Wellington Has the Only Preserved Colossal Squid in Existence and a Kiwi Sanctuary Within Walking Distance of the City Centre The colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) caught in the Ross Sea in 2007 weighed 495 kilograms and is the largest invertebrate ever recorded. It is displayed at Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum, which is free to enter. The squid is the most dramatic single...

The Great Depression Accidentally Preserved South Beach’s Art Deco District That is the counterintuitive origin story. When the Florida land boom collapsed in the late 1920s and the Depression set in, developers lacked the money to demolish and rebuild the Art Deco hotels and apartments that had gone up along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue. The buildings sat, frozen, as the rest of America...

Sigiriya: A 5th-Century Parricide’s Rock Palace, Fully Worth the Climb The history of Sigiriya begins with a king who killed his father. Kashyapa I took the throne of Sri Lanka in 477 AD by walling his father alive, then spent the following 18 years building a palace on a 200-metre volcanic rock column rising from the central plains, waiting for the revenge his brother would eventually...

Kathmandu Valley: Three Rival Cities That Still Haven’t Forgiven Each Other Patan and Bhaktapur will both tell you, separately, that they have the better Durbar Square. They are both right, in different ways, and the rivalry between the three city-states that once competed for dominance of this valley – Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur – has never entirely dissolved even after...

Cherry Blossom Season in Japan: What Climate Change Is Doing to the Calendar Japan’s 2026 cherry blossom season bloomed 5 to 7 days earlier than historical averages across southern and central Japan. Tokyo’s Somei Yoshino peaked around March 26; Kyoto’s around March 31. The reason is a warmer winter followed by a record heat surge in late February – a pattern that has been...

Þingvellir: Where Iceland’s Parliament Began and Two Continents Part In 930 CE, the Icelandic settlers established the Alþingi here, an outdoor parliament where free men gathered annually to make laws, settle disputes, and trade – one of the earliest known parliamentary assemblies in the world. They chose the site well: a wide, flat valley with good acoustics from the rock walls,...

The Ross Ice Shelf: The Ice Continent That Stopped Explorers for Decades James Clark Ross discovered the barrier in 1841. He sailed his two wooden-hulled ships, the Erebus and Terror, south through pack ice and emerged into open water in the Ross Sea – and then ran into a wall of ice 50 metres high running continuously to the horizon in both directions. He had found the edge of what would...

Alexander the Great Said Samarkand Was More Beautiful Than He Had Imagined. He Conquered Half the Known World and That Was Still His Reaction. The attribution may be apocryphal, but the sentiment is historically plausible. Samarkand and Bukhara are 280 kilometres apart in central Uzbekistan, connected by a 2-hour high-speed train, and together they contain the finest concentration of Islamic...

The Condors Use the Thermal Updrafts You Cannot Feel At Cruz del Condor viewpoint around 08:30 on a clear May morning, the Andean condors with 3.2-metre wingspans are soaring at eye level and below the rim. They are not performing for you. They are riding the thermal currents rising from the canyon to gain altitude with zero expenditure of energy, using the same physics that makes gliders work...

Eryri: The National Park That Finally Has Its Name Back In 2023, Snowdonia National Park officially restored its Welsh name – Eryri, meaning “the highlands” or “place of eagles” – as its primary designation, reversing a century of English administrative override. Snowdon, the highest peak, is officially Yr Wyddfa. These are not cosmetic changes. Wales is making...

The Drive-Through Trees Are the Smallest Redwoods You’ll See The Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree at Leggett on Highway 1 is 315 feet tall and 6 feet wide through the tunnel, which sounds impressive until you walk among the trees in the old-growth sections of Humboldt Redwoods State Park 60 miles north. Those trees reach 380 feet and their bases can be as wide as a room. The drive-through trees...

Ponte Vecchio: The Bridge Butchers Built, the Medici Cleaned Up The Ponte Vecchio has spanned the Arno at its narrowest crossing point since 1345, making it the oldest bridge in Florence and one of the oldest in Europe. The structure that makes it distinctive – the three-storey shops built along both sides, overhanging the water – was originally occupied by butchers, who disposed of...

Walt Disney World Resort: What Actually Matters When You Go Walt Disney World Resort covers 27,000 acres outside Orlando, Florida, making it roughly twice the size of Manhattan. Four theme parks, two water parks, a shopping district, and nearly 30 on-property hotels occupy only a fraction of that footprint. Disney bought all that land secretly in the early 1960s through dummy corporations, because...

