Tag: Cultural

Sheki Khan Palace and the Silk Road: Craft, Trade and Caravanserais in Azerbaijan

Long before Baku’s skyline filled with glass towers, the city’s real gateway to the world was a walled quarter of narrow lanes and merchant houses called Icheri Sheher. Our small group tour of the Caucasus opens here, in the old town, before tracing the historic road west to Sheki — once a wealthy staging post […]

Mogami River: River Travel and Basho’s Journey through Mountain Japan

Mogami River: River Travel and Basho’s Journey through Mountain Japan The Mogami River, whose swift current inspired one of Bashō’s most quoted haiku and once carried Edo-period rice to the coast. No stretch of Matsuo Bashō’s northern journey unsettled him quite like the Mogami River. By the time he reached its banks in the summer […]

Iceland Ring Road Itinerary for Mature Travellers: A 17-Day Circumnavigation

Iceland Ring Road Itinerary for Mature Travellers: A 17-Day Circumnavigation Landmannalaugar’s rhyolite mountains and obsidian lava fields, the highland crossing near the end of this 17-day circumnavigation. Iceland does not reward a single detour so much as a full circuit of it. The Ring Road — Route 1, the two-lane highway that traces the coastline […]

Lake Mývatn: Volcanoes, Craters, Birds and the Making of North Iceland

Lake Mývatn: Volcanoes, Craters, Birds and the Making of North Iceland Few places on the tour compress so much of Iceland’s volcanic story into a single afternoon as the basin around Lake Mývatn. Within a few kilometres you can stand on a lava field that was still erupting within living memory, walk between grass-topped pseudo-craters […]

Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum: Humanistic Buddhism in Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum: Humanistic Buddhism in Kaohsiung, Taiwan The Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum campus, set into the hills outside Kaohsiung. South of Taiwan’s ancient river towns and the misted headlands of the east coast lies a valley that Fo Guang Shan built from bedrock and a single conviction. In 1967, a young […]

Raohe Night Market: Ciyou Temple and Street Food in Taipei, Taiwan

Raohe Night Market: Ciyou Temple and Street Food in Taipei, Taiwan By the third evening of a small group journey through Taiwan, most travellers have already stood before the golden roofline of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and walked the porcelain-lined galleries of the National Palace Museum. Then the itinerary turns, quite deliberately, toward something noisier: […]

Victor Hugo in Guernsey: Exile, Hauteville House and Literary Legacy

Victor Hugo in Guernsey: Exile, Hauteville House and Literary Legacy Victor Hugo did not choose Guernsey so much as run out of places that would have him. By the time he stepped off the boat at St Peter Port in October 1855, France, Belgium and Jersey had each, in turn, shown him the door. What […]

Spain and Portugal Tours for Seniors: A Guide to the Journey

Spain and Portugal Small-Group Tour: How a 24-Day Iberian Journey Works The Alhambra and Generalife above Granada, the final stop on the 24-day route from Barcelona. The word Iberia covers two countries that spent centuries defining themselves against each other, and a well-built itinerary treats that tension as the point rather than a logistical inconvenience. […]

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao: A Modern Landmark on a Spain Journey

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao: A Modern Landmark on a Spain Journey Most of the buildings on a Spain and Portugal itinerary are older than the nations that now claim them — Roman theatres, Gothic cathedrals, Moorish palaces built and rebuilt across a thousand years. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is barely three decades old, and that […]

Lake Nasser Cruise: Egypt’s Remote Nubian Temples and History

Lake Nasser Cruise: Egypt’s Remote Nubian Temples and History A Lake Nasser cruise vessel crossing open water, with the desert headlands of Nubia rising on either side. Most travellers who cruise Egypt never see this stretch of the country. Once the boat leaves Aswan behind and the Nile widens into the still, blue expanse of […]

Kom Ombo Temple: Why Egypt’s Double Temple Honours Two Gods

Kom Ombo Temple: Why Egypt’s Double Temple Honours Two Gods Kom Ombo Temple at sunrise, on its rise above the Nile between Edfu and Aswan. Most Egyptian temples were built for one god and one purpose. Kom Ombo, rising on a bend of the Nile between Edfu and Aswan, was built for two. Its architects […]

