Changdeokgung Is the UNESCO-Listed Palace While Gyeongbokgung Gets the Tourists Seoul has five grand palaces from the Joseon Dynasty (1392 to 1910). Most visitors go to Gyeongbokgung, the largest and most reconstructed, because it appears on every map and has the changing of the guard ceremony. Changdeokgung, a 20-minute walk east, received UNESCO World Heritage designation in 1997 specifically...

The Region Where Sidra Pours From Chest Height and No One Finds This Strange Walk into any sidreria in Asturias and watch the waiter raise the bottle above shoulder level, tilt it out, and pour the cider into a wide-mouthed glass angled below the knee – a thin stream falling perhaps 80 centimetres, aerating the drink and releasing its characteristic slight fizz. This is the escanciar, and...

Ilulissat: Where the Icebergs Are the Size of City Blocks The name means “icebergs” in Greenlandic. That is not a coincidence. Ilulissat, the third-largest town in Greenland with around 4,600 people, sits at 69 degrees north on the west coast and exists in productive tension with a glacier that does not slow down for tourists or anything else. Sermeq Kujalleq, the glacier at the head...

Tuscany: What’s Worth Your Time and What You Can Skip Tuscany is Italy’s most visited region, which means some of it is genuinely wonderful and some of it has been polished to a tourist veneer that the place cannot sustain. The key decisions are about which towns to base yourself in, how much time to spend in Florence, and whether to rent a car or work with trains. Florence Florence...

The Cuillin: Why Most People Who Think They’re Going There Should Reconsider The Black Cuillin is not a hill-walking destination. It is a rock-climbing and mountaineering destination that happens to include twelve Munros, and the critical distinction matters because every year people die there after underestimating what the terrain requires. The rock is gabbro, a coarse volcanic intrusive...

Omani Frankincense Has Been Traded Here for Three Thousand Years Oman’s frankincense – luban, harvested from Boswellia sacra trees in the Dhofar region in the south – was among the most valuable trade commodities in the ancient world. The Romans burned it at state ceremonies. Egyptian embalmers used it in mummification. The Queen of Sheba brought it on her journey to Solomon. The...

Mount Ararat Is Not Where You’d Expect to Find It Every Armenian knows Mount Ararat – it is on the national coat of arms, visible from Yerevan on clear mornings, as synonymous with Armenian identity as any flag or language. The mountain is also entirely inside Turkey, 16 kilometres from the border, on land that has been disputed and fought over for centuries. Standing in Yerevan and...

Bwindi: USD 800 for One Hour, and Worth Every Cent Mountain gorillas cannot survive in captivity. There are none in zoos. There are approximately 1,000 mountain gorillas alive on Earth, split between Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in south-western Uganda and the Virunga Massif shared between Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC. To see a mountain gorilla, you go to the forest. The permit for Bwindi...

Ningaloo: The World’s Largest Fringing Reef, and You Can Walk Into It from the Beach At the Great Barrier Reef, you take a boat to the reef edge. At Ningaloo, in many places you walk out from the beach, swim 100 metres, and you are on live coral. This accessibility is the defining characteristic of the 260-kilometre fringing reef off Western Australia’s Cape Range Peninsula, and it is...

Calton Hill Has a Partial Parthenon, a Telescope Memorial, and the Best View of Edinburgh You Are Not Taking Calton Hill in central Edinburgh takes about 15 minutes to walk up from Princes Street and is consistently overlooked in favour of Arthur’s Seat, the larger volcanic hill further east. The oversight is useful for visitors who want a view: from the top of Calton Hill you look directly...

South Street Seaport: Lower Manhattan’s Maritime Quarter, Genuinely Improved South Street Seaport occupies a stretch of the Lower Manhattan waterfront that was, until the late 19th century, the commercial heart of American maritime trade. The cobblestone streets and early 19th-century commercial buildings that survive are among the most complete examples of pre-Civil War mercantile...

Shwedagon Pagoda: Myanmar’s Most Sacred Buddhist Site A note before beginning: Myanmar has been under military rule since the coup of February 2021. As of mid-2025, multiple governments including the United States, Australia, Canada, and Singapore maintain high-level travel warnings advising against or urging extreme caution for travel to Myanmar. The Yangon area remains more stable than...

