Slovenia’s Tentative List features The timeless, humanistic architecture of Jože Plečnik in Ljubljana and Prague . As the title already implies, this was meant to be a serial transnational nomination by Slovenia and Czechia. Last December however, after consulting ICOMOS, Slovenia decided to continue with the efforts alone: “the transnational bid was assessed as having little chance of success” . It is unclear yet whether they made the 1 February 2018 deadline for submitting the dossiers to be nominated for the WHC 2019, but we can safely assume that Slovenia will put this site forward within the next couple of years.

Ljubljanica River riverfront

Jože Plečnik was a Slovene architect who made his most important works in the first half of the 20th century. He is nicknamed “the Gaudí of Ljubljana” for this architectural imprint on the city. I visited Ljubljana in 2014 after a few days checking out (T)WHS by rental car around Slovenia. This site wasn’t on the Tentative List at the time, so I had to revisit my photo archive of the day to see if I had visited (photographed) any of his buildings anyway.

The city is strong …

I regularly check Amazon.com for new publications on World Heritage, and I found one at the end of last year that sounded interesting: The Rebirth of Bodh Gaya: Buddhism and the Making of a World Heritage Site by David Geary. The Mahabodhi Temple Complex in Bodh Gaya, centred around the descendant of a Bodhi tree where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, has been a WHS since 2002. The author (an anthropologist) did extensive fieldwork in Bodh Gaya in the years after the designation, and this publication - written with a general audience in mind – reflects his findings.

The complex history of the Mahabodhi Temple

The book starts with an interesting deep-dive into the site’s history, after its ‘rediscovery’ in the mid-19th century by state-sponsored Burmese pilgrims. At the time it was already an active Hindu pilgrimage site. There were no Buddhist residents in the area. During the 20th century, Buddhist countries and organizations from abroad started to add monasteries, temples and lodges in their own architectural styles to the area around the main temple. To acknowledge the rise in importance for Buddhists, the site has …

In December and January I spent 2.5 weeks in Namibia . I joined a 7 day small group tour to the South, a 7 day tour to the North (both organized by the recommended Wild Dogs Safaris ) and had a few days by myself in and around the capital Windhoek. This is a very special country, comparable to few others around the world. Mongolia and Australia’s Red Centre come closest.

Oryx in the Kalahari desert

1. Do not underestimate Namibia’s size

Namibia’s land area measures 823,290 square km. This makes it the 34th largest country in the world – larger than Turkey for example, and about the same size as Spain and Germany combined. For a traveller, this means that you will have to cover vast distances. On my 2 week organized tour, we drove over 4,000 km. And this on mostly unpaved roads. Those (gravel) roads often can be quite smooth as they are ‘raked’ every few weeks. But they can be very bad as well: I especially remember the hard driving in the western part of Etosha National Park and at the over 100km long access road …

It has taken a while due to travel and day job commitments, but Nan & I now can proudly present the refurbished version of this website. So what’s new?

Easier login and subscription

As a registered community member, you can now login via the button at the bottom left of the homepage. After providing your username & password, you will stay logged in as long as you are online. You can add reviews on the go, update your count of visited (T)WHS and rate WHS that you have already visited (see below for more on that).

The new and improved login screen

The addition of new members has now been fully automated, and uses e-mail verification. Also, finally a proper ‘lost password’ function has been introduced. So no more e-mails to me and tricks to perform anymore!

An improved user interface for adding and editing reviews

With the inclusion of a simple content management system, you will be able now to add mark-up to the texts of your reviews – such as turn words into bold or italic, create hyperlinks to other websites or add …

Robben Island was the penitentiary island where the South African apartheid regime kept its political prisoners between 1962 and 1991. Almost all of the past and current elite of the ANC was imprisoned here, but the cells also held members from the more radical Pan Africanist Congress and the Namibian independence movement SWAPO. The island, which lies in viewing distance from Cape Town, has been in use since the times of the Dutch East India Company (mid-17th century).

A former prisoner explains

One nowadays can only visit Robben Island on a tightly organized tour. Beforehand I had heard and read a lot about those tours: not a minute of free time to walk around for yourself, unintelligible guides who tell muddled stories, even ferries that get into trouble on the short crossing ( 60 people had to be rescued from sea in September 2017). But my experience was entirely different: maybe they have taken improvement measures or I caught them on a good day, but the staff on the ferry was very polite, engaging and safety conscious. The personal story of the former prisoner that acted as our guide I found very …

The Cape Floral Region is one of the few WHS solely focused on flora . ‘Fynbos’ is the key subject here: a diverse shrubland and heathland vegetation with many endemic species. It comes for example in the variation of ‘rooibos’, that is used for the eponymous tea. Although plants aren’t my specific area of interest, I managed to visit Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens and the Table Mountain National Park during my 4 days in Cape Town. These cover only 1 of the 13 inscribed clusters – the other 12 are located in the Western and Eastern Cape Provinces.

