Churchill, Manitoba: Polar Bears, Belugas, and How to Get There Churchill is a town of approximately 900 people on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba, 1,700km north of Winnipeg. It is the only place on earth where you can observe all three of the following in close proximity: polar bears in the wild, beluga whales, and the northern lights with reliable frequency. This...

South American Tepuis: The Table Mountains of the Guiana Shield Tepuis are flat-topped sandstone mountains found across the Guiana Highlands — a region spanning southern Venezuela, western Guyana, and northern Brazil. The name comes from the Pemon language and means “house of the gods.” There are around 115 tepuis of significant size, and the most dramatic are in Venezuela’s...

Oahu: Beyond Waikiki Most visitors to Oahu stay in Waikiki and spend their time on the strip of beach between the hotels and the ocean. This is fine - the beach is real, the surf lessons work, and the sunsets are as good as advertised. But Oahu’s 597 square miles contain considerably more than that one stretch of south-shore sand, and staying on Waikiki without renting a car for at least one...

Orlando: Theme Park Capital, and That’s Not Necessarily a Criticism Orlando’s economy is theme parks. The city of around 320,000 people sits at the centre of a tourism infrastructure that draws about 75 million visitors annually. Most of them are there for Disney World, Universal, or SeaWorld, and that’s completely fine. The parks are extremely good at what they do. Walt Disney...

The Cave of Crystals: Why You Almost Certainly Cannot Visit It The Cueva de los Cristales beneath the Naica mountain in Chihuahua, Mexico contains selenite crystal columns up to 12 metres long and weighing up to 55 tonnes. They are the largest natural crystals ever recorded. The cave was discovered in 2000 by miners drilling at 300 metres depth. It is also, in honest terms, essentially closed to...

Madagascar: A Country That Rewards Patience Madagascar is the fourth-largest island in the world, separated from Africa for around 88 million years, which means its flora and fauna evolved independently from anywhere else on earth. Around 90% of its wildlife is endemic. There are 105 species of lemur, all unique to Madagascar. There are also over 300 species of bird, half the world’s...

Trakai Castle: Lithuania’s Island Fortress and the Karaites Trakai Castle stands on an island in Lake Galve, 28km west of Vilnius in central Lithuania. The red brick Gothic fortress was built by Grand Duke Vytautas in the late 14th and early 15th centuries as the seat of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy - at the time the largest state in Europe by territory, stretching from the Baltic to the Black...

Moorea: Tahiti’s Neighbour, Quieter and Sharper Moorea is 17km west of Tahiti, 20 minutes by ferry or 10 minutes by small plane. Where Tahiti is high volcanic island meeting the sea without much of a barrier reef, Moorea has an almost complete reef encircling a lagoon that runs from pale turquoise at the reef edge to deep green near the shore. The island’s profile — two bays cutting...

Ponte 25 de Abril: Lisbon’s Red Bridge The Ponte 25 de Abril was designed by the same company that built the Golden Gate Bridge (American Bridge Company and United States Steel), which explains the visual resemblance: both are suspension bridges with red painted steel towers. The Lisbon bridge opened in 1966, nine years before the Golden Gate’s 1967 counterpart. It was named Ponte...

The British Museum: How to Make the Most of It The British Museum has 8 million objects and roughly 80,000 on display at any given time. Most visitors have three or four hours, which means you’ll see a fraction of what’s there. The question is which fraction. The museum is free, which is one of the great things about it. Temporary exhibitions require a ticket and these are often very...

Snæfellsnes: Iceland’s Most Underrated Peninsula Most Iceland itineraries go Reykjavik, Golden Circle, South Coast, and stop there. Snæfellsnes Peninsula, 180km northwest of the capital, gets left off. This is a mistake, and not a subtle one. The peninsula extends 90km west into the Atlantic, ending at the Snæfellsjökull glacier and the national park that surrounds it. Jules Verne sent his...

Hampton Court Palace: Two Palaces in One Building Hampton Court Palace was built in the 1510s by Cardinal Wolsey as his private residence, then acquired by Henry VIII after Wolsey’s fall from favour in 1529. Henry enlarged it extensively. A century and a half later, William III commissioned Christopher Wren to rebuild substantial sections in a Baroque style, at which point the original Tudor...

