As I had been to the Bangladeshi Sundarbans already in 2007, the visit to its Indian counterpart felt superfluous: this should be one transboundary WHS of course. And it felt even more like a chore because the visitor experience on the Indian side doesn’t come exactly recommended: I scouted for a “better” lodge to stay the night or a more imaginative tour, but all come with mixed reviews (or worse) online. So I settled for a private day trip from Kolkata . This one also suffered from poor communication beforehand, but fortunately, the logistics on the day itself worked perfectly.

A driver picked me up at 5 a.m. from my Kolkata hotel. The drive to Godhkali this early in the morning takes only 2h15 minutes (on the way back, it would be 3 hours). When you leave Kolkata’s city limits, the typical landscape dominated by creeks and channels begins.

In Godhkali, I was handed over like a postal package to a ferryman who put me on land at the next island, and on his turn delivered me to a waiting taxi that drove me in 15 minutes across the island to another dock. This is …

Champaner-Pavagadh is one of the lesser-known Indian WHS. It is also one of the least appreciated by members of our community, although it still amounts to a decent 3 stars. The Tripadvisor reviews about this site are much more positive. One of its main issues is that it is hard to summarize what it is actually about. As the name suggests, it comprises two (contiguous) parts: Champaner (the remains of an Islamic pre-Mughal city) and Pavagadh (a hill with an important Hindu pilgrimage site). They are linked through their prime setting, the hill providing the water the city needed. As it was still relatively early in my 2024 India journey, I deep-dived into it via a day trip on public transport from Vadodara (better known locally under its old name Baroda).

The bus ride to Pavagadh takes about an hour and costs 40~60rs. Buses frequently leave from bays 15-18 at the central bus station; signage is only in Gujarati but just follow the colourful pilgrims on board. From Pavagadh bus station you have to walk about 500m to the right around the walls of the citadel, to where you can see the Jami Masjid – …

The Workers' Assembly Halls , a nomination led by Denmark, is one of the more prominent upcoming serial transnational initiatives. It is aiming for inscription in 2027. They represent the international democratic labour movement of the years 1850 to 1950. This isn’t a popular subject in 2024, but “we” (the workers in the countries where the labour movement had a significant impact) owe perks like the 8-hour workday and holiday bonuses to them.

Among the 7 proposed Assembly Halls in 6 countries is “De Vooruit” in Ghent, Belgium. It doesn’t feature on the country’s tentative list yet, but it is definitely part of the final selected group that is preparing a nomination and it has received funding to do so from the Flanders government. I visited it yesterday on a guided tour.

The ‘Vooruit’ (Dutch for “Forward”) dates from 1913, the year Ghent hosted an International Exhibition . It seemed a good idea to the local socialist movement to celebrate its cause via a grand building, which was to be situated along the main road between the railway station and the city centre. The construction was funded by the eponymous socialist cooperative, which managed a …

There’s a forum topic dating back to 2014 already on this subject: WHS where you have been very close to but missed out on for some reason. We know them as “Near Misses” as well, although the result (frustration instead of relief) is the opposite of a “near miss” in safety procedures where disaster was just avoided; our Near Miss is when you were nearby, but you missed the WHS.

I have been very close to 12 (4%) out of the 293 I haven’t visited yet. How did those happen?

Visited long before inscription

First, I have two recent WHS where I had been very near early in my travel life:

• In 1994, I thoroughly explored the Chinese province of Yunnan for a month with a small Dutch group. I have 3 WHS ‘ticks’ as a result of it. But then, in 2023, there was the “ Ancient Tea Plantations of Pu'er ” – in Xishuangbanna, southern Yunnan. Unfortunately, I don’t have a travel diary from that trip. I studied my photos, but the closest I could find was Jingzhen (35km away) and some Dai and Bulang villages to the south of …

In last week’s blog post I referred to Padua’s Fresco Cycles and wondered why it took so long to get them inscribed. During the preparatory research, I also found out that it is the highest-rated WHS that was inscribed in the past 5 years. It got me curious to look for other recent WHS with very high ratings, and if there are any remarkable trends to discover.

Highest scores of the past 5 years

The following sites, which were inscribed in the last 5 years (2020-2024), have received the highest approval scores by the community members of this website. Remember that 2020 and 2022 had no WHC sessions. The ranking is sorted by the last column, based on the toned-down Wilson score we use on this website to deal with outliers and few votes.

