Necker Island: Richard Branson’s Private Paradise in the BVI Necker Island is a 74-acre private island in the North Sound of the British Virgin Islands, owned by Richard Branson since 1978 (he bought it for £180,000; it was reportedly worth significantly more the moment he improved it). It’s one of the most well-known private island rentals in the world, partly due to Branson’s...

Marina Bay Sands: The Infinity Pool, the SkyPark, and What It Takes to Access Them The Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore consists of three 55-storey towers connected at the top by the SkyPark, a curved platform 340 metres long and 57 floors above street level. The infinity pool - 150 metres long, extending beyond the building’s edge with a view over Marina Bay toward the central business...

Tikal: Maya City in the Petén Jungle Tikal was one of the most powerful cities in the Classic Maya world, with a population estimated at 60,000-90,000 at its peak around 800 CE. The city covers about 30 square kilometres of mapped archaeological structures, of which about 16 square kilometres have been excavated. The surrounding national park is 576 square kilometres of intact tropical lowland...

Venezuela’s Tepuis: What Arthur Conan Doyle Couldn’t Have Known When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World in 1912, he based it loosely on reports of Venezuela’s tepuis: ancient sandstone table mountains rising sheer from the jungle, their summits so isolated that they evolved separate ecosystems. He got the atmosphere right. What he couldn’t have anticipated is what they...

Lake Baikal: The World’s Deepest Lake Lake Baikal in Siberia holds about 23% of the world’s fresh surface water. It is 636km long, up to 79km wide, and 1,642m deep at its deepest point. The lake is also ancient - 25 to 30 million years old, old enough to have evolved roughly 1,700 species found nowhere else on earth, including the Baikal seal (nerpa), the world’s only exclusively...

The Great Sphinx of Giza The Great Sphinx is the largest monumental sculpture in the ancient world: 73 metres long, 20 metres high, and carved from a single outcrop of bedrock limestone on the Giza Plateau. The face, roughly 5 metres wide, likely depicts Pharaoh Khafre, who built the middle of the three major Giza pyramids around 2530 BCE. That attribution is accepted by most Egyptologists but is...

Ellis Island: The Numbers Behind the Museum Between 1892 and 1954, approximately 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island. At the operation’s peak in 1907, 11,747 people were processed in a single day. The island’s main building - the Registry Room, or Great Hall - was where arrivals were herded, questioned, and medically inspected in what was often a...

Portmeirion: An Italianate Fantasy on the Welsh Coast Clough Williams-Ellis spent 50 years building Portmeirion. He started in 1925, bought a rocky coastal headland in north Wales, and proceeded to construct an entirely fictional Italian village on it. He used salvaged architectural elements from buildings being demolished elsewhere in Britain — columns, doorways, colonnades — and combined them...

Karnak Temple: The Largest Religious Complex Ever Built Karnak is not a single temple. It is a 200-acre complex of temples, chapels, pylons, and processional avenues that was built and expanded over roughly 2,000 years - from around 2055 BCE well into the Ptolemaic period. Pharaohs added to it competitively, each wanting to outbuild their predecessors. The result is the largest ancient religious...

Stellenbosch: South Africa’s Most Important Wine Region Stellenbosch is 50km east of Cape Town on the lower slopes of the Hottentots Holland mountains, and has been producing wine since 1679 when the Dutch East India Company established it as a refreshment stop for ships rounding the Cape. It now has around 150 wine estates producing the range of varietals that do well in the Cape climate:...

Kashgar’s Sunday Market: Context First Kashgar in Xinjiang, western China, is at the eastern end of the ancient Silk Road, a former oasis city 4,000km from Beijing where Central Asian, South Asian, and East Asian trade routes historically converged. The Sunday Market (also called the Central Asian International Grand Bazaar or Yekshenba Bazari) has been held here for at least 2,000 years and...

Phong Nha-Ke Bang: The World’s Largest Cave System, Practically Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park in Quang Binh province, central Vietnam, contains more than 300 mapped caves in a 123,000-hectare block of Annamite limestone karst. The caves formed over 400 million years - among the oldest karst in Asia. Three of them are large enough to have their own weather systems. Son Doong, surveyed in...

