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The Kingdom of Tonga (also known as the Friendly Islands) is over 170 islands in the South Pacific. The Kingdom of Tonga has a tropical climate and is influenced by the trade winds, with two distinct seasons that affect what you can see and do while ...
Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan kingdom sandwiched between India and China, is one of the most deliberately restricted tourist destinations on Earth. And yet that very restriction is what keeps it pristine, peaceful, and like nothing else in Asia. Here's ...
Unlike much of North Africa, Algeria does not offer visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry for American citizens. You must obtain a visa from an Algerian embassy or consulate before you travel. The process requires planning, patience, and paperwork — but...
General Safety The United States is generally safe for tourists, but like any country, it's important to stay aware of your surroundings and take standard precautions. Emergency Numbers Dial 911 for all emergencies (police, fire, ambulance). Thi...
Singapore defies easy description. It is a city, a country, and an island all at once — a place where a 10-minute taxi ride takes you from a gleaming financial district to a Hindu temple festooned with carved gods to a Chinese opera house to a Mal...
Chile is one of the most geographically extraordinary countries on earth — a sliver 4,300km long and nowhere more than 180km wide, stretching from the driest desert on the planet in the north to the sub-Antarctic wilderness of Patagonia in the so...
Cyprus is the third-largest island in the Mediterranean, located at its eastern end — closer to Beirut than to Athens, closer to Turkey than to Italy, but very much a European Union country with European standards of infrastructure, food, and safe...
Rwanda is a country that demands you update your understanding of Africa. In 1994, it experienced one of the worst genocides in modern history — approximately 800,000 people killed in 100 days. Thirty years later, it is one of the fastest-growing e...
Italy has a well-worn tourist trail: Rome, Venice, Florence, the Amalfi Coast, Cinque Terre. They're famous for a reason, and they're worth seeing. But Italy is a country of 20 regions and thousands of years of layered history. What follows are ei...
In the summer of 1974, Steven Spielberg descended on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts with a mechanical shark and a crew that had no idea they were about to make cinema history. Jaws, released in June 1975, became the first blockbust...
The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and over a mile deep. More than six million people visit Arizona every year to see it — and a surprising number of them show up completely unprepared. Here's everything you need to know to ...
Bhutan is a tiny Buddhist kingdom in the eastern Himalayas, landlocked between India and China, with a population of just 780,000 people. It had no roads until the 1960s, no television until 1999, and deliberately maintained strict controls over tour...
American Samoa is an unincorporated territory of the United States in the South Pacific Ocean, approximately 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii. Its approximately 55,000 residents are US nationals (not citizens by birth, in a legal distinction that co...
Japan is by virtually every measure the most comprehensively designed country in the world for blind and visually impaired navigation. What makes this particularly remarkable is that the infrastructure is not a recent accessibility retrofit — it is a...
The Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, has one of the highest tourist-to-resident ratios of any city in the world. In 2024, roughly 20 million tourists visited a country of 18 million people — and concentrated overwhelmingly in a handful of po...
A decade ago, Croatia was the Adriatic bargain: all the beauty of Dubrovnik at Balkan prices. Since EU accession and the adoption of the euro in January 2023, that era is over — but the story is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Croatia is not...
Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic) has made a deliberate bet against mass tourism: it has no large resorts, no cruise-ship promenade, and no pumped-up party beach. What it has instead is a volcanic island so geologically active...
Moldova is a microstate tucked between Romania and Ukraine, rarely mentioned in travel conversations and frequently confused with other Eastern European countries. It also holds the world record for the largest wine cellar, hosts one of Europe's most...
Dubai has made an industry out of redefining what "luxury" means. In a city with dozens of seven-figure penthouses and floating villas, pinpointing the "most expensive" hotel is genuinely contested — but one name consistently leads every list: the Bu...
Morocco is not the first place most surfing enthusiasts think of — but it absolutely should be. The country's Atlantic coastline stretches for over 1,200 km, receiving powerful, consistent swells from the North Atlantic that produce world-class waves...
Vatican City is the world's smallest internationally recognised state — 44 hectares, 800 permanent residents, and no airport, no railway station open to the public, and no conventional accommodation sector. There are no hotels within the Vatican's wa...
Americans who make it to Serbia almost universally say the same thing afterward: they wish they had gone sooner, and they wish they had stayed longer. This is a country that operates almost entirely outside the standard Western European tourist circu...
Trinidad and Tobago sits at the southernmost end of the Caribbean island chain, just 11 kilometres from the Venezuelan coast. It is a constitutional republic, has been independent since 1962, and is one of the wealthiest nations in the Caribbean — no...
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — SVG to those who visit regularly — is the kind of place that competes for very little mainstream attention and is quietly delighted about it. While the northern Caribbean buzzes with cruise ship terminals and resort...
For most of its post-war history, North Korea operated a tightly controlled but functional tourism industry for foreign visitors. Western tourists travelled primarily through specialist agencies — most famously, the Beijing-based Young Pioneer Tours ...
The annual sakura season is arguably the most famous recurring natural spectacle in the world. For two to three weeks each spring, Japan's cities, rivers, roads, and temple grounds disappear beneath a soft canopy of pale pink and white flowers. The q...
There are places on the American East Coast where you can walk along the ocean and see horses — genuinely wild, unmanaged, government-protected horses — grazing in the dunes, standing belly-deep in the surf, or trotting across the sand with the Atlan...
Germany is a nation of travelers. With a strong passport, generous vacation entitlements, and one of Europe's highest standards of living, Germans collectively take hundreds of millions of trips per year — and the destinations they choose, the amount...
Most people could not find Bihar on a map. This is a significant oversight in world cultural geography, because Bihar is where some of the most important events in Asian and world history took place — and where the physical traces of those events can...
Syria was, before 2011, one of the most underrated travel destinations in the Middle East: a country of extraordinary ancient cities, exceptional food, and some of the most significant historical sites on earth. The civil war that began in 2011 devas...