Potala Palace: 1,000 Rooms, 200,000 Statues, and a Context That Cannot Be Separated From the Building The Potala Palace stands on Red Mountain (Marpo Ri) in Lhasa at 3,763 metres above sea level, rising another 117 metres above the city. It is 13 storeys tall, contains approximately 1,000 rooms, 10,000 shrines, and about 200,000 statues. The White Palace on the eastern side was the administrative...

The Smithsonian: 21 Institutions, All Free, Impossible to See in a Week James Smithson, a British scientist who had never visited the United States, died in 1829 and left his entire estate to the country with the instruction to use it for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” He had no known connection to America. The bequest led to the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in...

Sydney New Year’s Eve: Choosing Your Spot and What It Will Cost Sydney hosts the largest New Year’s Eve fireworks display in the southern hemisphere, with approximately 8.5 tonnes of fireworks launched from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and several barges around the harbour. The display runs for 12 minutes at midnight. There is also a 9 PM family display running about 7 minutes for...

South American Tepuis: The Table Mountains That Inspired The Lost World Arthur Conan Doyle published The Lost World in 1912. The isolated plateau he imagined, surrounded by vertical walls, accessible from below only with difficulty, and harboring creatures evolved in isolation from the rest of the world – was drawn from the tepuis of Venezuela’s Guiana Highlands. The science fiction...

The Law Says 400 Visitors at a Time. That Law Is the Point. Lord Howe Island has a legally enforced visitor cap of 400 tourists on the island simultaneously. The cap has been in place for decades and is the single most important fact about visiting: accommodation is scarce, flights have limited seats, and the island is deliberately quiet in a way that no resort design or off-season timing can...

Mount Fuji: The New Regulations and Why They Exist Mount Fuji at 3,776 metres is an active stratovolcano, the highest peak in Japan, and one of the most climbed mountains in the world. It has been a sacred mountain since at least the 7th century, a pilgrimage site, and the subject of more Japanese art than any other natural feature – Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji established...

Amsterdam’s Canal Houses Lean Because the Ground Moved The timber piles that Amsterdam’s buildings were driven into over four centuries ago have settled unevenly, and the result is a skyline of canal houses that tilt at various angles, some visibly, toward or away from the street. The hooks protruding from the gable peaks at the roofline are not decorative: internal staircases in...

North Island: The New Zealand the South Gets Credit For Travel writing about New Zealand defaults to the South Island. The fiords, the glaciers, the alpine scenery – Queenstown, Milford Sound, Aoraki. The North Island is where 78 percent of the country’s population lives, where most of the Maori cultural history is concentrated, where the geothermal activity runs along the entire spine...

Table Mountain: Check the Weather Before You Drive Up There The cableway on Table Mountain closes in wind. The “tablecloth” of cloud that forms on the summit when the south-easterly blows looks dramatic from the city below – it is a Cape Town meteorological signature, visible from the waterfront – and it means the cable car is closed and visibility on the summit is near...

St. Petersburg: What Visiting Actually Requires in 2026 Peter the Great chose the worst possible site on purpose. The Neva River delta was a frozen, marshy, flood-prone nightmare when he began construction in 1703, and tens of thousands of conscripted workers died building the city he wanted on it. The point was to prove that Russia could impose its will on geography. The result – the...

Valle de la Luna: Where the Atacama Gets Theatrical The Atacama Desert is already the driest non-polar desert on Earth – some of its weather stations have never recorded rainfall in their operational histories. Valle de la Luna, 15 kilometres from San Pedro de Atacama, is where the desert decides to show off. Wind and water carved the salt and clay formations over millions of years into...

Lake Garda: Why the Town You Choose Matters More Than You Think Lake Garda is 51 kilometres long, up to 17 kilometres wide, and the largest lake in Italy. Its northern tip is flanked by the Alps; the southern end opens into the Po Valley. The lake straddles three regions – Lombardy, Veneto, and Trentino-Alto Adige – and the towns on each shore have genuinely different characters rather...

Kinderdijk: Nineteen Working Windmills That Were Never Decorative Kinderdijk is sold to tourists as a scenic experience, which it is. What gets undersold is that it is also a functional explanation of why the Netherlands exists in its current form. The nineteen windmills at Kinderdijk were built between 1738 and 1740 to solve a specific engineering problem: the Alblasserwaard polder sits below sea...