San Diego: More Than Just Good Weather San Diego gets oversold as a beach town and undersold as a genuinely interesting city. Yes, the sun is reliable (320+ days a year, roughly). But the beaches themselves vary wildly in character, the food scene has real depth, and the neighborhoods feel distinct enough to reward a longer stay. Where to Go Balboa Park is the obvious starting point and deserves a...

Château de Chenonceau: The Loire’s Most Dramatic Castle Chenonceau is the one where the château spans an actual river. The castle’s five-arched bridge crosses the Cher, and the two-storey gallery built above it in 1576 runs 60 metres across the water. From the approach along the tree-lined road, the whole composition — French formal garden on the left, Diana de Poitiers’ garden...

The Mezquita: What Happens When a Cathedral Grows Inside a Mosque The Mezquita-Catedral of Cordoba is architecturally confusing in the best possible way. The original mosque, begun in 784 CE by Abd al-Rahman I, was expanded four times over the following two centuries until it covered 23,000 square metres and could accommodate 25,000 worshippers. When Ferdinand III reconquered Cordoba in 1236, he...

The Meeting of the Waters, Manaus About 10km east of Manaus, the dark, tannin-stained waters of the Rio Negro collide with the sandy brown Rio Solimões and spend roughly 6km refusing to mix. The two rivers run side by side with a visible seam between them before eventually merging into the Amazon proper. The phenomenon is real, not a promotional exaggeration, and it holds up to scrutiny. The...

Isle of Skye: Which Parts Are Worth the Drive Skye is a large island - 50 miles long - connected to the Scottish mainland by bridge at Kyle of Lochalsh. It has enough distinct landscape zones that a single visit struggles to cover them, and enough minor roads that navigation without a detailed map or offline GPS causes problems. Three days is a reasonable minimum. A week is not excessive if you...

South Georgia: Possibly the Most Spectacular Place You’ll Never Easily Reach There is no airport on South Georgia. No hotels. No restaurants. Getting here means booking an expedition cruise from Ushuaia or Stanley, paying somewhere in the range of $10,000–$20,000 USD for the privilege, and then spending two to three days crossing the Drake Passage. Most people will never go. That said, it is...

Into the Borneo Rainforest Borneo is the world’s third-largest island, divided between Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei, and its interior rainforest is one of the oldest on the planet - estimates put it at around 140 million years. That age shows in the sheer density and strangeness of the life here: pygmy elephants, proboscis monkeys, sun bears, eight species of hornbill, and the critically...

Mont Saint-Michel: Dealing With Three Million Annual Visitors Mont Saint-Michel receives around 3 million visitors a year. The island’s permanent population is 42 people. That ratio shapes the experience considerably. The abbey on the rock is genuinely extraordinary. A Benedictine monastery has existed here since 966 AD, rebuilt in stages through the 11th to 16th centuries, damaged during...

Delhi: How to See the City Without Being Overwhelmed Delhi is effectively eight cities layered on top of each other. Archaeologists have identified seven historical cities on the same site, and then there is the New Delhi that Lutyens built for the British after 1911. The result is sprawling, chaotic, and genuinely extraordinary. First-timers should allow five days minimum and accept that they...

Valle de la Luna: San Pedro’s Most Dramatic Landscape Valle de la Luna is 15km from San Pedro de Atacama and gets its name honestly. The landscape is pale, eroded, almost entirely devoid of vegetation, and utterly unlike anything else in Chile. Wind and water have carved the salt and clay into ridges, dunes, and strange circular formations over millions of years. On a clear evening — which...

Jasper National Park: The Quieter Side of the Canadian Rockies Jasper National Park covers 11,000 square kilometres in the Alberta Rockies, about twice the size of Banff National Park to its south. They share the Icefields Parkway, a 230km road that connects the two towns and passes the Columbia Icefield midway. Most Rockies visitors do Banff. Jasper, two hours further north, has the same...

La Paz: Bolivia’s Canyon City La Paz sits in a canyon carved into the Bolivian Altiplano at around 3,600 metres, ringed by the satellite city of El Alto at 4,000 metres on the rim above. The combination of altitude, dramatic topography, and the mix of colonial and Aymara architecture makes the city immediately disorienting in a good way. The bowl shape means most of the city is visible from...

