As I knew I would wake up early because of the unavoidable jet lag, I had looked for something to do in Bogotá in the early morning of my first day here. I found it with the Virgilio Barco Library , one of two TWHS in Colombia’s capital dedicated to modern architecture. It opens most days at 8 a.m. as it is a fully functioning public library. If the library were to become a WHS in the next few years, it would be the most recently built site on the List. It only opened in December 2001.

Bogotá is a sprawling city and although the library is located fairly central, I needed a 25 minute taxi ride from my hotel near the National Museum to get there. The EasyTaxi app did its work flawlessly – for less than 3 EUR I was transported from door to door by a yellow taxi. Despite the early hour, I found several people already walking the paths in the surrounding Virgilio Barco Park (which is also part of the TWHS). The area is also popular with bikers and you can rent bikes from street stalls.

The Virgilio Barco Library …

2019 has been yet another excellent year for “reviews” of visits to WHS and TWHS. During some months the queue with new reviews was so long that it could take up to 3 weeks before yours was published. It has calmed down a bit lately, so keep them flowing in!

The Statistics

The main review statistics for 2019:

• 891 new reviews have been added of both WHS and TWHS, that’s a 22% rise since 2018 and 61% compared to 2017
• 91 different people contributed (see Top 10 below)
• 14 WHS were reviewed for the first time (excluding the new, 2019, WHS of which all but 1 have also been already written about)

We do now have 7,753 reviews publicized and have covered 1094 of the 1121 WHS. These are the ones still unreviewed ...

Among the 891 new reviews, 357 are of TWHS. There certainly is a shift visible towards reviewing TWHS instead of WHS that have been covered well enough already.

Memorable reviews

It was actually Jay T who, during the meet-up in Scotland this summer, recommended the travel website of Michael Ayers to me. …

I am a fan of the Open University concept, where you can study a random subject at a high level whenever and from where it suits you. I even finished a Bachelor’s degree in Art History a few years ago at the Dutch Open University. One of the subjects in that curriculum was a disappointing introduction to Heritage management (I wrote a post about it in 2015). Last week I noticed that the UK’s Open University has a free course on my favourite subject of all: World Heritage. The course material gives an overview of what UNESCO’s World Heritage is about. Also it provides 5 case studies on specific WHS: New Lanark, Bath, Edinburgh, Lake District and Tarragona.

The course is equivalent to 10 hours of study. I clicked through it in some 45 minutes – the introductions about World Heritage, UNESCO, its procedures etc. were of course already well-known by me. I was more interested in the case studies.

New Lanark is presented as “an enormous success and [it] has gained many plaudits and awards for the long-term commitment of its trust and management …

On October the 1st I got myself a new passport. Not that the old one had expired (it was still good for 6 more years), but the visa pages had run out. Within a week I had a new one. In the Netherlands you have to apply at your city hall – the application process takes a few minutes and costs 71.35 EUR. They gave me a so-called ‘Business Passport’ this time – it has 64 visa pages instead of the regular 32. I also considered to try for a second passport, but it isn’t really necessary (I use an ID card to travel within the Schengen area on the odd occasion that my proper passport lies at an embassy).

What's a good passport to have?

One would think that any EU passport has the same privileges. But according to the ‘ Henley Passport Index ’ (“the most rigorous and sophisticated measure of global access”), the Dutch passport is 5th on the global ranking but ‘less’ worthy than the German one. Our neighbors can get into Pakistan, Vietnam and Turkey visa free, while the …

I recently amended my WHS coverage strategy from purely looking for the hotspots to also going out of my way twice a year for a difficult / expensive WHS (expecting that when I get older I will have more time to travel, but physical challenges will get harder and the money less easily replenished). An odd one among the latter set of WHS is St. George, Bermuda – one of our most isolated WHS (it’s 1,200km from Independence Hall ). The island group of Bermuda is not a particularly hard destination to reach, but it is mostly visited from the US or via a cruise. From Europe there’s only one British Airways flight a day. And it surely ticks the “expensive” box: start from UK price level, add a logistical surcharge as most things have to be flown in, take the cruise ship price inflation into account and finally the American-style 15-20% tipping. In the end this ‘tick’ costed me some 1,500 EUR.

