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 […]
Places to visit in Diu include over four centuries of Portuguese rule, a 1971 naval tragedy, and a cave system carved out to build a fort — all onto an island small enough to cover in a single well-planned day. Diu was under Portuguese control for 400 years before India’s Operation Vijay ended it in […]
Street Food in Phuket tells a different story from the rest of Thailand’s coastline: this is an island shaped by 19th-century Chinese tin miners who married local Thai women and built a cuisine out of it, not just another beach town serving pad thai to tourists. Walk down Thalang Road in Phuket Old Town on […]
Festivals in Hong Kong range from a 300-person dragon made of burning incense sticks to a bamboo tower stacked with 9,000 steamed buns that people race to climb. This is a city that keeps its older rituals — plague-warding parades, harvest lanterns, dragon boat races tied to a 2,000-year-old poet’s death — running alongside a […]