On July 20, 1944, a Bomb Exploded at This Table and Hitler Was Not Killed The briefing table in the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) is where Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase containing a bomb during a military conference on July 20, 1944. The explosion killed four people and wounded many others. Hitler survived, protected partly by a heavy oak table leg that deflected the blast....

Copper Canyon: Bigger Than the Grand Canyon, Receiving 1% of Its Visitors The Barrancas del Cobre in Chihuahua, Mexico, is a canyon system formed by the Rio Fuerte and its tributaries in the Sierra Madre Occidental. It consists of six major canyons covering around 65,000 square kilometres. The deepest points exceed 1,800 metres. By comparison, the Grand Canyon is 446 kilometres long and 1,857...

The Marina Bay Sands Infinity Pool Is Not Open to the Public Let that be clear before anything else. The 150-metre infinity pool on the SkyPark of Marina Bay Sands – among the most photographed pools in the world, the pool that appears to float at the edge of three 55-storey towers 57 floors above Singapore’s bay – is accessible only to hotel guests. You cannot buy a day pass....

The Plaza Was Created in 1967 by Demolishing a Neighbourhood The open space in front of the Western Wall – the broad plaza that can hold tens of thousands of people for prayer and crowds comfortably – did not exist before June 1967. When Israel took control of the Old City during the Six-Day War, the Moroccan Quarter that had occupied the area immediately adjacent to the Wall since the...

St. Catherine’s Has Been Occupied Continuously Since 565 CE That is not a typo. The monastery at the base of Mount Sinai was built by Emperor Justinian I, consecrated in 565 CE, and has never been abandoned. It is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery on earth, staffed by Greek Orthodox monks who have maintained the liturgical traditions of early Christianity across 1,500...

Four Nobel Laureates, One Small Capital, and a Pub Culture That Refuses to Apologise Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, Heaney. Four writers from the same compact city that also gave you Kilmainham Gaol, the Book of Kells, and a pub culture dense enough to sustain an entire industry of walking tours. Dublin holds a UNESCO City of Literature designation and wears it without self-consciousness, which is...

Perth Is 2,700 Kilometres from Its Nearest Australian Neighbour and That Isolation Made It Extraordinary The standard narrative converts Perth’s distance from Adelaide into a story about provincialism. The honest version runs the opposite direction: isolation produced specific beaches, a wine region that developed on its own terms across 150 years, and a quality of afternoon light that...

Ayutthaya: The Capital That Burmese Invaders Burned in 1767 In 1767, Burmese forces sacked Ayutthaya after a 14-month siege, burned most of the city, and forcibly relocated most of the population. The former capital of the Siamese kingdom, which had ruled for over 400 years and grown into one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world at its peak, was essentially ended. What survives...

Wat Pho’s Temple Walls Are a UNESCO-Registered University – and That Changes Everything About How You Should See It In the 1830s, King Rama III commissioned a comprehensive public-education project: marble plaques inscribed with the sum total of Thai knowledge in medicine, massage, yoga, literature, and Buddhist doctrine, inset into the temple walls for anyone who could read them....

Jeju Island: South Korea’s Volcanic Escape The Seoul-to-Jeju air route has been one of the busiest domestic flight corridors on Earth for years running, and yet most international travelers treat the island as a footnote. That is a mistake. Jeju is South Korea’s largest island, home to roughly 1.5 million people, with a dormant shield volcano at its center, lava tube caves, black sand...

Milford Sound: The Drive Is Half the Point Milford Sound is a fiord (not a sound – it was misidentified by an early European surveyor) on the southwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island, inside Fiordland National Park, 290 kilometres southwest of Queenstown. The fiord is 15 kilometres long, 2 kilometres wide at its widest point, and 290 metres deep. Mitre Peak, the most-photographed...

The Alps: Eight Countries, 1,200 Kilometres, and More Choices Than You Have Time For Mont Blanc at 4,808 metres is the highest peak in Western Europe and the most sought-after summit in the Alps. The Chamonix Aiguille du Midi cable car takes non-climbers to 3,842 metres in 20 minutes and provides views of the mountain that no amount of hiking achieves without technical equipment. From the top...

