres connected by tubes, 102 metres tall, meant to celebrate atomic-age science and be dismantled when the fair ended. Public sentiment prevented...

Sequoia National Park: The Trees Are Even Bigger Than You’ve Heard Giant sequoias are not the tallest trees on earth, that’s the coastal redwoods of Northern California. They’re not the widest, that’s the Montezuma cypress in Mexico. What they are is the largest living things on earth by volume, and the General Sherman Tree at 84 metres tall and 11 metres in diameter at the...

Thomas Becket was murdered inside Canterbury Cathedral on a December evening in 1170, and for the next 350 years it was one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in Europe Four knights killed the Archbishop of Canterbury in his own cathedral on the orders of Henry II, who had apparently said “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” as an expression of frustration rather than a...

Darwin, Northern Territory Darwin was bombed 64 times by Japanese forces between February 1942 and November 1943, more attacks than Pearl Harbor, though with somewhat lower casualties due to prior evacuation of civilians. The first raid on 19 February 1942 involved 188 aircraft and killed 235 people. This history was suppressed by the Australian government for decades to avoid affecting civilian...

Amboseli National Park, Kenya Amboseli is where you go to photograph elephants with Mount Kilimanjaro behind them. That combination – the largest land animal on earth framed against the highest free-standing mountain on the planet, the mountain’s snowy peak visible across an international border from Kenya – is one of the most recognisable wildlife images in the world and is...

Dubrovnik’s City Walls: Walk Them at Dawn or Don’t Bother The Dubrovnik city walls were designed to be intimidating. The Republic of Ragusa, which governed this city-state from 1358 to 1808, spent centuries and enormous sums building walls up to 6 metres thick and 25 metres high, with towers positioned to provide overlapping fields of fire. The walls were never actually breached by...

Polonnaruwa: Sri Lanka’s Best Archaeological Site, and the One Fewer People Visit King Parakramabahu I, who ruled Polonnaruwa from 1153 to 1186, is credited with building a reservoir so large, the Parakrama Samudra, covering over 6,000 hectares, that he declared “not a single drop of rain water that falls on this island should be allowed to flow into the sea without first being made...

Dartmoor, Devon Dartmoor Letterboxing started in 1854 when a naturalist named James Perrott placed a jar with a visiting card at Cranmere Pool, a remote bog at the northern edge of the moor, and invited visitors to leave their own cards. The practice has evolved over 170 years into a form of orienteering-scavenger-hunt specific to Dartmoor: there are now tens of thousands of...

Torres del Paine: Planning the W Trek Without the Amateur Mistakes Walk-up entry to Torres del Paine is no longer possible. CONAF moved to mandatory advance purchase for all visitors in 2024, and by the 2025-2026 season the rules had tightened further. Daily capacity limits on the most popular sectors fill weeks ahead during December through February. Book before you book flights, or you...

New York City New York is expensive, loud, and impossible to summarise in a travel guide. Most people find it disorienting on arrival. The useful frame is borough and neighbourhood. Manhattan is only one of five boroughs. Treating the city as a list of iconic sights misses the point – or hits only the most obvious part of it. The observation worth leading with: New York has no resort fees....

Vancouver, Canada Vancouver has more sushi restaurants per capita than any North American city outside Japan. This has been true for decades and reflects the Japanese Canadian community’s history in the city from the late 19th century onward, including the internment during World War II, after which many returned to the Lower Mainland despite the dispossession they’d experienced. The...

Arles: The City Where Van Gogh Painted 300 Works in Fifteen Months and Then Cut Off His Ear Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888 and left in May 1889, involuntarily. In the intervening fifteen months, despite the breakdown that led to the famous December ear incident and his voluntary admission to a psychiatric facility in nearby Saint-Rémy, he produced over 300 paintings and drawings. The...

The Acropolis of Athens: A Second Entry for the Same Site, With More Context The Acropolis hill was a religious and political centre of Athens for over a thousand years before the Parthenon was built. The site had Bronze Age Mycenaean fortifications, archaic temples, and votive deposits going back to the 7th century BCE. What you see now, the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion, the Temple...

John Wayne’s office, as the Navajo never called it The most recognizable landscape in American cinema has a problem: everyone arrives thinking they know it already. John Ford shot six westerns in Monument Valley starting with Stagecoach in 1939, and those frames burrowed so deep into collective memory that the West Mitten, East Mitten, and Merrick Butte now feel like sets rather than the...

Pooh Bridge, Ashdown Forest: What It Is and What to Actually Do There Let’s be clear upfront: Pooh Bridge is a small wooden footbridge over a small stream in a large heathland in East Sussex. It is not a theme park, not a grand monument, and not a full day out on its own. It is, however, genuinely charming, surprisingly moving if you grew up with A.A. Milne’s stories, and well worth...

