I had always been hesitant about going to Tunisia , it seemed boring and geared to package holidays for the masses, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I had expected. What it lacks in originality (I would be hard-pressed to name anything typical Tunisian), it makes up for it by just delivering it all well at a relatively low cost. I visited all of its 8 current WHS within a week, at an average all-inclusive cost of 117 EUR per WHS. Please find below my Top Tips for Travelling to Tunisia as a WH Traveller.

1. A little bit of French goes a long way

My French isn’t good, but right when I started using it in my interactions with the Tunisians I was taken by the friendliness of random shop owners, ticket sellers, and restaurant staff. People are much less comfortable in English and will look at you as if you’re from another universe. In French, they will make small-talk and smother you in helpful directions.

2. Louages are the way to go

The louage is Tunisia’s gift to the world’s public transport. It’s an improved version of the marshrutka …

I visited Kairouan on a half-day trip from Sousse by louage , the typical Tunisian minibus share taxi. The 60km distance is easily covered within an hour and a ticket costs only 5 Tunisian dinars (1.70 EUR). It was a scorching day, but still I managed to see all of Kairouan’s significant sights on foot – I walked the streets for 10km in total. With about 140,000 inhabitants, it is a fairly large city, located in a semi-arid region. Fortunately, there are many mini-markets where you can stop for a cool drink.

I started at the Aghlabid Basins, 1 of the 3 locations that make up this WHS. This is already quite a trek from the louage station. The Basins, large water reservoirs from the 9th century, were built outside the city walls and are fed by an aqueduct. I entered from the side, where the gate was open; the official entrance wasn’t and there were no tickets checked or sold. Local boys were using the reservoirs for swimming, although with plastic garbage floating in them this didn't look inviting. Still, I found the monumentality of the reservoirs quite impressive – the largest is 128m in …

Carthage may not be Tunisia’s grandest attraction anymore, its rich and powerful empire by far superseded the importance of the country it currently is part of. Unfortunately, not a lot is known about the cultural history of the Carthaginians – most books focus on the military history and their battles with the Romans (using sources written by Romans). You'll know enough if you listen to only one podcast on that subject. At an exhibition on Punic Carthage that I visited in Leiden in 2015, I found more to my taste (those white and blue glazed pendants !). The accompanying book, “Carthage: fact and myth”, still is the best one I could find as it covers a range of topics including the Punic writing system, the relationship with the Numidians, and its influence on European art.

I choose to do a half-day tour with Le Lemon Tour for my real-life visit. They own a bicycle shop in Carthage and conduct tours – on a bike of course! - to the archaeological sites. They are very professional and you can also just rent a bike to explore the area on your own. That a bike is such …

Over the past 6 weeks, I have spent 3 to 4 hours a day improving much of the outdated content on this website. Country by country, I touched upon every single WHS site page; all 1154 of them. I replaced old photos, verified links, spell-checked texts, and re-evaluated reviews. I finished last week with Spain and Italy, which took a full day each but brought back good memories of so many short trips. Find below what I learned from it, plus some hints on how you can help to improve these pages even more.

1. Site Intro

Every WHS site page starts with a short introduction to the WHS and one identifying photo. I tackled these photos first, some were over 15 years old. They were tiny, scanned from an analog photo, or unsharp in general. In the process, I replaced 633 old photos with bigger/better/newer/sharper ones. But there are still 85 photos left that are older than 10 years. Can you help refresh them? I've provided a list and the requirements at the Forum.

The intro texts I haven’t yet touched content-wise (that may be a project for next year). But …

Among the farewell gifts from my last (and final?) job was a book called “ God. An anatomy ”. It describes the depiction of body parts of God in early sculptures and paintings as found in the region where Christianity developed. It is chock-full of descriptions of places where such examples can be seen. Of course, I immediately considered whether a new connection could be derived from it. However, depictions of (parts of) God are rare at WHS, or are so small or precious that they have been moved to museums.

But we already have a similar connection, about a subject which the book also touches slightly: Petrosomatoglyphs . These are (supposed) impressions of part of a human or animal body incised in rock. I updated the connection details, deleted a couple, and found some more; the sources used can be found for reference in the weblinks on the connection page.

Divine Footprints

These prints are often used in religious ceremonies, a practice that is present in all main religions.