Jellyfish Lake: When Millions Become Thousands In 2025, golden jellyfish populations in Palau’s Jellyfish Lake dropped to roughly 5,600 individuals – a fraction of the millions that once filled the water. Climate patterns had shifted water temperature and stratification enough to crash the population temporarily. The lake remains open to visitors and moon jellyfish are still present in...

Hong Kong Disneyland Is the Smallest Disney Park and That Used to Be a Problem When it opened in 2005 on reclaimed land at Penny’s Bay on Lantau Island, Hong Kong Disneyland was routinely criticised for being too small, too expensive, and underwhelming compared to the Tokyo and US parks. A series of expansions completed between 2012 and 2023 have substantially changed the equation: Toy Story...

The Palace of Westminster Is Not a Museum and That Changes Everything Walk past the Victoria Tower on a sitting day and you will see the Union Flag flying above it, which means the monarch is not present; swap it for the Royal Standard and that calculus flips entirely. This is a working legislature, and the fact that you can wander through it at all – peering into the chamber where Churchill...

Stellenbosch: Where South African Wine Has Been Made Since 1679 The Dutch East India Company established Stellenbosch as a refreshment stop for ships rounding the Cape in 1679, and wine has been produced in the surrounding valley continuously since shortly after. That puts Stellenbosch’s wine history at over 345 years – older than most of the world’s respected wine regions have...

Vancouver: The City Where You Can Ski and Sail on the Same Day In June 2026, Vancouver will host seven FIFA World Cup matches, and if you think that changes nothing for regular visitors, you haven’t tried to book a hotel downtown in late June. The city is used to being sought after – it’s been called the most liveable city in North America so many times the title has lost meaning...

Fiji Is 333 Islands and Most Visitors Only See One of Them The overwater bungalows, the white sand, the improbably turquoise water – those images all exist in Fiji, and they are located on the smaller outer islands rather than on the main island of Viti Levu where the airports are. Nadi, the international arrival point on Viti Levu’s western side, is a transit hub with orchid gardens...

Castle Combe: The Prettiest Village Claim Is Defensible Castle Combe gets called England’s prettiest village in every travel listicle, and after a visit you tend to understand why, even if the label produces slight eye-rolls from locals who have watched coach parties pile out in summer. The honey-coloured Cotswold stone cottages, the 14th-century market cross, the Bybrook flowing under a...

St Mark’s Basilica: The Pricing Changed in 2025 Since July 2025, you can no longer buy tickets at the door for St Mark’s Basilica. All tickets must be purchased online in advance at tickets.basilicasanmarco.it. Prices also increased: basic admission is now 10 euros online (a dramatic jump from the previous free entry), with combined tickets for the Pala d’Oro or the Museum and...

The Café Chairs in Plaza Mayor Charge €6 for a Beer. Two Minutes Away the Same Beer Costs €2.50. This is the most useful thing to know about Plaza Mayor, Madrid. The square itself is worth visiting, briefly, for its scale and its history. The bars and restaurants facing the square are not the point. Plaza Mayor was constructed between 1617 and 1619 under Philip III. The square covers 129 by 94...

The Lakota Refused $1.3 Billion and They Are Still Refusing It The US government has been holding that settlement money in a federal trust for decades – compensation for land taken in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty when gold was discovered in the Black Hills. The Lakota Sioux will not touch it. They want the land back, not the money. Mount Rushmore sits on that land: four...

You Hear Niagara Falls Before You See It The rumble is subsonic at first, moving through the soles of your shoes before the water comes into view. Then you round the corner at Table Rock and the sound becomes a roar and the mist rises hundreds of metres and the scale of what is happening in front of you exceeds what photographs prepared you for. The Niagara River drains four of the five Great...

The Ksour Were Granaries First, Fortresses Second, Film Sets Third Ksar Ouled Soltane, 24 kilometres south of Tataouine, is a fortified Berber granary built from the 16th century, four stories of golden stone ghorfas (storage cells) rising around a central courtyard. The cells are small, arched, and stacked – functional architecture designed to keep grain cool and secure through decades of...

The First Ascent of the Matterhorn Killed Four of the Seven Climbers – and the Broken Rope Is Still On Display in Zermatt On July 14, 1865, Edward Whymper’s team reached the Matterhorn’s summit first. On the descent, a rope broke and four climbers fell 1,200 metres to their deaths. The knotted rope is displayed in the Matterhorn Museum in the village, and the graves of those who...