A bit of fynbos

My explorations started at Kirstenbosch gardens. I was staying at a Bed&Breakfast in Klaassens Road, next to Gate no. 3 of the gardens. This whole area is incredibly lush – and wealthy. Properties sell easily for over 1 million EUR. Entering Kirstenbosch via this upper gate leads you directly to the fynbos and the proteas, both almost only to be found in the Cape Floral Region. With the Table Mountain directly in the background, it’s all very pleasing to the eye. The lower part, near main entrance no. 1, is a bit …

Twyfelfontein or /Ui-//aes is a rock engraving site in northern Namibia, supposedly the best of its kind in variation and number in Africa below the Equator. My non-Dutch trip mates had already great difficulty in pronouncing ‘Twyfelfontein’ (which is a perfectly normal word in Afrikaans and Dutch, meaning ‘doubtful fountain’). But try its alternative name ‘/Ui-//aes’: the slashes represent two different clicks in the local Damara language.

Rocky area near the entrance

The site lies deep into a barren valley, surrounded by pretty rock formations made out of sandstone. All of a sudden you’ll end up at a car park and a visitor center – Twyfelfontein caters to 40,000 visitors a year so things are organized quite well. It conveniently lies on the route between Etosha and Swakopmund, and as there is not a lot else to see in the area many tour operators schedule stops here.

We are assigned a guide and after a short walk on the main road in the burning heat, we start our tour at the remains of the house of David Levin. He was a white farmer who settled in the area in 1946 to …

The Namib Sand Sea is the most extensive example in the world of a coastal fog desert. It’s the kind of place nature documentaries rely upon. In David Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth II: Deserts’ several scenes were filmed here such as the gecko licking its own eyeballs - where thaw had formed in the early morning - to get liquid. The site was inscribed on all 4 natural criteria and it is the undoubted highlight of a trip to Namibia.

View from halfway Dune 45

The designated area is enormous – about 75% of the size of the Netherlands. But only a small part of it is open to regular tourists. The common access point is at the east, at Sesriem and the Sossusvlei. Only few tour operators have permits to venture deeper into the Namib Sand Sea (they are named in the nomination dossier). We stayed overnight at the Sossus Dune Lodge , which is the only hotel within the park’s borders (there’s a camp site as well which has this privilege). This means that you’ll be in the park before sunrise and have all the nice spots to yourself for at least …

The Etosha Pan in northern Namibia is one of the world’s largest salt pans. It is a former lake bed of 4,730 square km. Nowadays the area is mostly a dry, saline and uninhabited desert. This combined with the high temperatures results in the fact that no flora or fauna to speak of can survive there. Only ostriches sometimes seek shelter here from predators. Vehicular traffic on the pan itself is forbidden.

The salt pan

On the fringes of the pan there are natural (and artificial) waterholes, grasses and shrublands that support high numbers of mammal and bird species. They are protected within the Etosha National Park, which with a founding date of 1907 is one of the oldest conservation sites in Africa.

The park has the largest single population of black rhino in the world. Numbers are nowadays undisclosed to prevent unwanted attention of poachers (drones are forbidden in the park for the same reason). But earlier numbers indicate about 600-750 black rhino living in Etosha. We saw about 10 of them. White rhino has been reintroduced here as well, but they are more rare. We were lucky to encounter one …

Few of you will be familiar with the Benguela Current. At least I wasn’t before I started researching my Namibia trip. At the country’s Tentative List I found an entry called The Benguela Current Marine Ecosystem Sites . It could surely do with a more catchy name and/or an epic subtitle if it ever were to be nominated, but in reality it is quite an interesting site. The Benguela Current is an ocean current that carries icy cold, wind-driven upwelled waters from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. These waters are very rich in nutrients, and they support a whole food chain from phytoplankton via fish to sea birds and marine mammals.

Approaching Halifax Island

The proposed nomination includes a marine ecosystem along the southern Namibian coast including Mercury Island, Ichaboe Island, Halifax Island and Possession Island. In the coastal town of Lüderitz there are catamaran trips on offer to one of these islands: Halifax. They leave daily (weather permitting) at 8 a.m., take 2 hours and cost 450 Namibian dollar (about 30 EUR).

Halifax Island is home to the largest colony of jackass-penguins in Namibia. Lüderitz (“home of the sand storm”) …