Christianity

• In the Church of San Sebastiano Fuori le Mura in Rome , the alleged footprints of Jesus can …

Although I have visited almost all West European WHS, two easy sites across the Channel had become virtually inaccessible during the Covid years. One of those is the English Lake District , an annoying miss as the site is visited by millions of tourists yearly and is also comfortably in the top 20% of most visited by our community. The best time to visit the Lake District is when it doesn’t rain and when there are no school holidays. I was rather lucky with 2 sunny weekdays in mid-April, though I did catch the final days of the Easter holidays.

As the size of the Lake District and the lack of clear focus of the WHS is a bit intimidating, I decided to allocate 2 days to it. Fortunately, near-local Solivagant suggested two driving routes. On the first day, I drove South to West, from Ambleside to Sellafield. I actually started a bit north of Ambleside, at Rydal Water . Here you can do the Lake District in a nutshell: the easy 1.5-hour hike around the lake will deliver lake views, dry stone walls, some sheep, and bare hilltops. Rydal Hall, a large country house, features …

While preparing for my upcoming trip to eastern Canada, I discovered that I “have to” visit 3 WHS that derive their OUV from fossils. Western Canada even has 2 more of those, resulting in a particular focus on Canada’s World Heritage List (5 out of 20). I find fossils intriguing: it’s exciting to look for them, and there’s the satisfaction of actually finding a good one (preferrably on your own). However, the visitor experience of these sites is often disappointing. As Zoë wrote in her review of the particularly unloveable Chengjiang Fossil Site : “Fossil sites generally mean museum. I see how there is a difference between the fossils and the Earth has a long history, but they are still boring to me. I also don't find them worthy of their inclusion for specific reasons or superlatives. They should be studied, protected, but they are definitely not a tourist attraction.”

In total, there are now 27 Fossil WHS on the list. Below I will have a closer look at them, and how our reviewers have evaluated their visits.

Types of fossil sites

A fossil is “the shape of a bone, a shell, or …

The implicit aim of the members of this community is to visit as many WHS as possible. Or as many as they’ve set themselves as a goal. But there are also smaller ‘achievements’ to be gained. A satisfying and popular subgoal for example is having a country ‘complete’, especially one of the biggies. And there are other cross-sections to make that show the specific Travel Focus of our WH Travellers. For example: who has bagged the most WHS in Africa? Or who has visited the most WHS on Uninhabited islands?

Countries completed

From the 3 countries that have the most WHS within their borders , China is completed by 5, Italy by 11 and Germany by 20 community members.

Looking at the countries that cover a large geographical area: 3 members have the USA complete ( Don Parrish , Zoë Sheng , Jeanne OGrady ). No one has Canada complete. No one has Russia ( Ivan & Martina have 28/30, missing Uvs Nuur and Wrangel Island). Australia is best covered by Shandos Cleaver (18/20), missing Macquarie and Heard & McDonald Islands.

Ever-popular Turkey (8) seems to be relatively easy to complete, and Mexico (2) …

India: UNESCO World Heritage Sites was published in August 2021. This book, covering all Indian WHS up to and including 2019, is a must for every India enthusiast and WH book collector. One can only hope that it inspires other larger countries with a wide geographical spread of WHS to compile similar books; I am especially thinking of Canada or Argentina.

How it looks

When the delivery guy brought the book to my door, I was surprised that it wasn’t especially large or heavy. It probably would have fitted into the mailbox. The hardcover edition has 240 pages and measures 25 by 30 cm. It has been written by Indian scholars and conservationists with insider information (such as a former WHC member) and is endorsed by UNESCO (its logo features on the cover).

The 38 WHS covered are split between cultural, natural, and mixed sites. Each section has an explanatory essay about the subject, eg. “From rock shelter to stupa and temple”. The cultural sites have multiple of those. Each WHS is portrayed in 4 dedicated pages, including glossy photos but also reproductions of 18th-century paintings and photos from around 1900. There is …

When I was in Zacatecas a few weeks ago, I used its Teleferico to cross the city and had a great overview of its urban plan within the narrow valley. As over 35 WHS have one or more cable car systems in their core zones, they warrant a closer look; so I did some additional research and updated the existing connection details with a year of construction, length in meters & minutes, etc. To determine what’s in and what’s out, I used the wiki definition of cable car: “a vehicle suspended in the air from a cable”. There apparently are 3 main types: Aerial tramways, Chairlifts, and Gondola lifts. The gondolas have a rotating bull wheel at the terminal that moves the cable forward, the aerial tramways just go back and forth.

History

The earliest incarnation of a cable car (drawn by horses) is said to be from the 17th century, but in the late 19th century the idea really took off with the use in mining areas. They carried ore from a mine located high on the mountain to an ore mill located at a lower elevation. In the early 20th century, they started …