Juneau Has No Roads Leading In or Out, and That Is the Whole Point Alaska’s capital city is inaccessible by car from anywhere else. No highway connects Juneau to the outside world. You arrive by plane or by ferry, hemmed between the Gastineau Channel and the mountains of the Coast Range, and the isolation is not incidental; it is the condition that made Juneau what it is. The city grew from...

Peter Luger Does Not Care What You Think. That Is Part of Why It Works. No credit cards (at the Brooklyn original). No fancy cocktail menu. No seasonal small plates or clever concepts. The servers have been there for decades and will not take your opinion seriously if you ask for anything other than the porterhouse. The menu is short. The room is German beer hall with dark wood panelling and...

At 9 am on a Tuesday in November, Piazza San Marco is quiet enough to hear pigeons. By 10:30, the tour groups arrive in waves. By noon, you cannot cross the square without stopping every twenty steps. If you want to understand why St. Mark’s Basilica still stuns people after a thousand years of visitors, you need to be there early, before the crowd noise becomes the ambient soundtrack. The...

Few natural events match the Aurora Borealis for sheer impact. Curtains of green, violet, and red light ripple across a dark sky while the ground below sits frozen and still. This guide covers where to go, what to expect, and how to make the most of a Northern Lights trip from start to finish. Understanding the Aurora Borealis The Aurora Borealis occurs when charged particles from the sun collide...

NASA tests its Mars rovers here. Not as a metaphor. The Yungay Station in the Atacama Desert is used to trial planetary drilling equipment because the soil composition matches the surface of Mars more closely than anywhere else on Earth. When you walk through Valle de la Luna, the Moon Valley just outside San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile, you begin to understand why. The landscape is that...

The Canyon Named for Relief In 1844, a Voortrekker party led by Hendrik Potgieter trekked to Delagoa Bay and did not return when expected. Those who waited at camp assumed the men dead. When they finally arrived safe, the relief was expressed by naming the river they camped beside the Blyde, an old Dutch word meaning “glad” or “happy.” The name stuck, even after the river...

The name Kinderdijk, Child’s Dike, comes from a flood legend. In 1421, the St. Elizabeth’s flood destroyed much of what is now South Holland, killing thousands. Survivors searching the aftermath found a wooden cradle bobbing on the water, with a cat balanced on the rim, tilting its weight to keep the baby inside from getting wet. The child was alive. The spot where the cradle drifted...

The Only Place on Earth Where Royal Albatross Breed on the Mainland This fact alone should put Otago Peninsula on your New Zealand itinerary. The albatross comes home to Taiaroa Head, at the tip of the peninsula, in a kind of defiance of logic: these are birds that spend more than 85 percent of their lives airborne over the open Southern Ocean, flying an estimated 190,000 kilometres per year. A...

San Antonio is the only city in the United States with a UNESCO World Heritage Site right in the middle of its downtown, and most people who visit spend about 45 minutes there before walking back to the River Walk to drink a margarita. The five Spanish colonial missions, founded between 1718 and 1731, were listed together in 2015 as the first and only UNESCO site in Texas. The Alamo is the most...

Hagar Qim: 5,500 Years Old and More Interesting Than Stonehenge Most people who visit Hagar Qim have already been to Valletta, maybe the Mdina citadel, possibly the Blue Grotto if the tour bus stops there. By the time they reach the windswept ridge above Qrendi on Malta’s southern coast, the afternoon light is fading and they have about forty minutes before the site closes. That is not...

The current grabs you before you clear the channel entrance. If you have never drift-dived a location where the ocean moves faster than you can swim, the Somosomo Strait on a mid-lunar day will reset your expectations about what diving actually feels like. That is the reason serious divers come to Taveuni, and it is why the Rainbow Reef system keeps drawing people back when dozens of easier,...

Waikiki is Not Oahu. Know the Difference Before You Book. Most people who fly to Oahu spend the majority of their time in a two-mile stretch of Waikiki lined with international hotel chains and shops selling macadamia nuts. That is their choice to make. But Oahu is a 44-mile-long island with a dormant volcanic crater you can hike before 7am, a North Shore food truck culture that locals take...