Pont du Gard: Roman Engineering at Scale The Pont du Gard is a three-tiered Roman aqueduct bridge crossing the Gardon River in southern France, built around 50 CE as part of a 50km aqueduct system that delivered water to the city of Nimes (Nemausus). The bridge stands 49 metres high at its tallest point, the second-tier arch spans 24 metres, and the whole structure was built without mortar - the...

Mount Rushmore: Monumental, Complicated, and Still Worth Visiting Mount Rushmore is one of those American icons that looks exactly like its photographs — four presidential faces carved 18 metres tall into a granite cliff in the Black Hills of South Dakota. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln. The sculpture is unambiguously impressive as engineering and as...

Vermont: The Honest Travel Guide Vermont is small (pop. 650,000, roughly) and deliberately unglamorous about it. No major interstate cuts through Burlington. There’s no major professional sports team. The state banned billboards in 1968. What it has is specific: genuine farmland, real hills, a craft beer scene that’s actually good rather than just plentiful, and fall foliage that is,...

Winchester Cathedral: The Longest Medieval Building in Europe Winchester Cathedral has the longest medieval nave in Europe - 164 metres from west entrance to east end. The building stands on the site of a 7th-century minster; the current structure dates from the Norman period with substantial later additions. The nave was rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic style between 1360 and 1404 by Bishop...

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: Denmark’s Best Day Trip Despite the name, Louisiana has nothing to do with the American state. It was named after the three wives of its original 19th-century owner, all named Louise. It opened as a museum of modern art in 1958, perched on a cliff above the Øresund strait about 35km north of Copenhagen. The building, the art, and the view work together so well...

Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra: The Monastery of the Caves The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Caves) sits on bluffs above the Dnipro River in southern Kyiv and has been continuously occupied as a monastic complex since 1051 CE. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contains some of the most important examples of Kievan Rus architecture, and is currently under partial Ukrainian state control following...

Pompeii: A Roman Town Preserved by Disaster On the morning of 24 August, 79 CE, Vesuvius erupted in a Plinian column that sent around 4 cubic kilometres of volcanic material into the atmosphere. Pompeii was buried under roughly 4-6 metres of pumice and ash within 24 hours. The site was largely forgotten until rediscovery in the 18th century, and systematic excavation has continued since 1748....

Yosemite: The Logistics They Don’t Put on the Poster Yosemite Valley is 7.5 miles long and about a mile wide. Into that space, the park funnels upward of 12,000 vehicles on a busy summer weekend. Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, El Capitan, Mirror Lake: all real, all worth seeing. The experience of seeing them from bumper-to-bumper traffic on Valley Road is somewhat less inspiring. The solution is...

Lake Toba: Supervolcano, Inland Sea, Batak Homeland Lake Toba occupies a caldera formed by a supervolcanic eruption about 74,000 years ago that may have been the largest eruption of the past 25 million years. The resulting depression filled with water over millennia to create a lake 100km long, 30km wide, and 505 metres deep. Samosir, the island at the centre of the lake, is itself larger than...

Ilulissat: The Icefjord and What Surrounds It Ilulissat is the third-largest town in Greenland, about 4,600 people, sitting at 69°N on the west coast. The name means “icebergs” in Greenlandic. That tells you what you’re there for. The Ilulissat Icefjord (Ilulissat Kangerlua in Greenlandic) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the mouth of Sermeq Kujalleq, one of the fastest and...

Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse: Austria’s Great Alpine Drive The Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse is a 48km mountain road in Austria that crosses the High Tauern range between Bruck an der Glocknerstrasse in Salzburg state and Heiligenblut in Carinthia. It was built between 1930 and 1935 as a public works project during the Great Depression, employed 3,200 workers, and required cutting through...

The Kalahari: A Semi-Desert That Doesn’t Behave Like One The Kalahari covers about 900,000 square kilometres across Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, making it one of the world’s largest sand systems. It is technically semi-arid rather than true desert — it receives more rainfall than the Sahara or Namib — which is why it supports grasslands, shrubs, and significant wildlife. The...

Ponte Vecchio: Florence’s Oldest Bridge, Most Crowded Photo Spot The Ponte Vecchio has spanned the Arno at its narrowest point since 1345, making it the oldest bridge in Florence and one of the oldest in Europe. The current structure replaced earlier wooden bridges. What makes it immediately recognisable is the shops built along both sides — three-storey structures overhanging the water,...

