Delhi’s weekend travellers have a particular fantasy: sleep inside a real fort, wake up to ramparts and peacocks, and be home by Sunday night. It is more achievable than most people expect, because the countryside around the capital is dotted with old Rajput and Jat strongholds that have been restored as hotels. This guide ranks, […]
Most visitors to West Bengal think of Kolkata, the Sundarbans or Darjeeling. Far fewer know that in Bankura district, a few hours from Kolkata, stands a town whose red-brown Bishnupur temples are covered in carved clay panels depicting the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the life of Krishna. Built by the Vaishnava Malla kings in the […]
Most travelers heading through Punjab have Amritsar’s Golden Temple on the itinerary and treat Jalandhar as a rail junction on the way. That undersells it. This is a city whose name traces back to a Puranic demon king, whose region was once known as Trigarta, and which served as Punjab’s provisional capital after 1947—and today […]
Uttarakhand holds some of the most varied trekking in India: alpine meadows that flower for a few weeks each monsoon, frozen lakes in January, a 5,900-metre glacier pass, and weekend ridge walks within a few hours of Dehradun. The best treks in Uttarakhand range from two-day beginner outings to nine-day expeditions, and the right pick […]
Jordan is one of the easiest countries in the Middle East to drive: right-hand traffic, well-kept highways, free parking almost everywhere, and a headline route that links a Nabataean rock city, a red-sand desert, and the lowest point on land in under a week. A Jordan road trip also solves the country’s main logistics problem, […]
Everyone who visits Istanbul sees the Blue Mosque — it’s hard not to, given it faces Hagia Sophia across the same square and anchors nearly every tourist photo of the skyline. But a proper Istanbul mosque tour goes further: the city has more than 3,000 mosques, and a handful of them are genuinely overlooked. Yet […]
Rome has been feeding people for roughly 2,800 years, and remarkably, you can still trace a line from what wealthy Romans ate reclining at a banquet under Augustus to what’s on the menu at a trattoria near the Pantheon tonight. Roman dining today means a short, fiercely defended list of pasta dishes built on pork […]
Estonia packs an unusual range into its festival calendar for a country of just 1.3 million people: a midsummer bonfire tradition old enough to have pagan roots, a Soviet-era film festival that’s grown into Northern Europe’s biggest, and a choral event so large that organizers have had to cap ticket sales for safety. The Festivals […]
Most treks near Mumbai and Pune climb toward a fort or a peak. The sandhan valley trek goes the other way — down into a narrow, water-carved canyon in the Sahyadris so deep and tight that direct sunlight barely reaches its floor, earning it the name “Valley of Shadows” and, in countless trekking blogs, a […]
Phnom Penh doesn’t ease you in. Within a few blocks of each other sit a gilded royal palace, a riverside promenade lined with French colonial buildings, a sprawling market under a 1930s Art Deco dome, and a former high school turned torture prison that’s now a memorial to one of the 20th century’s worst atrocities. […]