Five Days in Turks and Caicos: What Actually Matters Grace Bay is one of the few beaches on Earth that actually looks like the photos. That is a low bar to clear, but the Caribbean makes you skeptical: too many places that sell themselves on turquoise water and deliver something closer to murky green. Turks and Caicos delivers. The water off Providenciales is that flat, glass-clear aquamarine that...

That particular shade of blue is not filtered or enhanced. Moraine Lake actually looks like that, a turquoise so saturated it reads as artificial even when you are standing in front of it. The colour comes from rock flour: glacial meltwater carrying microscopic particles of ground stone that remain suspended in the water and scatter light in the blue-green wavelengths. The Ten Peaks surround it on...

Stop Trying to See All of New York. You Cannot. The single worst mistake first-time visitors make in New York is trying to cover too much ground. The city has 8.3 million people, 472 subway stations, and more good restaurants than you could eat your way through in a lifetime of Tuesdays. You have four days. Pick a few neighbourhoods, go deep, and let the city find you. That is actually how it...

Napoleon never set foot in Waterloo. The town itself, three miles north of the actual fighting, was simply where the Duke of Wellington made his headquarters and wrote his dispatch. Wellington’s dateline stuck and the battle took its name from a village that saw none of it. The French, more accurately, called it the Battle of Mont Saint-Jean. That small correction matters more than it might...

The law that governed lifeboats in 1912 was based on a ship’s tonnage, not its passenger count. That means Harland and Wolff actually installed more lifeboats on Titanic than the regulations required, because the regulations themselves were absurdly out of date. That single detail, quietly noted in one of the exhibit galleries at Titanic Belfast, stopped me cold. The tragedy was worse than...

The nose is gone and nobody agrees on why. The medieval Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, writing in the 15th century, blamed a Sufi mystic who mutilated the face to protest what he saw as idol worship, and was later killed by an angry mob for it. Other historians point to earlier Islamic iconoclasm. Napoleon’s artillery is the most durable myth, easily disproved by 18th-century drawings that...

Gorges du Verdon: Europe’s Grand Canyon Has a Secret Problem The Gorges du Verdon is one of the most jaw-dropping landscapes in Europe, and it knows it. That self-awareness is both the canyon’s greatest asset and its main drawback in high summer, when coach tours line the belvedere parking lots and the kayak rental queues stretch back before 10am. Go in mid-May or early June and you...

The hill behind Purmamarca does not look real. Seventy-five million years of marine sediment, compressed and folded and oxidised at altitude, has produced seven distinct bands of colour stacked on top of each other: deep red, terracotta, purple, green, white, yellow, ochre. The Cerro de los Siete Colores is at its most vivid in the hour after dawn when the low Andean light hits the mineral layers...

Angkor Wat is the largest religious complex ever built. That fact is repeated so often it has become background noise, but the scale of it only lands when you are standing at the causeway at 5am watching the light change over the central towers, and you remember that 50,000 workers and several decades produced what you are looking at. King Suryavarman II began construction in 1122 CE. The...

Septimius Severus became Roman Emperor in 193 AD and then did something no emperor before or after him managed: he poured the equivalent of the entire public works budget of Rome into his hometown. His hometown was Leptis Magna, a port city on the Libyan coast, and the results are still standing. No tour groups, no ticket barriers, no gift shops. Just columns and arches and the open sky of North...

The Isle of Skye Is Spectacular and Kind of Broken by Its Own Popularity The Old Man of Storr car park on the A855 fills up by 9am on any decent summer morning. The Fairy Pools track from the car park at Glen Brittle (which costs £8 for the day and is sometimes full before coaches arrive at 10) leads down to water that is genuinely magical in the right light and genuinely crowded at midday in...

Parc Güell Was Supposed to Be a Failed Property Development. That Is Why It Is Interesting. In 1900, the Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell asked Antoni Gaudí to design a garden city on a hillside north of Barcelona, aimed at 60 wealthy families who would pay handsomely for houses with views over the city and sea. By 1914, after 14 years of construction, exactly two houses had sold. One of them...

Moraine Lake to Paradise Valley: Read This Before You Book the Shuttle Here is the thing about Moraine Lake that the social media version does not prepare you for: you cannot just drive there anymore. Since 2023, private vehicles have been barred from Moraine Lake Road entirely, and as of 2026 even vehicles with accessibility placards must use the shuttle system. Every visitor needs to reserve a...