Kerala’s Backwaters: Houseboats, Canals, and the Reality of the Trip The Kerala backwaters are a network of lagoons, lakes, and canals running along a 900km stretch of the Arabian Sea coast, fed by 44 rivers and separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land. Vembanad Lake, the largest lake in Kerala, forms the centrepiece. The appeal is being on the water: watching coconut palms,...

Tuscany Beyond the Cliches Tuscany has been sold so many times on olive oil bottles and wine labels that first-time visitors sometimes arrive expecting a film set. The rolling hills of the Val d’Orcia really do look like that. The cypress lines, the stone farmhouses, the October light - it is all accurate. What the posters omit is that August is extremely hot and overcrowded, that parking in...

Robben Island: What the Tour Actually Involves Robben Island sits 11km off Cape Town in Table Bay. It served as a prison from the 17th century through the late 20th century, and as a maximum-security political prison during apartheid from 1964 to 1991. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there for 18 of his 27 years in captivity. The island is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and museum, and the tour of...

Miami Beach: Better Than Its Reputation, Worse Than Its Instagram South Beach is the part of Miami Beach most people picture: the Art Deco hotels in pastel colours along Ocean Drive, the wide beach, the permanent parade of people who look like they’ve been attending a photoshoot since 1994. It is genuinely beautiful in the early morning, before 9am, when the light comes in low from the east...

The Shard: What It Costs, What You Get, and Whether It’s Worth It The Shard is 310 metres tall, making it the tallest building in the UK. Renzo Piano designed it. It opened in 2012 and has a roughly triangular cross-section that reflects light differently at different hours. Whether it works in the London skyline is still argued. From the inside looking out, it definitely works. The View...

Jellyfish Lake: What Palau’s Most Famous Swim Actually Involves Jellyfish Lake is a marine lake on Eil Malk Island in Palau’s Rock Islands, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The lake is connected to the ocean through fissures in the limestone rock but is isolated enough that its ecosystem has evolved independently over thousands of years. The golden jellyfish (Mastigias papua etpisoni) and...

Griffith Observatory: Los Angeles’s Best Free View Griffith Observatory opened in 1935 on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood, donated to the City of Los Angeles by mining magnate Griffith J. Griffith with the specific requirement that admission to the building remain free. Ninety years later, the main building is still free to enter. The parking, the planetarium shows, and the gift shop...

Salar de Uyuni: Bolivia’s Salt Flat At 10,582 square kilometres and sitting at 3,656 metres above sea level, the Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat on earth. It was formed when prehistoric lakes dried out, leaving a crust of salt that averages 10 metres thick. The surface is flat to within one metre across the entire expanse, which is why satellite navigation systems use it to calibrate...

Rainbow Reef, Fiji: One of the Pacific’s Best Dive Sites Rainbow Reef sits in the Somosomo Strait between Taveuni and Vanua Levu, two of Fiji’s larger islands. It’s consistently listed among the top dive sites in the Pacific, and for once the reputation is justified. The soft coral density here is extraordinary — huge sea fans, feathery sea whips, and masses of small hard coral...

Volcanoes National Park: Gorilla Trekking in the Virunga Mountains Volcanoes National Park occupies 160 square kilometres of the Virunga mountain range in northwest Rwanda, bordering Congo and Uganda. It is the primary destination for mountain gorilla trekking in Rwanda and one of only three places in the world - alongside Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and Congo’s Virunga...

Tubbataha Reef: Remote Philippine Atoll Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park sits in the middle of the Sulu Sea, 150km southeast of Puerto Princesa on Palawan, Philippines. It consists of two atolls — North and South — rising from ocean depths of 900 metres. The surrounding waters are among the most biodiverse marine environments in the Pacific: the park contains 600 fish species, 360 coral species, 11...

Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf: What’s Worth Your Time and What Isn’t Pier 39 is the most visited tourist destination in San Francisco, which tells you everything and nothing. The pier itself is a two-storey shopping mall on stilts over the bay, opened in 1978. Most of its shops are interchangeable souvenir outlets. This is not where you should spend your afternoon. But the area...

Sipadan: One of the World’s Best Dive Sites, With One Major Catch Sipadan is a small island off the east coast of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, rising from a sea floor 600 metres below. The reef wall that encircles it drops vertically for that full distance, creating conditions for extraordinary concentrations of marine life: schools of barracuda that form into spiralling tornadoes, hawksbill and...

