It is hard to overstate how little rain falls in northern Chile. Wikipedia calls the Atacama Desert the driest non-polar desert in the world and says some weather stations there have never recorded rain. It is also a landscape of salt flats, geysers, red valleys, coastal fog, and some of the clearest night skies on […]
Matara is a busy commercial city on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, about 160 km from Colombo, and it is often treated as a stop on the way to somewhere else. Look closer and it has a Portuguese and Dutch fort, a star-shaped fort, a lighthouse at the island’s southernmost point, a tunnel temple and a […]
Mandvi is a port town on the Kutch coast that has built wooden ships for roughly 400 years, has a golden-brown beach lined with camels and windmills, and keeps a 1929 palace of the Kutch maharajas by the sea. It also sits in the same region as the Great Rann, which is where the topic […]
Vietnam’s festival calendar runs on the lunar calendar, which means the biggest nights land on the full moon. In Hoi An, motorbikes leave the old town, the electric lights go off and silk lanterns and candle floats take over, and in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City entire streets sell lanterns before Mid-Autumn. This guide […]
Once a year, on the full moon of Kartik, the ghats of Varanasi are lit with lamps from one end of the river to the other, and the Ganga aarti is performed at its largest scale. Wikipedia describes it as a festival of lights on the Ganges, associated with Shiva, on which the gods are […]
Most people picture cherry blossoms in spring, but in India the best-known bloom is in autumn. The wild Himalayan cherry turns the hills around Shillong pink in the weeks before winter, while Kashmir’s spring bloom comes in March and April. This guide to the Cherry Blossom Season in India covers five places and their months, […]
Oman rewards people who drive. Roads run from Muscat’s coast to turquoise wadis, from a sea of dunes in the Wahiba Sands to a turtle beach on the Arabian Sea, and up into mountain villages near Nizwa, with a long road south to Salalah for the committed. This guide to the Oman road trip covers […]
Egypt’s calendar runs on three clocks: the Islamic lunar calendar that sets Ramadan and Eid, the Coptic calendar behind Sham el-Nessim, and the sun itself, which lights a temple sanctuary at Abu Simbel on two days a year. Layer on festivals inherited from the pharaohs, and the result is a country where celebration has been […]
Paris is known for tasting menus, but plenty of its tastiest snacks cost around ten euros or less and are eaten standing up, on a bench or beside the Seine. Paris Street Food is a mix of French staples such as the ham-and-butter baguette and the buckwheat crêpe, plus falafel, kebabs and dim sum from […]
Sri Lanka’s ghost stories are layered: colonial bungalows with a lady in a locked room, a waterfall that locals avoid after dark, a Dutch hospital with noises in the attic and an older tradition of spirits and demons that exorcism rituals still address. This guide covers the best-known Haunted places in Sri Lanka: five to […]