Tibidabo: Barcelona’s Hilltop Amusement Park and What Surrounds It The Museu d’Autòmats at Tibidabo’s lower terrace contains one of the best collections of antique mechanical arcade machines in Europe, 19th and early 20th century coin-operated figures and games, most still working on old-format coins dispensed at the entrance. It sits quietly at the edge of the park and most...

Madidi National Park, Bolivia A 2018 scientific survey counted over 1,000 bird species within Madidi National Park’s boundaries, more than in any comparable area anywhere on earth, and more bird species than exist in the entire continental United States. The park’s exceptional diversity comes from its altitudinal range: it descends from Andean snowfields at 5,000 metres through cloud...

Arthur’s Seat: The Volcano in Edinburgh That Helped Invent Geology Arthur’s Seat is a 350-million-year-old extinct volcanic plug rising 251 metres above Edinburgh in Holyrood Park, 10 minutes’ walk from the Royal Mile. It is also, in a specific historical sense, where the scientific understanding of geology was born. In 1788, James Hutton stood on the Salisbury Crags below...

Lake Wakatipu: 80km of Glacial Water Surrounded by Serrated Peaks Lake Wakatipu has a documented oscillation, rising and falling 8 to 10 centimetres roughly every five minutes due to atmospheric pressure changes. The Maori explanation is more interesting: the lake is the heartbeat of a sleeping giant named Matau, whose body is curled below the water. This explanation works on the evidence –...

Samarkand and Bukhara: The Silk Road Cities That Actually Deserve the Description In 1220, Genghis Khan arrived at Bukhara, then one of the wealthiest cities in the Islamic world. He rode his horse into the main mosque, declared it a stable, and used the Quran cases as feed troughs. The city was sacked, burned, and its population scattered or enslaved. An estimated three-quarters of the urban...

The Leaning Tower of Pisa: The Field of Miracles and What Else to See Most people who visit the Leaning Tower of Pisa spend 90 minutes, take the pushing photo, climb the tower, and leave without seeing the rest of the Piazza dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles). The other buildings in the square are the reason the site is UNESCO-listed, and they receive far less attention than they deserve. The Piazza...

Ben Nevis had a weather observatory at its summit from 1883 to 1904, and the data it collected about Scottish mountain weather was so extreme that scientists initially doubted it Ben Nevis is 1,345 metres, the highest point in Britain and Ireland, and it is in the West Highlands above Fort William. The summit is below the cloud line for roughly 80% of the year. The observatory that operated there...

Etna: Europe’s Most Active Volcano and the Wines Grown on Its Slopes Mount Etna changes altitude after every major eruption, the figure of 3,329 metres on most maps is typically 10-30 metres out of date. The summit’s shape shifts as the central craters collapse or fill with new lava. In 2021, a series of paroxysmal eruptions sent ash 10km into the atmosphere and deposited lava on the...

Attend a Cherry Blossom Festival in Japan: A Guide for Tourists The rowboat queue at Chidorigafuchi moat in Tokyo starts forming before 7am during peak bloom. By 9am, the wait for a boat is over an hour. This is because the experience of drifting through the fallen petals with the Imperial Palace walls on one side and cherry trees arching overhead is worth the queue, and everyone who has been told...

Cristo Redentor: The Queue, the Cloud, and Why 7am Works Cristo Redentor stands on the summit of Corcovado, a 710-metre granite peak in the Tijuca Forest above Rio de Janeiro. The statue itself is 30 metres tall, made from reinforced concrete with an exterior of soapstone tiles, and was completed in 1931. It is visible from most of coastal Rio on clear days. The arms span 28 metres. These facts...

Registan Square, Samarkand The Sher-Dor Madrasah has tigers on its portal arch. This is unusual for an Islamic building: traditional Islamic iconography avoids human and animal representations, and the 1636 building’s architect included them anyway – tigers pursuing deer, with a sun-face rising behind each tiger. The name means “bearing lions” in Persian. The reason for...

The Grand Mosque, Mecca During the last ten nights of Ramadan, Masjid al-Haram approaches its capacity of 2.5 million worshippers. The latest expansion added space for an additional 300,000 people, and the Saudi government has invested in crowd management infrastructure including digital boards at entrances that display real-time capacity in green when space is available and red when full. At...

Mogao Caves: 1,600 Years of Buddhist Art in the Gobi Desert In 1900, a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu was clearing sand from a cave at Mogao when he found a bricked-up chamber he had not known was there. Behind the wall were approximately 40,000 documents and textiles, stacked floor to ceiling, sealed since around 1,000 CE. Among them was a printed scroll of the Diamond Sutra dated 868 CE, the...

