In the past week, it was all over the news that the DRC government has opened parts of Virunga WHS up (again) for oil and gas exploration. Simultaneously, I was prepping for my upcoming Chad trip and discovered that the Ennedi nomination had been significantly reduced in size to carve out an area for oil exploration just before nomination (much to the frustration of ICOMOS and IUCN). Surprisingly, in our ‘ Damaged ’ series of connections, we did not have a connection yet for World Heritage Sites Threatened by Oil and Gas Exploration (though we have Oil Spill ). So I decided to create one.

A structured approach to finding these sites proved to be difficult. A search for “oil” on the UNESCO website brought me to 47 sites with “Soil” and similar words in their description. You’d want to do a full-text search on all documents, not only on the website text, but this feature is not available. A query through our “News Links” brought in a few more, as did a search in the State of Conservation (SOC) and IUCN outlook reports. None of the sites seemed to have been put in danger from …

Jonathanfr asked a while ago on the Forum whether we could have a Connection called “Perfect inscriptions”. 'Perfect' meaning: a recommendation of inscription by the advisory body, then inscribed at the first attempt . I was afraid sites like this would be too common to justify a connection, but as we have all the data anyway (thanks to crawling through all available official documentation in the past by some community members) I crafted a query for it to see what the outcome would be.

The process

I queried our database on the data displayed on the site pages under “Site History”. To determine perfect status, I excluded sites that have either been Referred, Deferred, Rejected or got an Advisory Body Overruled in their history before Inscription. I did so too with sites that got a Conditional inscription, sites where an Incomplete dossier has been submitted and sites where the State Party had requested it to not be Examined (often a move to avert a negative conclusion).

I ended up with 790 of the current WHS where the nomination process can be seen as Perfect. That’s 68% of them all! The list includes major sites such as Machu …

While prepping for my upcoming trip to Greece, I updated the connections of the WHS I am about to visit as I always do. Common among the Greek WHS is a connection called Byzantine Empire and Civilization . At 57 sites, it’s long and most entries didn’t have an explanation. I added them and started wondering about what ‘Byzantine’ really means. It’s a term that is easily used, I think we all have an image in our mind of what Byzantine architecture (domed churches) or Byzantine mosaics and murals (lots of gold) look like. But which are the best and most typical examples?

Political Byzantine

The Byzantine Empire spanned about 11 centuries, governing constantly changing parts of South Eastern Europe and the Levant from Constantinople. So several WHS that derive their OUV from a different culture, ended up being part of the Byzantine Empire at some time. The Byzantines didn’t have much influence here. However, they might still be named in overhyped statements like “ruled successively by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and the Order of the Knights of St John”. Examples are Damascus (Umayyad), Ani (Armenian), and Valletta (Crusader Knights).

Byzantine …

Personally, I spend much more time behind my laptop than on my phone, but I know that for many others it’s the other way around. I like apps that are very practical: maps.me (offline and very good at hiking trails), whatsapp, uber, even the flashlight! Another good use of an app can be to track where you’ve just been or what you’ve just seen (think of birding apps!). The list of WHS at 1154 items is long enough to warrant a tool that helps you to keep your records. We’ve discussed this subject before in a Forum post , but I think it’s time for an updated look at which apps exist that track your WHS count.

Which apps are available?

I found the following specialist apps:

• World Heritage – UNESCO List
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites
• World Heritage Collect
• World Heritage Sites Guide by Tripbucket
• My World Heritage Passport

In addition to these, generic country tracking apps exist. Of those, Nomadmania and VoyageX Pro also allow you to keep track of your visited WHS. Apps like Pin Traveler …

When you look at the Canadian WHS map , there is what looks like a convenient cluster of 10 WHS in the East. These were the goal of my June 2022 road trip. It took me 24 days and 8,679 km of driving across three time zones to cover them all. 11 community members did this before me, however probably not all within one trip. You can find my day-to-day itinerary here on the Forum . I had been to Western Canada before and found the East more varied and more liveable. Please find below my Top Tips for Travelling to Eastern Canada as a WH Traveller.

1. You cannot wing it

At least not when you want to be sure to see all WHS within a fixed amount of time. Especially now, when travel is just restarting after Covid, some resources are scarce. Newfoundland has a notorious shortage of rental cars, for example; I circumvented that issue by driving up from Montreal and booking the car 8 months beforehand. For the WHS locations that require a tour, I also reserved weeks before - although not all were fully booked when I got there. The …

I did not ‘engineer’ my 800th visited World Heritage Site: my Canadian itinerary was already set before I decided to go to Tunisia first. With no ‘misses’ in between, the Red Bay Basque Whaling Station became my #800. The place does not sound as exciting as Okavango and Uluru for example, which were my #700 and #400 respectively. But in the end, I was happy with it as I found it an enjoyable site in a rather remote location.