Waitomo Glowworm Caves: Worth the Hype or Not? The short answer: yes, but only the boat section, and only if you’re willing to pay to do it properly. The Waitomo Caves complex sits in the King Country region of New Zealand’s North Island, around 80km south of Hamilton and 200km from Auckland. Three caves form the main attraction: Waitomo (the original, opened to tourists in 1889),...

Step Back in Time at Bodiam Castle: A Medieval Jewel in the Sussex Countryside Few castles in England stop visitors in their tracks quite like Bodiam. Rising from its wide, still moat in the East Sussex Weald, the fortress presents an almost perfectly symmetrical silhouette of towers and battlements that looks lifted from an illuminated manuscript. Built between 1385 and 1390, it has stood largely...

Isle of Man: What the TT Doesn’t Tell You The Isle of Man sits in the Irish Sea between Britain and Ireland, 33 miles long and 13 miles wide at most. It is a Crown Dependency - not part of the United Kingdom and not part of the EU - with its own parliament (Tynwald, established around 979 CE and one of the oldest continuous parliamentary institutions in the world), its own currency (accepted...

The Zócalo: Mexico City’s Central Square The Plaza de la Constitución, universally called the Zócalo, is one of the largest public squares in the world at about 57,600 square metres. It is also one of the oldest continuously occupied civic spaces in the Americas: the Aztec ceremonial centre of Tenochtitlan was here before the Spanish arrived and demolished it to build their colonial city...

Zhangjiajie: The Sandstone Pillars of Hunan Zhangjiajie National Forest Park is the reason most people make it to this corner of Hunan province. The park protects over 3,000 quartzite sandstone columns, many of them more than 200 metres tall, covered in vegetation and often in cloud. The Avatar comparison is inescapable at this point - the film team visited in 2008 and one pillar was officially...

Petra: How to See It Properly Petra, the ancient Nabataean city carved from rose-coloured sandstone in southern Jordan, is extraordinary. The Treasury facade is about 30 metres tall and 25 metres wide; the columns, frieze, and urn at the top are carved directly into the cliff face. The workmanship is remarkable for any era, and it dates from around the 1st century CE. What undermines the...

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 past the point of interest. 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 requires three days...

Conwy Castle: Edward I’s Welsh Campaign in Stone Conwy Castle was built between 1283 and 1289 at the command of Edward I of England, who used it as part of his military strategy to control northern Wales following his conquest of the Welsh princes. The architect was James of St George, a Savoyard master builder who designed multiple castles for Edward in Wales and Gascony. The Conwy...

Cotopaxi: The Active Volcano You Can Drive To Cotopaxi is one of the highest active volcanoes in the world at 5,897 metres and one of the few you can get reasonably close to without technical mountaineering. The summit glaciers make it photogenic from the surrounding páramo, and on a clear day it’s visible from Quito, 60km north, with what might be the cleanest snow cone shape of any large...

The Lake District: Where to Go and What to Skip The Lake District National Park is 2,362 square kilometres of Cumbrian hills, tarns, and lake valleys in northwest England, designated a World Heritage Site in 2017. In peak summer it is one of the most visited places in England. The roads around Windermere on a July Saturday are borderline gridlocked, parking in Ambleside requires patience and cash,...

Tiger Leaping Gorge: The Hike That Makes You Forget About Everything Else Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the deepest gorges on earth. The Yangtze River drops through a gap between Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain, with vertical relief of around 3,900 metres from river to summit. From the trail, you are looking up at snow-capped peaks and down at whitewater rapids that would kill...

Lucerne and the Chapel Bridge: Getting Past the Postcard Lucerne’s Kapellbrücke appears on roughly 40% of all photographs taken in Switzerland. That’s an estimate, but it doesn’t feel far off. The wooden covered bridge crosses the Reuss River diagonally and dates to 1333, making it one of the oldest timber bridges in Europe. It burned in 1993 (a tourist’s cigarette,...

Villa d’Este, Tivoli: The Fountain Garden That Set the Renaissance Standard Villa d’Este in Tivoli was created by Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este between 1550 and 1572 on the site of a Benedictine monastery. Pirro Ligorio designed both the villa’s frescoed interior and the terraced garden that steps down the hillside below it. The gardens contain 51 fountains, 364 water jets,...