Karnak: The Temple Complex That Took 2,000 Years to Build and Still Isn’t Done Approaching Karnak from Luxor, you walk a section of the Sphinx Avenue: a 2.7-kilometre processional road once flanked by 1,350 ram-headed sphinxes connecting Karnak to Luxor Temple to the south. About 400 sphinxes have been excavated and restored; more lie under modern streets. Walking even a short stretch before...

Church in the Rock, Branson: Faith and Limestone on Table Rock Lake Church in the Rock sits on the shoreline of Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri, carved into a limestone bluff face. The worship space itself – seating roughly 350 people – was cut directly into the rock, with the cliff wall forming the back and sides and the lake visible through the front opening. It was completed...

Kizhi Pogost: 22 Domes and No Metal Fixings Kizhi Island sits in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, northwestern Russia, about 68 kilometres north of Petrozavodsk. The Kizhi Pogost on the island’s southern tip contains two wooden churches and a bell tower built in the 18th century using timber joinery without metal fixings. The Transfiguration Church, completed in 1714, rises to 37...

Most Visitors to Fiji Never Go to Suva and That Is Their Loss Nearly every visitor to Fiji flies into Nadi on the western side of Viti Levu and heads directly to a resort or outer island. Suva, the capital, sits three hours east by bus and receives a fraction of the tourist attention the resort areas get. The reason is not hard to understand – Suva is a working port city with traffic, market...

Mozart’s Birthplace - Salzburg, Austria The yellow building at Getreidegasse 9 has been drawing visitors since 1880, which means tourists were already queuing outside it before the electric light was commonplace. That is a long time for a city to wrestle with what to do with its most famous son, and Salzburg has largely decided to lean in hard. You’ll find Mozart’s face on...

134 Columns, 2,000 Years, and You Still Cannot Fit It All in One Day Stand inside the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak at seven in the morning, before the cruise-ship groups arrive, and your first instinct is disbelief. Not spiritual awe – disbelief that human hands built this without powered machinery. The 134 sandstone columns, the tallest stretching 23 metres, still carry patches of original...

The Night Watch Is Nearly 4 Metres Tall and Has Its Own Room De Nachtwacht – Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1642 militia portrait – measures 3.63 by 4.37 metres and has occupied the Rijksmuseum since 1808. The 2019-2021 Operation Night Watch conservation project was conducted in a glass enclosure inside the museum, observable by visitors and watched by millions online – arguably the...

Polonnaruwa: The 12th-Century Capital That Built the World’s Largest Artificial Reservoir Sri Lanka’s ancient sites get compared as if they are interchangeable: Anuradhapura is older, Sigiriya is more dramatic on the approach, Dambulla has more complete cave paintings. Polonnaruwa is often the one that historians rate highest, for the specific reason that it represents a functioning...

The Eiger’s North Face Can Be Watched from a Cafe Table The Eiger North Face is 1,800 metres of exposed limestone that rises nearly vertically from the base to the 3,967-metre summit. Between 1935 and 1938, during what German and Austrian climbing circles called the race to the Nordwand, four separate parties died attempting the first ascent – eight climbers killed in three years on a...

Portland Is Still Good and Is Not What It Was in 2015 and These Things Are Both True Portland in 2026 is not the same city it was a decade ago. The downtown core around SW 4th and Burnside saw significant disruption during 2020 to 2022 and some blocks remain noticeably rough. The city has been working on recovery, and the outer neighbourhoods – Alberta Arts District, Mississippi Avenue,...

Two Rivers That Refuse to Mix About 10 kilometres east of Manaus, the dark almost-black Rio Negro collides with the sandy brown Rio Solimoes and then, for roughly six kilometres, refuses to merge. They run side by side with a visible seam between them before finally surrendering to each other and becoming the Amazon proper. The phenomenon is real, it is sustained, and it holds up entirely when you...

comment : #(real_date: 2024-08-06T16:15:57+00:00) comment : # (real_timestamp: 1722960957) Ascot: Three Centuries of Horse Racing, Hats, and Watching the Royal Family Arrive Queen Anne founded Ascot Racecourse in 1711 when she rode across Windsor Great Park and decided it was an ideal spot for horse racing. The first race was held that summer. The course has operated ever since, and the...