Findings:

• Two WHS in this bracket still suffer from too few votes to make the score representative.
• The no.1 of this group only ranks #166 overall, and the no. 10 is #494!
• No less than 8 out of 10 WHS are cultural.
• None have reached a score of 4 or higher (equalling 'very …

Last week I was in Northeast Italy, celebrating the 10th anniversary of our immersive Art History course in Florence with my study mates (it turned out to be ‘only’ 9 years ago we found out during the trip). We were roughly in the Veneto Hotspot , covering Verona, Padua, Mantua, and Vicenza. I also added two days on my own in Bologna. These were all revisits for me. It's a region that has been popular for its treasures of art for centuries, even the French troops took a lot home from here as seen in the new Napoleonic booty connection.

Below are my Top Tips for Travel to the Veneto Hotspot as a WH Traveller in 2024.

1. Choose your base wisely

We have Venice as the center of the Veneto Hotspot and while its international airport and two inner-city WHS make this a logical choice, I’d recommend choosing a different base. Venice is the most expensive and the most touristy city in this region. For lower costs of hotels and food in restaurants, consider Verona, Padua, or even Bologna. The latter’s university crowd guarantees cheap eateries and the city has excellent train connections …

Wojciech’s recent review of the Minaret of Jam (“The road from Herat takes 13 hours…”) sparked a debate about whether this Afghan icon is The Most Remote Cultural WHS. A quick look at our “ Takes more than 5 days ”-connection brings up Bikini Atoll, but all other remote ones listed there are natural or mixed. In a quest to find more Remote Cultural WHS, I took a systematic approach.

The Approach

I started with a subset of sites that are rarely visited: a combination of the ‘ least visited WHS ’ (cutting it to 10 members or fewer that have visited) and the ones in the '1,000 visitors or fewer' connection . This resulted in a list of 46 different Cultural WHS.

Then I tried to measure the time it takes from a hub city to get to the WHS. With a hub city I mean a place with decent hotels and frequent onward connections to the rest of the country, including an international airport. I used what is mentioned in the reviews and also Google Maps. Timings are calculated under ‘normal’ conditions (no active war, no weather disruptions, not out-of-season).

I …

Solivagant often sends me inspirational things on WH-related topics, but I don’t always have the time to do something with them. This also was the case with ‘ The World’s Greatest Natural Areas ’. At the 24-hour ferry back from Ogasawara, I finally found some focused hours to digest this article published in 1982 by the Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA) of IUCN. This was in the early years of the World Heritage Convention, and they decided to come up with an indicative inventory of natural sites with the potential to be listed. It’s interesting to see where we stand now, 42 years later.

The Inventory

The CNPPA came up with 219 different sites in its concise and well-written article, spread across the biogeographic realms as follows:

1. Nearctic: 33
2. Palaearctic: 42
3. Afrotropical: 47
4. Indomalayan: 31
5. Oceanian: 14
6. Australian: 13
7. Antarctic: 6
8. Neotropical: 33

Their WH status now

Of the 219 proposals, 115 sites have since acquired WH status and 29 more are on the Tentative Lists. Some WHS are partial representations of the proposals in “The World’s Greatest Natural …

With a four-week trip to seven of the most recent or most remote Japanese WHS, I have ‘completed’ the country, the second person on this website to do so after Zoë. It was a wonderful trip, my fourth to Japan, and I am certainly not done with it—there are still more areas to explore. I would like to go to Shikoku Island or Hokkaido in the winter, for example.

Below are my Top Tips for Travel to Japan as a WH Traveller in 2024.

1. Being in Japan is better than seeing all its WHS

Just being in Japan and taking part in its daily life trumped the quality of its sights on each of my four visits. Think of a world where people are raised to be considerate of each other. You can roam the streets of the big cities alone late at night, or leave your bag unattended when you pick up something from a counter or go to the toilet. One with the best public transport system in the world. And with an extremely rich food culture. It’s a "Land of Instructions" too, sometimes bordering on the silly (see top photo), …

My first one from the “ Takes 5 days or more to visit ”-list! The Ogasawara Islands are a Japanese archipelago in the Northern Pacific Ocean about 1,000km south of Tokyo and 1,800km north of Guam. They can only be visited by a weekly ferry which takes 24 hours to cover the distance. About 2,500 people inhabit its two main islands. Settlers arrived here in the 19th century, the islands were mostly uninhabited before. After having been taken by the US during the Second World War, the islands were returned to Japan in 1968.

Despite being a group of islands, the OUV is not marine but firmly focused on land (rapidly diversifying land snails! endemic plants!) – even UNESCO seems to have forgotten that as its Gallery only shows photos of sea creatures. About 80% of the core zones of the 5 components are land-based. On Chichi-jima, where I stayed for 3 nights, the core zone of the WHS covers about 65% of this island; the coastal villages and agricultural fields are excluded.

The protected area that lies closest to the main settlement of Omura is Miyanohama Beach . And that is where I headed …