Spectacular New Year’s Day visits are starting to become a habit of mine: it was Virunga in 2016 (gorillas on New Year’s Eve, chimps the next morning) and the Rock Islands of Palau in 2017. On the first of January 2018, I woke up at the edge of Namibia’s Fish River Canyon . I had only been sleeping intermittently because of the strong, howling winds blowing through the canyon and along the chalets of the Fish River Lodge which has been built exactly on the rim. From my bed I could see the sun rise above the canyon, constantly changing the illumination of the rocks.

Morning view

This canyon in the far south of Namibia is one of the world’s largest (often advertised as the second largest), although a precise ranking of canyons is as difficult as that of waterfalls. Are we counting length, width, depth or total area? We have 26 different canyons within WHS already inscribed in our connection , including Capertee Valley ( Greater Blue Mountains ) which also is said to be the world's second largest canyon after the Grand Canyon .

Anyway, the Fish River Canyon is …

“Reviews” of Visits to WHS for long have been a cornerstone of this website. We do now have 6,446 reviews publicized, and have covered 1033 of 1073 WHS. Here are some review statistics for 2017:

• 555 new reviews have been added of both WHS and TWHS
• 86 different people contributed
• 9 WHS were reviewed for the first time.

A special mention goes out to Jarek and Solivagant , as they each covered 3 of those 9! You may have missed out on one or two reviews during the year due to the high turnover on the homepage of this website, so I’ve picked out reviews of 10 WHS that deserve a rerun:

Derbent and Grand Canal

In February, Szucs Tamas reasoned that travelling to Dagestan is not difficult at all for Western travellers. He ticked off Derbent . No fridge magnets on sale here, but they have the oldest mosque of Russia with a stunning interior. Juha Sjoeblom took us to 4 locations of the Grand Canal . His post is about granaries - not a surprise as "the canal is originally created for transportation of grain".

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While preparing for my upcoming trip to Namibia , I found out that South African Rands are as commonly used there as Namibian dollars. That meant that it would be worth sifting through my unorganized plastic box of leftover banknotes and coins in search for South African Rands from a previous trip.

Leftover banknotes and coins

As I had some time on my hands, I organized all banknotes into 28 envelopes: one envelope per country. I handled the dirty Indian rupees, wondered about the Ukrainian hryvnia and enjoyed the feeling of the polymer notes of Singapore, Malaysia and Canada. I counted the notes as well, hoping to find a small fortune but most of it is nearly worthless. Only the 7,700 Japanese Yen (about 59 EUR) can be a nice starter for a future trip to Japan. Maybe I should just save these random banknotes, they can become more sought after later.

The favourite in my personal banknote "collection" is the 250 Iraqi dinar note showing the Samarra spiralling minaret, that I brought home from my 2014 Iraqi Kurdistan trip. Currency showing WHS are extra special of course, although I do not have a lot of it. Especially for this …

The Early Christian Necropolis of Pécs represents a mix of three categories of sites: it's a Burial site , an Archaeological site of Ancient Rome and a Christian religious structure . Its OUV is mostly derived from its wall paintings. Pécs is a midsized city in the south of Hungary, and I went there for a weekend trip reaching it via a 2 hour flight to Budapest and then a 2 hour 50 minute direct train ride. The town was very quiet, but it had a cosy Christmas fair in front of its landmark (former) Mosque of Pasha Qasim.

Mausoleum superstructure

The core zone of this WHS lies in front of Pécs Cathedral and mostly underneath cathedral square. On my first approach I walked across the glass ceilings from where you can look into the Roman site, but I could not find the way in! So I walked on to the mausoleum which fortunately has a clearly visible structure remaining above ground. It’s all out in the open, this is the only part that you can see without paying the entrance fee. That fee by the way is 1100 forint, about 3.5 EUR, …

This year it is 100 years since De Stijl was founded, the origin of the Dutch Modern Movement in Art (and Architecture). I cannot better describe this artistic movement than this quote from Wikipedia: “Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors.” The anniversary is celebrated in many Dutch cities with exhibitions, lectures and lots of merchandising. Utrecht is probably the frontrunner in this – home town of Gerrit Rietveld, one of the most iconic Stijl-members and designer of the WH listed Rietveld-Schröder Huis .