Melk: The Abbey That Justifies the Detour Melk is a small town on the Danube about 85km west of Vienna. You’d drive through it without a second thought if Stift Melk — the Benedictine abbey looming on a cliff above the river — wasn’t one of the most extraordinary pieces of Baroque architecture in Europe. The abbey dominates everything. It’s visible from miles down the river, and...

Mumbai: Getting Past the Postcard Mumbai is both easier and harder than first-timers expect. Easier because the city has a workable infrastructure and most people in service roles speak English. Harder because it is genuinely enormous - roughly 20 million people spread across a narrow peninsula and spilling north into suburbs - and the contrasts (sleek office towers 200 metres from Dharavi’s...

EPCOT: The Theme Park That’s Actually Two Different Parks EPCOT opened in October 1982 as Walt Disney’s original vision of a permanent world’s fair — part futurism showcase, part international cultural village. It has drifted from that vision over the decades, adding thrill rides and IP-driven attractions while retaining the World Showcase component. The result is a park...

Parc Guell: What It Is, What It Costs, and What Most People Miss Parc Guell was conceived by Eusebi Guell in 1900 as a residential development on the Carmel hill above Barcelona, designed throughout by Antoni Gaudi. The development failed commercially - only two of the planned 60 houses were ever built - and Guell’s family donated the site to the city in 1926. It became a public park and was...

The Jungfrau Region: What It Costs and What You Actually Get The Jungfrau region covers a roughly triangular area in the Bernese Oberland, with Interlaken at the base and the three peaks of the Eiger (3,967m), Mönch (4,107m), and Jungfrau (4,158m) at the top. The region has some of the most developed mountain tourism infrastructure in the Alps — which means efficient access but also prices to...

Swarovski Kristallwelten: Crystal Theme Park in the Tyrol Swarovski Kristallwelten (Crystal Worlds) in Wattens is a curiosity: a publicly accessible attraction funded and run by a private crystal manufacturing company as both a museum and a marketing exercise. Daniel Swarovski founded his crystal cutting factory in Wattens in 1895, partly because the Inn River provided cheap hydroelectric power...

Amsterdam’s Canals: A Practical Guide to Actually Enjoying Them The canal ring (Grachtengordel) was dug mostly between 1613 and 1663, when Amsterdam was the wealthiest trading city in the world. Four main canals run in concentric semicircles from the IJ waterfront: Herengracht (Gentlemen’s Canal), Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal), Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal), and...

Kolkata: British India’s Former Capital Kolkata was the capital of British India until 1911, when the imperial government moved to Delhi partly to escape the Bengali political scene, which was by that point more trouble than the British were comfortable managing. The city left behind some of the most ambitious colonial architecture in Asia, a deeply literary culture, an obsession with...

Ishak Pasha Palace: The Furthest Ottoman Outpost Ishak Pasha Sarayi sits on a rocky outcrop at 1,970 metres above sea level near Doğubayazıt in far eastern Turkey, about 20km from the Iranian border and in sight of Mount Ararat (5,137 metres). Construction began in 1685 under Çolak Abdi Pasha and was completed around 1784 by his grandson Ishak Pasha, making the palace complex a multi-generational...

Komodo Island: Dragons, Diving, and Pink Sand The Komodo dragon has been doing just fine for millions of years, and it will have absolutely no problem making you feel like you are the smaller animal. Adults reach up to three metres and can sprint at 20km/h over short distances. The park rangers carry a forked stick, not a gun, which should calibrate your expectations. Keep up with the guide, do...

Flanders Fields: Why You Should Visit the Western Front The Western Front stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss border, and the section through Belgian Flanders saw some of the most sustained fighting of the First World War. Around Ypres (Flemish: Ieper), British and Commonwealth forces held a small salient in Belgian territory for four years. The cost was approximately half a million...

Petronas Towers: More Than a Skyline Photo The Petronas Twin Towers held the title of world’s tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004, when Taipei 101 surpassed them. At 452 metres including the spires, they are still the tallest twin towers in the world and the defining feature of Kuala Lumpur’s skyline. They were designed by Argentine-American architect Cesar Pelli and built by two...

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 in 1959 and...