Disneyland Anaheim: The Original Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim on 17 July 1955. The opening day was widely reported as a disaster — the crowd was twice what had been expected, counterfeit tickets were circulating, and several attractions broke down — but it recovered and has been more or less continuously busy since. The park covers about 160 acres (Disney World in Florida covers...

Lord Howe Island: The 400-Visitor Cap and Why It Matters Lord Howe Island sits in the Tasman Sea 700km northeast of Sydney. It is 11km long and averages 2km wide. By law, no more than 400 tourists can be on the island at any one time. This cap has been in place for decades and is the single most important fact about visiting: you will need to book well in advance, accommodation is limited, and the...

Fortress of Minceta: The Highest Point on Dubrovnik’s Walls The Minceta Tower is the tallest structure on Dubrovnik’s city walls, standing at 35 metres above sea level at the northwest corner of the fortifications. It was originally designed by Juraj Dalmatinac in 1461 and completed by Michelozzo Michelozzi, the Florentine architect. The round tower capped with a crown of battlements...

The Rialto Bridge: Venice’s Most Crowded Crossing The Ponte di Rialto was completed in 1591, making it the oldest of the four bridges crossing the Grand Canal. Its architect, Antonio da Ponte, was an unlikely choice — he beat Palladio, Sansovino, and Michelangelo in the competition for the commission, which speaks either to politics or genuine good taste on the part of the Venetian...

Mamayev Kurgan: Volgograd’s Memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad The Motherland Calls stands 85 metres tall on Mamayev Kurgan, a hill above the Volga that was among the most bitterly contested ground in the battle of Stalingrad (1942–43). The statue — a woman with a raised sword, sculpted by Yevgeny Vuchetich — was the tallest free-standing sculpture in the world when it was completed in...

St Mark’s Basilica and the Campanile: Two Very Different Experiences They stand 50 metres apart on the same piazza, but visiting them is not the same. The Basilica is one of the most complex interior spaces in European architecture. The Campanile is a straight brick tower with a lift to the top. Both are worth doing; prioritise according to whether you are in Venice for art history or...

Inle Lake: The Floating Gardens of Shan State Inle Lake sits at 880 metres in the Shan Hills of central Myanmar, roughly 30km long and between 5 and 10km wide depending on the season. The Intha people who live on and around the lake built their houses on stilts, developed floating garden agriculture by anchoring beds of vegetation to the lakebed with stakes, and refined a rowing technique —...

The Oresund Bridge: Copenhagen to Malmo in 35 Minutes The Oresund Bridge connects Copenhagen and Malmo across 16km of sea and opened in 2000. The train is the better way across: cheaper than driving (SEK 125 one-way from Malmo to Copenhagen Central, or DKK 110 in the other direction as of 2024), faster, and you see the water. The bridge’s cable-stayed section rises 57 metres above the...

Icehotel Jukkasjärvi: What Sleeping at -5°C Actually Involves Jukkasjärvi is 200km north of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland. The Icehotel here has been built and rebuilt every winter since 1989, each year from ice cut from the nearby Torne River. In 2016 they also opened Icehotel 365, a permanent wing kept frozen year-round by solar panels, so you can now visit in August if the cold appeals...

Empire State Building: The Observatory Comparison Worth Knowing The Empire State Building opened in 1931 after 410 days of construction. At the time of completion it was the world’s tallest building, a title it held until 1970. The Art Deco exterior - limestone and granite cladding, stainless steel spandrels - was designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. The building has 102 floors and stands...

Mainau Island: A Garden Worth Planning Your Lake Constance Trip Around Mainau is a 45-hectare island in Lake Constance, connected to the southern German shore by a footbridge, and managed since 1932 by the Bernadotte family (Swedish nobility, Scandinavian royalty by a circuitous route). The island was a hunting estate before they turned it into an elaborate garden, and the baroque palace at its...

Yakushima: Japan’s Ancient Forest Island Yakushima is a UNESCO World Heritage island off the southern tip of Kyushu, and it’s unlike anything else in Japan. About 20% of the island is covered by old-growth cedar forest, including trees well over 1,000 years old. The oldest, the Jomon Sugi, is estimated to be between 2,170 and 7,200 years old (the range is wide because scientists...