India’s most photogenic heritage sites tend to share one thing in common: a level of geometric precision that photographs almost as well from a phone as it does from a tripod. A stepwell cut 20-30 metres into the earth in a perfect inverted pyramid, a palace facade built from 953 individual windows, a mausoleum whose […]
Ukrainian food is built around a handful of ideas that show up in dish after dish: beetroot cooked low and slow, dough boiled rather than baked, and pork fat treated as seriously as any cut of meat. In 2022, UNESCO placed the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in […]
Festivals in Hungary range from a week-long takeover of an entire Danube island to a psytrance gathering deep in rural Tolna county that its own organizers describe as an “ecological Tomorrowland.” Hungary punches well above its size on the European festival circuit, and while Budapest hosts the biggest names, some of the country’s most distinctive […]
The Buddhist circuit in India links the places where the four defining events of the Buddha’s life happened — birth, enlightenment, first sermon, and death — along with the university and mountain retreats where his teachings were studied and expanded for centuries afterward. Most of these sites sit within a few hundred kilometers of each […]
Places to visit in Kumbhalgarh are dominated by one structure: a fort wall that runs for 36 km along the ridgeline of the Aravallis, wide enough in places to let eight horses ride abreast, and long enough to rank as the second-longest continuous wall in the world after the Great Wall of China. Built by […]
The Tadiandamol trek climbs to the highest point in Kodagu district, a grassy summit inside the Brahmagiri Wildlife Sanctuary that most sources place at 1,748 meters (5,735 feet), though a few list it slightly lower at 1,746 meters—either way, it’s the tallest thing around for a long stretch of the Western Ghats. The route starts […]
The Ganpati festival in Mumbai turns the entire city into one continuous procession for ten days every year, as lakhs of clay idols move from home altars and neighbourhood pandals toward the Arabian Sea. What began as a scattered set of private household rituals became, in 1893, a deliberately public spectacle — and more than […]
Places to visit in Madurai tend to start and end with one building: a temple complex so large it has its own postal code’s worth of gopurams, corridors, and tanks, in a city Tamil tradition holds was planned around drops of nectar (“madhu”) that fell from Shiva’s hair. Madurai is one of the oldest continuously […]
Places to visit in Vijayawada sit almost entirely along or near a single river: the Krishna, which the city straddles with a hilltop goddess temple on one bank, a 1,223-meter barrage holding it back, and a 133-acre island sitting in the middle of it. Vijayawada rarely makes it onto a first-time India itinerary, but between […]
Beautiful Train Journeys in India run through a stranger range of engineering than almost any other rail network on earth: narrow-gauge toy trains climbing 2,258 metres on zigzags carved in 1881, a bridge standing 35 metres taller than the Eiffel Tower, and a vertical-lift sea crossing that replaced a century-old bridge too corroded to carry […]