If you look up on a map where this is located, you will see how remote and isolated it is. Labrador's first "big" town - with the beautiful name Happy Valley Goose Bay - has only 8,000 inhabitants and is 550 km away. Fortunately, Labrador is part of the province of Newfoundland & Labrador, so the province subsidizes a ferry that runs daily between the tip of Newfoundland (near L'Anse aux Meadows ) and Blanc Sablon (an hour south of Red Bay). Ideal for the WH traveller.

I was a bit concerned about this ferry beforehand: it gets very bad reviews, the company has a terrible website and you can only reserve by phone. On the …

Along with Red Bay in Labrador, Mistaken Point is the hardest-to-reach World Heritage Site of the 10 in Eastern Canada. Located in the far southeastern corner of the island of Newfoundland, it can only be visited with a prearranged tour. I reserved 4 weeks in advance by e-mail and was given a choice between two time slots on my preferred day. Fortunately, the tours rarely get cancelled ("about 5 times a year") as bad weather does not deter the Newfoundlanders, they are only called off when the waves are so high that they cover the fossils or it gets dangerous. The day before the visit, I drove from Deer Lake in the West to St. John's, the largest city in the East (which takes 6.5 hours). Then it's a further 2 hours to the South via the “Irish Loop”, a coastal road across the Avalon Peninsula past many villages of Irish origin.

12 people showed up for the 10.30 a.m. tour, all Canadians except me. We were then invited to follow our guides by car in convoy towards the starting point of the trail towards the fossils. Do they do it this way to discourage illegal …

Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park isn’t very well-known and doesn’t receive as many visitors - both among the general population and within our community - as comparable parks in the USA such as Olympic NP. When I visited in mid-June, there were usually only one or two cars at the viewpoints and trailheads parking lots. In 2018, it saw about 39,000 visitors. By comparison, Olympic NP counted 2.72 million….

The park has a large variety of landscapes, ranging from glaciers and fjords to freshwater lakes, tuckamore forest and coastal cliffs. I spent 2.5 days there: driving around while enjoying the views, hiking some of the trails, and doing the Western Brook Pond boat tour. From a logistical view, the park has a northern and a southern zone, separated by Bonne Bay. During my preparations, I enjoyed the lovingly detailed guidebook ‘Gros Morne National Park’ by Michael Burzynski.

In the southern zone, I did the Tablelands hike and the Green Gardens hike. Driving up there, Tablelands draws the attention right away: it’s a barren, brown mountain range among the surrounding forested ones. It looked stunning with the still remaining bits of snow and ice on its …

I like reading mammal-watching trip reports and even sometimes the birding reports at Cloudbirders , although for the latter I still fail to see the fun in just going somewhere and ticking off large numbers of 'subjects' in one morning. Via one of those reports, I discovered that the iconic Mountain Gorilla isn’t critically endangered anymore. That made me have a second look at our connection Critically endangered fauna species , which hadn’t been updated much since 2010. I now did so, using the latest data from IUCN which can be found on their ‘Red List’ website .

Positive changes

A critically endangered species according to IUCN is “facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild”. It is the highest at-risk status, just prior to “Extinct in the wild” and “Extinct”. 3,714 fauna species are currently on that list.

It turned out that a lot of species that we had in our connection are not critically endangered anymore. They include the Leatherback Sea Turtle, which can be found in Malpelo, Rio Platano, Guanacaste Sian Kaan, etc. The fates of the Blue Crane, Black-bearded Saki, Cone-billed Tanager, Mediterranean monk seal, Iberian Lynx, Kittlitz’s …

Remember that stunning photo of Burkhan Khaldun ? Or that first review of Thimlich Ohinga ? They were made by Michael Ayers , who has just finished his second world tour on a bicycle. A trip that took place between 2019 and 2022, where he visited 124 new Sites, bringing his total to over 300. For a total of 1,121 days, he visited one WHS every 8.6 days. Discounting the 317 days being inactive for Covid procedures, general travel disruptions, or convalescence, it was more like one every 6.2 days. He’s also a keen birder and managed to add 1,152 new species to his worldwide Life List. Meet Michael below, while he shares his experiences as a WH Traveller on a bicycle.

How do you decide on the itinerary for such a long tour?

I have always been a cartophile, and have continuously studied geography as a hobby, so for me working out the itinerary is almost as enjoyable as the travel itself. I have happily spent many hours looking at maps, deciding which parts of the world would be most compelling to visit. Technology has, of course, had an effect on that process, and …