The Swimming Pigs of Exuma: What the Photos Don’t Show Big Major Cay in the Exuma Cays is an uninhabited island in the southern Bahamas where a colony of domestic pigs lives on the beach and swims out to boats. The origin story is contested – sailors, a shipwreck, or (the most plausible version) a local entrepreneur who put pigs there for the tourism potential in the 1990s – and...

Niagara Falls: The Canadian Side Is Better and Here Is Why The Niagara River carries the combined outflow of four Great Lakes northward and drops 57 metres at the falls. The US-Canada border runs through the middle of the river, and the falls are divided into three sections: the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls on the US side, and the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. Horseshoe Falls...

Salina: The Aeolian Island That Actually Has Enough Shade Salina is the greenest of the Aeolian Islands, which isn’t just a description of the colour but a statement about its character relative to its siblings. Lipari is the tourist hub. Stromboli has the active volcano. Vulcano has the sulphur smell. Salina has water – two volcanoes that trap moisture from passing clouds – and...

The Phrase “Jumping Off the Stage at Kiyomizudera” Means Committing Fully to a Decision In Japanese, it is an idiom for going all in on something dangerous or irreversible. The phrase came from a historical practice: during the Edo period, people jumped from the main stage of Kiyomizudera as a test of faith or a plea to Kannon for wish-fulfillment. Historical records suggest the...

The Forth Bridge Was Built in Response to a Catastrophe On the night of 28 December 1879, the Tay Bridge – Scotland’s other great Victorian railway bridge – collapsed in a storm as a passenger train was crossing it. Seventy-five people died. The disaster was the defining engineering failure of Victorian Britain, and it shaped everything that came after. When construction began on...

Capri’s Blue Grotto: What Actually Causes the Light, and Why You Should Go Before 11am The Blue Grotto is roughly 60 metres long and 25 metres wide, with a ceiling 14 metres high at its tallest point. The cave cut into limestone cliffs on Capri’s northwestern shore has been generating philosophical commentary since the Roman emperor Tiberius kept a villa on the island – a recent...

Seeing Lemurs in Madagascar: Where, When, and How Not to Waste the Trip Before dawn in the Andasibe forest, the Indri starts. The call rises in a long, wailing territorial duet that carries several kilometres through the trees and is genuinely unlike any other wildlife sound on Earth. You hear it before you see the source – and when you do see them, two of the largest living lemurs perched...

The Bridge That Keeps Getting Mistaken for San Francisco The confusion is understandable. Both are suspension bridges with red-painted steel towers, dramatic towers rising from the water, long main spans, and an industrial grace that photographs nearly identically from the right angle. The reason they look alike is that the same firm built both: the American Bridge Company, working with US Steel,...

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park: Kilauea Is Erupting Again, and the Timing Matters Kilauea began a new episodic eruption cycle at the Halemaumau crater on December 23, 2024 – one of the longest-running eruption sequences on record, with 48 documented eruption episodes by June 2026, more than any previous episodic fountaining eruption in recorded Hawaiian volcanic history. Individual episodes...

Pelourinho: Salvador’s Old City and the History It Carries The name of the neighbourhood tells you what happened here. Pelourinho means “pillory” in Portuguese – the whipping post where enslaved people were publicly punished during the colonial era. Salvador da Bahia was the first capital of colonial Brazil and the largest entry point for enslaved Africans in the Atlantic...

Charles Garnier Built the Casino First and the Paris Opera Four Years Later The architect who gave France its most celebrated opera house designed the Casino de Monte-Carlo in 1863 as his warm-up act. Walking into the Place du Casino and seeing the two buildings side by side in your memory – the opera house on the Boulevard des Capucines, the casino on this Mediterranean terrace – the...

The Centre Pompidou Is Closed Until 2030 and That Makes Now the Wrong Time to Read About It Casually The Centre Pompidou closed on 22 September 2025 for a five-year renovation. It will not reopen until 2030. If you are visiting Paris in 2026, the building is not accessible for its usual exhibitions and museum floors. The renovation – led by architects Moreau Kusunoki, with Frida Escobedo...

The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba: One Building That Charles V Regretted When Charles V came to see the cathedral nave that had been inserted through the center of the Great Mosque’s interior in 1523, he is said to have told the chapter: “You have destroyed something unique to build something ordinary.” The story is possibly apocryphal, but it captures something true about the...