The WHS is located on and around one of the northernmost islands of the Bermuda archipelago: St. George Island. The town is known as “St. George’s” (short for St. George’s Town), but it …

I wasn’t terribly interested in the Water Management System of Augsburg , but I did feel an urgent need to make my German WHS score ‘complete’ again! So last Saturday I ventured out to this Bavarian city on a day trip from my home – flying Amsterdam-Munich and then taking a train to Augsburg. Even for an experienced traveler and German speaker, buying a train ticket from a vending machine proved to be like finishing a moderately difficult exam, having to answer question after question – resulting in a final bill of 50.90 EUR for the return trip Munich Airport - Augsburg. Ouch!

So this day consisted of a lot of sitting in planes and trains. The stay was to be so short that I did not even bring a bag and only kept my iPhone in a coat pocket. No passport as well; since a few months I am using only a creditcard sized ID card for travels within the EU (which feels a bit like having a second passport, so the real one can be safely sent to some embassy for a visa). The iPhone fortunately gave me access to some good podcasts. I …

During my Sicily trip of 2006 I had already ticked off the Val di Noto WHS by visiting the towns of Modica, Ragusa, Scicli and Noto. It comprises 4 more locations however, including specific urban areas of the city of Catania. Catania is also home to the busiest international airport on Sicily, so I walked around there for a few hours before my return flight to the Netherlands after my Etna hike in October 2019.

It takes a 20-minute walk from the station to Cathedral square, the historic heart of the city. The city has a bad reputation, but on this sunny Sunday even the railway station area did look OK. Catania’s excuse for looking gloomy is that it was built from grey-black lava stone. The excess of (badly done) graffiti sprayed on the walls and the many vacant buildings do not help either.

Yet there is also beautiful art and architecture to be found here. Just like the rest of the Val di Noto, Catania was hit by a major earthquake in 1693. The city was rebuilt in the same location making ample use of the fashionable Sicilian baroque style. Typical of the Sicilian …

Over 240 community members so far have ticked off Mount Etna as ‘visited’, but I wonder how many of them have just ‘seen’ it from a distance versus entered the core zone and witnessed its OUV. Most reviews to date indeed seem to have been in the former category. By far the best of them is Joel’s video , made during terrible weather conditions. I recently spent a long weekend in the area to try to make mine into a ‘good visit’. It all got off to a fitting start as my flight from Rome was delayed by an hour because air traffic to Catania was temporarily limited due to Etna's ash clouds .

The next day at 5.15 a.m., I left Taormina with my guide for the journey to the northeastern slopes of the Etna. We drove to the parking lot of Rifugio Citelli , which lies already at an altitude of over 1,700 meters. Everything was still dark and quiet, although we were able to stop underway at a bar for an Italian stand-up breakfast of cappuccino and a cornetto. The breakfast bars along the route open early (this one at 4.30!) to serve …

Early September I spent 2 weeks travelling across Russia , covering over 5,200km by train on this itinerary . It was only my second visit to this vast country, after having done a short tour to Moscow & St. Petersburg in 1990. Find below my top tips for travelling to Russia as a World Heritage Traveller.

1. Incorporate different regions in your itinerary

I’d recommend to not focus solely on the Moscow region or the Moscow/St. Petersburg corridor. Although it has the highest density of WHS in the country, it has a very common European vibe and many of the sights do feel a bit similar. Already after a few days I was beginning to dread visiting yet another white church with a golden dome. Incorporating parts of the South and the East in your itinerary, though these regions are very much Russified as well, will bring you in touch with different cultures and landscapes. Bolgar and Lake Baikal became the highlights of my trip.

2. You don't have to be afraid of the language barrier anymore

A few weeks before my departure I started doing daily Russian lessons via Duolingo. And I …

The Historic Center of Irkutsk is an enigmatic entry on Russia’s Tentative List. Its official description is in French and just rambles on about its general history, architectural styles, street plan and renovation projects. There seems to be no focus what the prospective WHS should entail: “a large number of preserved architectural monuments of different periods and styles (Siberian baroque, classicism, art nouveau, "Russian style", local traditions, Gothic, Byzantine, Asian architectural art, constructivism)” suggests a broad approach, while it seems logical that OUV could be found somewhere in its renowned wooden architecture.

Irkutsk, the largest city in Eastern Siberia, was founded in 1661 as a military fortress that imposed taxes on the indigenous population in the form of animal fur. The city also developed as a commercial and administrative center due to its location on various trade routes with Mongolia and China such as the Tea route. Today it is slightly more chaotic than the big cities in western Russia, but I liked it. One really encounters a completely different side of the country. At the cozy Central Market, you’ll find Mongolian, Buryatian and Chinese tradesmen selling nice thick woolen socks, cheese and honey. And of …