Luxembourg: The City, the Gorges, and What to Do in Two Days Luxembourg City is a small capital – population 130,000 – that manages to look considerably more dramatic than its size suggests. The Old Town sits on a plateau above the Alzette River gorge, and the Bock promontory juts out above a 70-metre drop into the valley below. The casemates (underground fortifications) carved from...

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro The walls of Kotor’s Old Town climb approximately 4.5 kilometres up the mountain directly behind the city, reaching the fortress of San Giovanni at 280 metres above sea level. The climb takes about 45 minutes and the view from the top looks down over the entire inner bay – the water, the medieval rooftops, and the limestone mountains that drop into the Adriatic...

Waitomo Glowworm Caves: What Actually Happens Inside The glowworms are not worms. They are the larval stage of Arachnocampa luminosa, a fungus gnat found only in New Zealand and parts of eastern Australia. The larva hangs from a silk thread and produces bioluminescent light from its tail end, which attracts small insects into other silk threads below it. When thousands of them cover a cave...

Salar de Uyuni: The World’s Largest Salt Flat and What to Actually Expect The Salar de Uyuni is 10,582 square kilometres of salt crust in southwest Bolivia at about 3,650 metres altitude. A prehistoric lake evaporated over millennia and left behind a crust of salt 2 to 10 metres deep. The total estimated salt reserve is around 10 billion tonnes – and beneath the crust lies one of the...

Changdeokgung Palace, Seoul The Secret Garden (Huwon) behind Changdeokgung was created in the early 15th century as a private royal retreat and remains one of the finest examples of Korean garden design in existence. It covers 78 acres of forested hillside, with lotus ponds, pavilions set into cliff faces, and ancient trees (some over 300 years old) that were planted and maintained across six...

Discovering the Bairro of Ribeira, Porto Ribeira is Porto’s oldest surviving neighbourhood, draped along the northern bank of the Douro River and inscribed as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. It has been the commercial and trading core of Porto since at least the 12th century – the Douro River connected the interior of the Iberian Peninsula with the Atlantic, and...

American Cemetery, Omaha Beach, France: A Moving Tribute to the Brave As I stood on the windswept coast of Normandy, gazing out at the endless rows of white marble headstones, I felt a deep sense of reverence and gratitude. The American Cemetery, Omaha Beach, is a poignant reminder of the ultimate sacrifice made by thousands of brave men and women during World War II. The cemetery honors the...

Versailles: The Palace, the Gardens, and Why You Need More Than Four Hours Louis XIV moved the royal court to Versailles in 1682 and kept it there until 1789, when the Revolution ended the whole arrangement. For over a century, the palace was simultaneously a royal residence, a government headquarters, and a strategic tool for keeping the French nobility under close observation. At peak, some...

Andaz Amsterdam Prinsengracht: The Hotel and the Canal Andaz Amsterdam Prinsengracht is a Hyatt property occupying a row of restored 17th-century canal houses on the Prinsengracht, designed throughout by Marcel Wanders – the Dutch designer known for mixing bold pattern with a sense of wit. The hotel opened in 2012 and reads less like a conventional luxury property than a living design...

Smithsonian Natural History: Largest Natural History Museum on Earth, and It’s Free The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History on the National Mall holds 145 million specimens. About 1.3 million are on display at any given time. Admission is free, has always been free, and is subsidised by the federal government. You can spend half a day here at zero cost and leave knowing...

The Yangtze River Cruise: What It Was, What Changed, and What You Can Still See The Three Gorges Dam displaced approximately 1.4 million people. This is the largest involuntary human displacement for a single infrastructure project in history. The towns and villages that sat in the gorge bottoms are underwater; what’s left is visible in the “ghost town” markers on the hillsides,...

Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) On a clear moonless night in the high plateau above Libanus, the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye. Not as a suggestion of light, but as a full structural band across the sky. The park was designated an International Dark Sky Reserve in 2013, making it one of the first five in the world, and the low light pollution is real and consistent in the central...