The 2004 Tsunami That Killed 35,000 Sri Lankans Barely Touched Galle Fort The Dutch East India Company ramparts, built from 1649 onwards and reinforced over subsequent decades, deflected the waves that swept over the surrounding southwest coastline. The walls were designed to protect trade routes and colonial interests, not to serve as emergency flood defences 350 years later. But the engineering...

Jasper National Park: The Quieter Rockies, Caveat Noted Jasper National Park covers 11,000 square kilometres in the Alberta Rockies, about twice the size of Banff. They share the Icefields Parkway, a 230-kilometre road connecting the two towns and passing the Columbia Icefield midway. Most visitors to the Rockies do Banff. Jasper, two hours further north, has the same landscape quality with...

The Dunes Fill with Clear Blue Lagoons After the Rainy Season Lencois Maranhenses looks impossible in photographs: a vast field of white sand dunes, rolling like a frozen sea, each valley between dunes holding a pool of clear freshwater ranging from pale green to deep cobalt. The photographs are accurate. The explanation is geological rather than miraculous: the park receives heavy rainfall from...

Andringitra: The Madagascar Highlands Most Visitors Miss Madagascar’s lemur-watching circuit – Isalo, Ranomafana, Andasibe – gets the tourist traffic. Andringitra National Park sits an hour south of Ambalavao in the southern highlands, and it gets a fraction of those numbers because it requires more effort to reach and makes fewer concessions to casual visitors. That combination...

Nobody Actually Stays on Sipadan. The Last Resort Was Removed in 2004. Malaysia removed all resort infrastructure from Sipadan Island in 2004 to protect the marine environment. You sleep on the nearby islands of Mabul or Kapalai and take a 20-minute boat to Sipadan for your dives. This is the arrangement that keeps the reef in its current condition, and the reef is extraordinary. Sipadan is a...

The Louvre Has 35,000 Works on Display. Most Visitors See Three of Them. That is an exaggeration but not much of one. The standard Louvre visit involves: queue at the pyramid entrance, walk directly to the Mona Lisa, stand six metres back in a crowd of several hundred people to see it, walk past the Winged Victory of Samothrace, leave. The museum has approximately 72,735 square metres of gallery...

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 experience. The Basilica is one of the most complex interior spaces in European architecture, built over 11 centuries by a city that used it to display its wealth and piety simultaneously. The Campanile is a straight brick tower with a lift....

The Uffizi: Get Into the Botticelli Rooms Before 9am The Uffizi Gallery in Florence holds the two most important Botticelli paintings in existence, which is reason enough to organise a visit around access to rooms 10 through 14. Primavera (c. 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) hang in the same large hall. If you know nothing else about Renaissance painting, these two works will make the visit...

The Galapagos: What No Nature Documentary Prepares You For The marine iguana shuffled across my feet. Not over them – across, weighed them, continued. This is the thing about the Galapagos that photographs and documentaries fail to communicate: the animals are not performing for you. They simply do not register humans as a threat. Sea lion pups try to play with your fins underwater....

The Most Expensive Mistake You Will Make in South America Is Flying Over Easter Island That is the old joke among budget travellers, but most of them admit within 48 hours of landing that it was worth every peso. Easter Island – Rapa Nui in the indigenous language – sits 3,700 kilometres from the Chilean coast and 2,075 kilometres from Pitcairn, the nearest inhabited land. One of the...

Las Vegas Spent $2.3 Billion Building a Spherical Concert Venue The Sphere at The Venetian opened in September 2023 after five years of construction – a 111-metre-tall spherical building covered in the world’s largest LED display screen on the outside and the world’s largest LED screen on the inside. Residencies in 2026 include the Eagles, Metallica, No Doubt, and Kenny Chesney....

Dali Spent Years Studying Rhinoceros Horns. The Bronze One in Puerto Banus Is the Best Reason to Stop There. Salvador Dali’s obsession with the rhinoceros horn was not the whimsy it appears to be. From the early 1950s onward, he spent several years photographically and mathematically analysing natural forms that break down into logarithmic spirals – sunflowers, cauliflower heads, and...