Two Rietveld villas from the rear

Yesterday I attended a symposium organized by the student society for Cultural Sciences at the Open University, titled 'De Stijl: a source of new art in the 20th century'. They had invited two inspiring speakers to introduce us to De Stijl in Utrecht painting and in Utrecht architecture. The work of Gerrit Rietveld was central to this of course, showing his development from painter to furniture maker to architect. The man of the simple and abstract …

After two Referrals in 2014 and 2016 respectively, France will try once again to get the Tectono-volcanic ensemble of the Chaîne des Puys and Limagne Fault enlisted – probably already next year. It’s a natural site that covers a string of 80 dormant volcanoes and a parallel geological structure to the west that shows inverted relief.

Cloud cover over the Puy de Dôme

When I prepared for this trip, I opted to visit the Gour de Tazenat – an almost perfectly round crater lake or “mare”. But when my rental car plans fell through, I had to find a way into the core zone of the Chaîne des Puys by public transport. Fortunately its main landmark, the Puy de Dôme, lies just 15km west of the city of Clermont-Ferrand and I was able to catch a shuttle bus between Clermont-Ferrand and the Dôme Railway Station on the last day of the season.

The Puy de Dôme itself nowadays can only be accessed via the Panoramique des Dômes , a panoramic rack railway that covers the final km’s to the top. A return trip costs 12.30 EUR (in low season), though you can …

Saint-Savin sur Gartempe is a quaint French village with just over 900 inhabitants. It has a couple of hotels and restaurants, and as I was pressed into slow travel because of limited public transport options I found the place pleasant enough to stay overnight. I had a fine 4-course gourmand dinner at Le Patisson , the quality of which in such a small town provides at least one reason why so many NW Europeans choose to move to rural France. But of course at the end of the day I came just for its enlisted Abbey Church and its medieval murals .

The Abbey at the Gartempe

The next morning I started with a walk along the Gartempe river and across both bridges for some photos of the Abbey. Its size is remarkable for such a small town and it was fully included in the core zone by a minor boundary modification in 2015. Most of it though is from a much later date than the medieval murals that provide the site’s OUV.

Entrance nowadays costs 8 EUR, which includes a good booklet with explanations (without it is 1 EUR less). There's …

Bourges Cathedral was meant to be my 650th visited WHS – but after my biggest WH travel mistake ever I had to rearrange my 5-day trip to south-central France. I had planned to visit my last 4 remaining WHS on the French mainland plus 1 TWHS within that time-frame. The route involved quite a bit of driving, but it would all still be doable. My chances turned instantly when I discovered at the car rental counter of Clermont-Ferrand airport that I had left my driver’s license at home. No license = no rental car = no remote WHS visits. The Vézère Valley and the Pont d’Arc Cave would have to wait, and even reaching Saint-Savin sur Gartempe now would involve a minor expedition.

The west façade with its five portals

So I eventually ended up on a train from Clermont-Ferrand to Bourges. This area of France is not well-covered by public transport, and I had to wait a few hours to take the first train north. I arrived in the mid-sized city of Bourges in the early evening. The streets in the town centre were deserted, and the inhabitants seemed to be …

During my recent trip to Ecuador I was pleasantly surprised by the entrance tickets that I received at locations within the Quito WHS. No photography is allowed within these buildings (they are mostly churches with lots of art), and a hefty foreigners entrance fee is charged. But in return I got tickets displaying the church interior’s main features; these are good souvenirs. It made me think about entrance tickets of other WHS - which ones were remarkable enough for me to save over the years?

Some of the glitzy Quito tickets

Especially in Western Europe nowadays one often gets nothing more than the cash register receipt. Or even no receipt at all – sometimes they just take your money and that’s it. At the Hohle Fels Cave of the German Caves and Ice Age Art I just had to drop 3 EUR in a plastic box. Another annoyance is when the ticket inspector keeps the (best part of the) ticket that you just bought!

I am not really someone that saves all kinds of memorabilia from my trips, but I have held onto some 15 entrance tickets from my Big China Trip …