St. Peter’s Basilica: The Logistics of One of the World’s Busiest Churches St. Peter’s Basilica is the largest church in the world by interior volume, is free to enter, and receives around 20,000 visitors on a busy summer day. The security queue can be 2 hours on summer weekday mornings. The difference between a genuinely profound visit and a frustrated half-day is almost...

Kayaköy has over a thousand stone houses and two churches standing empty since 1923, and most people drive past without stopping on their way to the beach The Turquoise Coast runs roughly from Bodrum in the west to Antalya in the east, and the name is accurate – the colour of the water in the coves along this coastline is a semi-transparent blue-green that shifts with depth and angle of...

Discovering the Art District in Beijing Beijing’s Art District, commonly known as 798 or Dashanzi, is a must-visit destination for art enthusiasts and curious travelers alike. This former industrial zone, built in the 1950s with East German assistance, was once home to state-owned electronics factories. Over time, artists moved into the cheap, cavernous warehouse spaces, and the area...

Phnom Penh: Cambodia’s Capital Between Recovery and Reinvention Phnom Penh is a city that has had several lives and is currently living one of its better ones. The Khmer Rouge emptied it entirely in 1975, forcibly evacuating the entire population of roughly 2 million people into the countryside. When they were driven out by the Vietnamese in 1979, they left a city that had been occupied for...

Taman Negara: 130 Million Years of Rainforest While most of the world’s tropical forests were affected by ice age glaciation, this patch of Peninsular Malaysia remained climatically stable throughout – allowing species to evolve in isolation over 130 million years without the disruptions that reset other tropical ecosystems. That continuity is not an abstract claim. It shows up in the...

Toshogu Shrine: Excess as a Form of Reverence Most Shinto shrines lean into understated elegance. Toshogu goes the opposite direction, deliberately and spectacularly. Built in 1617 to enshrine Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun who unified Japan, it’s been described as a shrine that tries to contain an entire country’s gratitude in carved wood and lacquer. Gold leaf, intricate reliefs of...

The Amalfi Coast The path that connects Bomerano to Positano above the cliffs is called the Sentiero degli Dei, the Path of the Gods. The name is not immodest. You walk along a limestone ledge 400 metres above the sea, looking down over terraced lemon groves, past stone watchtowers, with the curve of the coast stretching in both directions. The final descent to Positano involves roughly 1,500...

The Guilin karst landscape has appeared in Chinese painting for over a thousand years, on the 20 yuan banknote, and in essentially every travel photograph from southern China – and it looks exactly like all of that The limestone towers rising from the Li River plain in Guangxi province are not an exaggeration in the paintings. They are a specific geological formation called tower karst...

Hay-on-Wye: The Bookshop Town on the Welsh Border Richard Booth opened a second-hand bookshop in Hay Castle in 1961, the town had a population of around 1,500 people, and nobody thought much would come of it. By the 1970s and 1980s, as other booksellers followed Booth’s lead and the town developed a critical mass, Hay-on-Wye had become something genuinely unusual: a small market town whose...

Guggenheim Bilbao The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in October 1997 and is credited with the economic transformation of a city that had been in visible decline since the collapse of its steel and shipbuilding industries in the 1980s. The “Bilbao effect” - the theory that a single piece of landmark architecture can revitalise an urban economy - is now a standard reference point in urban...

Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol Isambard Kingdom Brunel was 24 years old when he won the competition to design the Clifton Suspension Bridge in 1831 with a span of 702 feet across the Avon Gorge. Construction did not begin until 1836, stalled for decades due to funding problems and the Bristol Riots, and Brunel died in 1859 with the bridge still unbuilt. It was completed in 1864 by the...

Roman Baths, Bath The hot spring that feeds the Roman Baths produces around one million litres of water per day at a constant 46 degrees Celsius. It has been doing this continuously for at least two millennia, and probably longer – archaeological evidence suggests prehistoric use before the Romans arrived. The Romans built a temple to Sulis Minerva (a fusion of the local deity with the Roman...

The Rock-Hewn Churches of Tigray, Ethiopia The most extraordinary church visit I can describe involves a 45-minute walk across rocky terrain, a climb using hand and footholds cut into a cliff face, and a final traverse along a narrow ledge above a 200-metre drop – at the end of which is a cave containing 5th-century frescoes that are in better condition than most European medieval paintings...