The Guide Was There That is the thing that distinguishes Robben Island from every other apartheid-era historical site in South Africa. When your guide walks you into the Maximum Security Prison and shows you an isolation cell, it is not a reconstruction and he is not describing someone else’s experience. The tour of Robben Island is conducted by former political prisoners who were...

Xochimilco: The Aztec Canal System That Survived the Drainage of the Lake When the Spanish arrived at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital sat on an island in a lake. The city was connected to the mainland by causeways and the lake was criss-crossed by canals with chinampas – artificial islands built from layered aquatic vegetation and lake mud over woven reed frames – used for intensive...

Cristo Redentor: The One Monument That Justifies the Hype The summit of Corcovado Mountain on a clear morning is one of the few tourist landmarks that delivers in excess of what you expect. The photographs are already familiar – the outstretched arms against blue sky, the city spreading in every direction below – but the scale, the 360-degree reality of Rio at your feet, and the...

Postojna Cave: You Board a Train Inside the Mountain The tour of Postojna Cave begins with a three-minute ride on a narrow-gauge electric railway that carries visitors 2 kilometres into the limestone mountain. This is not a detail or an analogy. You board a small train at the cave entrance, and it moves at a moderate speed through passages of stalactites and stalagmites in the dark before...

Son Doong: The Cave You Probably Won’t Get Into Oxalis Adventure sells 1,000 slots per year for Son Doong Cave expeditions. New dates are released in late January and sell out within hours. The tour costs USD 3,000 per person for a four-night, five-day expedition, is capped at 10 participants per group, and requires climbing a 90-metre calcite flowstone wall and wading through underground...

Necker Island: $78,000 a Night and What You Get For It Richard Branson bought Necker Island in 1978 for £180,000. It was a 74-acre uninhabited island in the North Sound of the British Virgin Islands with no fresh water and no buildings. He was told it was worth £3 million. He offered £175,000, was refused, came back with £180,000, and got it on the condition he develop it within five years or the...

The Peak Tram Has Been Running Since 1888 That specific fact – Victoria Peak’s funicular railway opened in 1888, making it one of the oldest cable railways in Asia – reframes the visit slightly. The steep climb to 552 metres on Hong Kong Island, looking north across Victoria Harbour toward Kowloon, was being done by visitors on the same track when this was still a British colony...

Theresienwiese: Munich’s Biggest Open Field and Two Weeks of Controlled Chaos Oktoberfest began as a horse race. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen in October 1810, the public was invited to watch horse races on the field outside the city gates, and that single event became a tradition that has run for over two centuries, growing into something...

Getting to Haida Gwaii Takes Effort and That Is Precisely the Point The archipelago of around 150 islands sits 130 kilometres off the northern British Columbia coast. Access is by BC Ferries from Prince Rupert (an 8-hour sailing) or by small prop flights from Prince Rupert or Vancouver. Prince Rupert itself is 14 hours by train from Prince George or a flight from Vancouver. None of this is casual....

Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf: Three Things Worth Your Time and Why Everything Else Isn’t Pier 39 is the most visited tourist destination in San Francisco. It is also, at its core, a two-storey shopping mall on stilts over the bay with primarily interchangeable souvenir outlets. Knowing this going in saves you from spending your afternoon there when you should be somewhere else. But...

Checkpoint Charlie: The Site Is Disappointing; the History Is Not Checkpoint Charlie – the Allied crossing point between West and East Berlin at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse – was demolished in June 1990. What stands there now is a replica booth, two actors in Cold War military uniforms offering photos for tips, a commercial souvenir market on the pavement, and the...

The Expressway Tunnel Bypasses One of Southeast Asia’s Better Drives Most bus and train passengers travelling between Danang and Hue take the modern expressway tunnel that cuts through the mountain and deposits them in the next city without ceremony. This is efficient and devoid of the reason to make the trip. The Hai Van Pass road, which climbs over a 496-metre coastal mountain before...

At 3,842 Metres You Are Looking Down at Mont Blanc’s Shoulders Mont Blanc is the highest peak in western Europe at 4,808 metres. Standing on the Aiguille du Midi summit platform, you are 966 metres below the top of it, but you are also surrounded by the mountain in a way that no lower viewpoint provides. The Mer de Glace glacier flows below you to the north. The Italian Alps are visible to...