Arnhem Land: 97,000 Square Kilometres of Aboriginal Australia, and Getting In Requires a Permit The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land sent a formal petition to the Australian parliament in 1963 on sheets of bark, decorated with traditional clan designs and written partly in Yolngu languages. This was Australia’s first formal legal document created by indigenous Australians asserting their rights...

Mecca: The City That Receives Two Million Pilgrims in a Single Week Every year, at the same days of Dhul Hijjah, approximately two million people converge on a small valley in the Hejaz mountains of western Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj – the largest annual peaceful gathering of human beings on earth. The logistics of managing this crowd, feeding and housing them, and ensuring their physical...

In January 2026 a Russian Drone Shattered Windows Across Two of Its Buildings That was the first war-related damage to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra since World War II. The monastery complex on bluffs above the Dnipro River has survived Mongol raids, Soviet demolitions, German occupation, and nearly three years of active war. It is still open. The cave network beneath it, in continuous use since monks...

The World’s Best Roman Mosaic Collection Is in Tunis The Bardo National Museum holds the largest collection of Roman mosaics anywhere on earth. That sentence seems like the kind of claim that belongs in tourist marketing, but it is simply true: the floors and walls of Roman villas and bathhouses across North Africa – ancient Carthage, Hadrumetum, Hippo Regius, Thysdrus – were...

South Georgia: 250,000 King Penguins and Two Days Across the Drake Passage to Reach Them There is no airport on South Georgia. No hotels. No restaurants. Getting here requires booking an expedition cruise from Ushuaia or Stanley, paying somewhere between USD 10,000 and 20,000 for the trip, and then enduring two to three days crossing the Drake Passage in whatever sea state the Southern Ocean...

The Pantheon: Built by a Modest Emperor Who Kept Someone Else’s Name on It The inscription across the Pantheon’s facade reads “M. AGRIPPA L. F. COS TERTIUM FECIT” – “Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, built this in his third consulship.” The building you are looking at was not built by Marcus Agrippa. Agrippa’s original temple on this site dated to 27...

Chartwell: The House Churchill Loved and His Wife Found Impractical Winston Churchill paid £5,000 for Chartwell in 1922 – considered overpriced at the time – and spent the following decades altering it, extending it, and draining the family finances to maintain it. Clementine found it impractical and expensive to run. Churchill loved it with the kind of attachment that defied cost...

New Zealand: Two Islands, Three Weeks Minimum, and the Country That Keeps Outperforming Its Reputation New Zealand is roughly the size of Japan or the British Isles with a population of five million. The country spans 1,600 kilometres from subtropical mangrove forest in the north to glaciated fiords in the south, with active volcanoes, geothermal plains, the Southern Alps, and enough wine country...

Cappadocia: The Balloon Photograph Is Real, and That’s a Problem Cappadocia launches 100 to 150 hot air balloons on most mornings from April through October, weather permitting. The dawn flight – an hour floating over volcanic cone formations called fairy chimneys, with dozens of other balloons in the same sky at sunrise – is one of the more striking visual experiences available...

Two Million People in Two Square Miles Notting Hill Carnival in 2026 runs from 29 to 31 August, the August Bank Holiday weekend. Saturday 29 August is the Panorama steel band competition. Sunday 30 August is Children’s Day and J’ouvert, the early-morning pre-dawn start. Monday 31 August is the main masquerade parade. The Mayor of London announced GBP 5 million in funding for the 2026...

The Lake Has No Inflows and No Outflows and That Is Why It Glows Lake McKenzie on Fraser Island (K’gari) – a perched lake sitting above the water table, fed entirely by rainfall and filtered through pure silica sand – has no connection to any river, groundwater system, or sea. The water is extraordinarily clear, slightly acidic from the sand’s chemistry, and supports a...

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Sacred, Contentious, and Genuinely Strange There is a ladder on a ledge above the main entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that has not been moved since some time before 1852. It cannot be moved because no denomination that shares custody of the building can agree on who has jurisdiction over that particular ledge. This is not a historical curiosity. The...

The Millau Viaduct: The Bridge That Goes Above the Clouds On autumn mornings in the Tarn Valley, a weather phenomenon occurs that justifies the Millau Viaduct’s most striking claim. Low cloud and mist settle in the valley floor, and the bridge deck floats above them in sunlight. The highest pylon top reaches 343 metres – 23 metres taller than the Eiffel Tower – and the road deck...