Bilbao’s Guggenheim: The Building Is the Exhibit The “Bilbao effect” has been attempted by dozens of cities since 1997, each commissioning a landmark building and hoping it will trigger the same urban transformation. Most failed. The Bilbao Guggenheim worked not just because of the Frank Gehry building but because the Basque regional government simultaneously invested in...

Atlanta: The City That Burned Itself Down and Then Built Something Different General Sherman’s March to the Sea in November 1864 destroyed much of Atlanta, estimates suggest 4,500 of the city’s 5,000 buildings burned. The city was rebuilt by 1868, largely erasing its antebellum architecture. This explains why Atlanta looks modern among Southern cities: its history is not in its...

Cañon del Colca: Get to Cruz del Condor Before the Tour Buses Do The condors at Cruz del Condor viewpoint don’t perform on a schedule, but they’re most reliably visible between 8am and 10am when thermal currents off the canyon walls lift them to soaring height. The tour buses from Arequipa (a 3-hour drive) arrive around 9-10am, at which point the viewpoint fills with several hundred...

Ulaanbaatar: Mongolia’s Capital and Starting Point The Gandan Monastery’s 26-metre copper Migjid Janraisig statue was dismantled in 1938 under Stalin’s orders and shipped to the Soviet Union. The official reason given was war materials; the statue was melted for ammunition or repurposed. Hundreds of monks were executed in the same purge; most of Mongolia’s 700-plus...

Zimbabwe Zimbabwe is one of southern Africa’s most rewarding destinations for wildlife and landscape, and one of the most underrated. The infrastructure is thinner than Botswana or South Africa – electricity supply is inconsistent outside main cities, good lodges and camps run generators or solar – but the guiding quality is exceptional. Zimbabwe’s professional guiding...

Hoover Dam: What It Is, Why It Was Built, and What You Actually See At peak construction in 1934, 5,000 workers were employed at the Hoover Dam site simultaneously. The project ran from 1931 to 1936, during the Great Depression, and provided employment when little else did. Ninety-six workers died in industrial accidents during construction. The persistent myth that workers were accidentally...

Asa Wright Nature Centre & Lodge: The Veranda That Does Most of the Work Trinidad sits on the South American continental shelf, just 11 kilometres from Venezuela, and shares much of its wildlife with the South American mainland rather than with the rest of the Caribbean. This is why Asa Wright’s bird list exceeds 170 species on the property itself, and why the veranda of the Spring Hill...

The Wave allows 64 people per day and has been oversubscribed by a factor of 10 for years – plan around that reality Page, Arizona has an improbable concentration of significant geology within a two-hour drive. Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, The Wave, Lake Powell, and the Vermilion Cliffs are all accessible from the same base. None of them are undiscovered, and the gap between people who...

Gambling in Macau In 2025, Macau’s gambling revenues hit approximately USD 30.85 billion, which is about 84 percent of 2019 pre-pandemic levels and climbing. For context: Las Vegas Strip gaming revenue in the same year was around USD 8 billion. The numbers are not close. Macau generates more gambling revenue than Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Singapore combined. The territory is 32 square...

Kashgar’s Sunday Market: What Remains, What’s Changed, and What You Need to Know Kashgar is a Uyghur city in China’s Xinjiang region, at the point where the Silk Road split around the Taklamakan Desert. For centuries it was one of the most significant trading centres in Central Asia, and the Sunday Market (properly the China-Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan Bazaar, or more specifically the...

Castle Combe: England’s Prettiest Village Has a Weekday Morning Problem Castle Combe wins the “prettiest village in England” designation with some regularity in travel polls, which is both accurate and responsible for its summer weekends. The honey-coloured Cotswold stone, the 14th-century Market Cross, the narrow Bybrook River running below the houses, it is genuinely lovely,...

Westminster Abbey: What Is Actually Inside Westminster Abbey has the Coronation Chair. It was made in 1300 to 1301, has held the Stone of Scone beneath the seat since then (with an interruption from 1996 to 2023 when the stone was returned to Scotland), and has schoolboy graffiti carved into the back from the 18th century. Boys from Westminster School were allowed to use the abbey during that...

Oia, Santorini Santorini is the caldera of a volcano that erupted catastrophically around 1600 BCE, one of the largest eruptions in human history. The explosion destroyed the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri (preserved in ash and now accessible as an archaeological site in the island’s south) and possibly contributed to the collapse of Minoan civilisation on Crete. The caldera is the drowned...

Cave of Crystals, Naica: The World’s Largest Crystals You Cannot Currently Visit The Cave of Crystals beneath the Naica mine in Chihuahua, Mexico, was discovered in 2000 when miners drilling a new tunnel broke through the chamber ceiling. Inside were selenite crystals up to 11 metres long and over a metre in diameter, the largest natural crystals ever found. The cave temperature is...