The Unfinished Obelisk of Aswan: Egypt’s Ancient Granite Quarry

The Unfinished Obelisk of Aswan: Egypt’s Ancient Granite Quarry On the west bank of the Nile at Aswan lies a slab of pink granite more than three thousand years old, still fused to the bedrock it was cut from. Had it been freed and raised, the unfinished obelisk of Aswan would have stood taller than […]

Edfu Temple: Horus, Myth and Egypt’s Best-Preserved Ptolemaic Temple

Edfu Temple: Horus, Myth and Egypt’s Best-Preserved Ptolemaic Temple For nearly two thousand years, Edfu Temple lay buried under drifting Nile sand, its roofline barely visible above the mudbrick village that grew up around it. That accident of neglect is precisely why it survives today as the most completely preserved cult temple in Egypt, its […]

Deir el-Medina: The Artisans’ Village of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings

Deir el-Medina: The Artisans’ Village of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings Deir el-Medina sits in a shallow desert hollow on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor, a short walk from the tombs its residents spent their working lives carving and painting. For roughly 450 years during Egypt’s New Kingdom, this walled village housed […]

National Museum of Egyptian Civilization: Cairo’s Royal Mummies, Egypt

National Museum of Egyptian Civilization: Cairo’s Royal Mummies, Egypt Cairo has no shortage of extraordinary museums, but the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization takes a different approach from its famous neighbours. Rather than concentrating on a single dynasty or discovery, it lays out the whole arc of Egyptian civilization in chronological order, from prehistoric settlements […]

Aspendos Theatre: Rome’s Best-Preserved Stage in Turkey

Aspendos Theatre: Rome’s Best-Preserved Stage in Turkey Most Roman theatres survive as suggestions of themselves — a curved wall here, a few tiers of seating there, the rest carried off for building stone centuries ago. Aspendos theatre is the exception. Rising intact from the plain of ancient Pamphylia on Turkey’s southern coast, it is widely […]

Aphrodisias, Turkey: The City of Sculptors and the Goddess of Love

Aphrodisias, Turkey: The City of Sculptors and the Goddess of Love The reconstructed Tetrapylon gateway, marking the ceremonial approach to the Temple of Aphrodite. Long before marble became a byword for European sculpture, the workshops of Aphrodisias were shipping finished statues across the Roman world. The city sat on a seam of fine-grained white and […]

Konya, Turkey: The Whirling Dervishes and Legacy of Rumi

Konya, Turkey: The Whirling Dervishes and Legacy of Rumi Long before Konya became a stop on the modern traveller’s map, it was the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and the adopted home of a Persian scholar named Jalal ad-Din Rumi. It was here, in the 13th century, that Rumi wrote the poetry that […]

Yazılıkaya and the Hittite Gods: Hattusa’s Rock Sanctuary, Turkey

Yazılıkaya and the Hittite Gods: Hattusa’s Rock Sanctuary, Turkey The open-air rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, set in the Anatolian landscape near Hattusa. A short walk from the fortified capital of Hattusa in central Turkey, a natural cleft in the limestone opens onto one of the most unusual religious sites to survive from the Bronze Age […]

Scotland Island Hopping: A 20-Day Route from Arran to Shetland

Scotland Island Hopping: A 20-Day Route from Arran to Shetland Island hopping across the Scottish Isles, where ferries link seven islands into a single 20-day route. Scotland island hopping sounds straightforward until you look closely at a map of the west coast and start counting ferry terminals. Nearly 800 islands fringe the country’s western and […]

Ajaccio, Corsica, France: Napoleon’s Birthplace and Legacy

Ajaccio, Corsica, France: Napoleon’s Birthplace and Legacy Ajaccio’s old town peninsula, Corsica Ajaccio sits on a wide, sheltered bay on Corsica’s west coast, its ochre and cream buildings rising above a harbour still busy with fishing boats and ferries. It is Corsica’s capital, but it is best known to the wider world as the birthplace […]