Old Dhaka Hasn’t Been Cleaned Up for Tourists, and That Is the Point Haji Biryani has been operating on Nazimuddin Road in Old Dhaka since the 1940s. They make one thing – kacchi biryani, mutton or beef slow-cooked with rice in a sealed clay pot over several hours – and they sell out by early afternoon most days. The queue outside in the morning is mostly local. The biryani costs...

Tsukiji: The Inner Market Moved, the Outer Market Stayed, and That’s Fine The famous Tsukiji tuna auction moved to the new Toyosu Market in October 2018. Many articles about Tsukiji still describe it as if the auction is there. It is not. The wholesale seafood business now operates from Toyosu, 2.5 km to the south, where foreign visitor access to the famous auction requires a lottery ballot...

Torres del Paine: Book Six Months Out or Sleep Outside the Park Torres del Paine National Park occupies 181,414 hectares in the Magallanes region of Chilean Patagonia, roughly 80 kilometres north of Puerto Natales. The three granite towers that give the park its name rise to 2,850 metres and are, plainly, extraordinary. The weather in front of them, which can include sun, rain, snow, horizontal...

The Pantanal Is Where You Actually See a Jaguar Every Amazon rainforest tour promises jaguar sightings and delivers very few, because jaguars are solitary, rainforest-adapted ambush predators that vanish into canopy before any boat arrives. The Pantanal is different. When the seasonal floodwaters recede in the dry season (June through October), the jaguars of the Cuiaba River area in northern Mato...

Every Serious Food Writer Who Comes to Penang Leaves Saying the Same Thing Anthony Bourdain said it was one of the best food cities on earth. Beyond that, chefs who run Michelin-starred restaurants in other cities come here and eat at plastic tables in open-air hawker centres like tourists. Penang’s reputation is not marketing. The food itself is Hokkien Chinese in its foundations, but...

Auyuittuq National Park: Baffin Island’s Arctic Wilderness The name Auyuittuq means “the land that never melts” in Inuktitut. Climate change is making that name less accurate: the Penny Ice Cap that covers much of the park has retreated measurably in recent decades, and the glacial rivers that feed the Akshayuk Pass are higher and faster in summer than they were a generation ago....

Atlanta: The City That Burned in 1864, Rebuilt, and Kept Going The Atlanta BeltLine is 22 miles of multi-use trail built on former rail corridors connecting 45 neighbourhoods. It is the largest urban greenway in the United States, the most significant urban renewal project in Atlanta since at least the 1996 Olympics, and the right starting point for understanding the city as it actually works...

The Lavena Coastal Walk, Taveuni, Fiji The Lavena Coastal Walk is a 5km trail on the eastern coast of Taveuni, Fiji’s third-largest island. It runs through a Fijian village, along a shoreline backed by rainforest, through coconut plantations, and ends at two waterfalls – Wainibau Falls, where the trail crosses a stream several times and finishes at a swimming hole beneath a 40-metre...

Gibraltar: Smaller Than You Think, More Interesting Than You Expect Gibraltar is 6.7 square kilometres. This is a number that doesn’t fully resolve until you are walking across it and realise you’ve covered it corner to corner in 40 minutes. The Rock itself – a 426-metre limestone promontory where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean – dominates everything so completely...

The Sea of Galilee Is a Lake and the Lowest Freshwater Lake on Earth Lake Kinneret, known in the New Testament as the Sea of Galilee, sits 213 metres below sea level in the Jordan Rift Valley in northern Israel. It is 21 kilometres long and 13 kilometres wide, freshwater, and the primary drinking water reservoir for Israel. These geographical facts matter for understanding the landscape: the...

Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda: USD 1,500 for One Hour The gorilla permit for Rwanda costs USD 1,500 per person per day. That is not a misprint. Rwanda deliberately sets its permit at the highest price of any gorilla trekking destination – higher than Uganda’s Bwindi (USD 800) and far higher than the DRC (which has lower prices and higher risk). The logic is explicit: limit visitor...

Wawel Hill: The Limestone Rock That Polish History Keeps Returning To Wawel Hill is a limestone outcrop rising 28 metres above the Vistula River in central Krakow, and on it sit the two most historically significant buildings in Poland: the Wawel Royal Castle and the Wawel Cathedral. The castle was the seat of Polish kings from the 11th century until the capital moved to Warsaw in 1596. The...

Bodiam Castle: The Most Photogenic Fortress in England, and a Question About Whether It Was Ever Really a Fortress Bodiam Castle looks exactly like a medieval castle should look: four corner towers, two gatehouse towers, continuous battlements, and a wide still moat reflecting the whole composition in a way that seems designed for photographs. It was built between 1385 and 1390 and has stood...

Bernini Built That Bronze Canopy With Metal Stripped From the Pantheon The baldachin over the main altar of St. Peter’s Basilica stands nearly 29 metres tall – taller than a 9-story building – and was constructed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini under Pope Urban VIII using bronze removed from the portico of the Pantheon. The scandal was immediate. Critics coined “What the barbarians...

Antibes Has the Best Picasso Museum and Nobody Talks About It Pablo Picasso spent the autumn of 1946 living and working in the Chateau Grimaldi in Antibes, on the Cote d’Azur. He was 65, the war was over, and he made 245 works in a few months including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramic pieces. The chateau has been the Musee Picasso since 1966 – his works on the ground floor,...

Khao Sok’s Rainforest Is Older Than the Amazon by 100 Million Years That is not a typo or exaggeration. The rainforest in Khao Sok National Park in Surat Thani province, southern Thailand, is estimated at 160 million years old. The Amazon formed around 55 million years ago. Khao Sok existed before flowering plants were common. The biodiversity that accumulated over that timespan includes 48...

Snæfellsnes: Iceland in Miniature, Without the Crowds Most Iceland itineraries go: Reykjavik, Golden Circle, South Coast, Vik, done. The Snæfellsnes Peninsula, 180 kilometres northwest of the capital, gets cut. This is a consistent mistake. The peninsula extends 90 kilometres west into the Atlantic, ending at the Snæfellsjökull glacier and the national park surrounding it. Jules Verne set the...

The Turquoise Coast Has Ruins Alongside the Beaches The Lycian civilisation occupied this coastline from roughly the 15th century BCE until the Roman period, and they left rock-cut tombs in cliff faces, sunken ruins accessible only by boat, and a series of hilltop cities that now sit beside some of the clearest water in the Mediterranean. Ölüdeniz gets the photographs. Patara has a two-kilometre...

Etna Erupts Several Times a Year and That Is Not the Unusual Part Mount Etna erupts, on average, several times annually. Most eruptions are effusive rather than explosive – lava flows from flank vents or summit craters without the ash clouds and pyroclastic material that constitute genuine hazard. The 2021 eruption sent lava flowing down the southeastern flank and triggered a 4.3 magnitude...

The Amalfi Coast: Objectively Beautiful, Genuinely Expensive, Worth It Anyway Amalfi itself was once a maritime republic that rivalled Venice. Its cathedral was built to house the bones of St. Andrew, brought from Constantinople in 1208, which made it a major pilgrimage site and one of the reasons the town had the money and ambition to build what it built. That history – a small coastal...

Everest Base Camp Trek: What the Guidebooks Get Wrong Everest Base Camp (5,364 metres) is not actually a great view of Everest. By the time you’re standing on the moraine looking at the Khumbu Icefall, the mountain itself is largely obscured by surrounding peaks. The best views of Everest on the trek come from Kala Patthar (5,643 metres), the small peak above Gorak Shep that most trekkers...

La Rambla: Barcelona’s Most Visited Street and Most Avoided by the People Who Live There La Rambla is 1.2 kilometres from Plaça de Catalunya to the Columbus Monument at Port Vell. For decades it was the definitive Barcelona experience: the evening paseo, the flower stalls, the newspaper vendors, the cafes spilling onto the pedestrian central promenade. Today it is the most pickpocketed...

The British Museum: Where to Go When You Have Three Hours and 80,000 Objects The British Museum is free, has 8 million objects, puts about 80,000 on display at any given time, and is one of the great arguments for publicly funded cultural institutions. It is also impossible to see in a day, which is why the question of which rooms to prioritise is more useful than any comprehensive guide to the...

Kolmanskop: The Town the Namib is Still Eating In 1908, a railway worker named Zacharias Lewala found a diamond in the sand near here and handed it to his German supervisor, August Stauch. Within a year, prospectors had staked 2,100 claims across the surrounding desert. By 1912, Kolmanskop had a ballroom, a skittle alley, a tram line, a bakery, and a hospital housing the first X-ray machine in the...