The Konbaung Dynasty was the last Burmese monarchy before British colonial rule started in 1885. With their expansionist agenda they set the current borders for Myanmar. Since 1996 a group of 7 Wooden Monasteries from the Konbaung Period has been on Myanmar’s Tentative List. They are located in Ohn Don, Sala, Pakhangyi, Pakhannge, Legaing, Sagu and Mandalay – scattered roughly in the area between Mandalay and Bagan. In contrast to the earlier brick architecture of the Pyu and Bagan civilizations, these monasteries owe more to pre-Buddhist Southeast Asian house-building practices and beliefs than to Indian prototypes.

Shwe-Kyaung in Mandalay

Shwe-Kyaung in Mandalay was my first encounter with these teak wood monasteries. I had been cycling around town all morning without seeing many tourists, but this is a major sight well on the beaten track of every tour guide. There’s an entrance fee to this and all other landmarks of Mandalay (valid for 5 days), costing 10,000 kyat / 7 EUR. The building originally belonged to the royal palace and was intended as sleeping quarters for the king. After he died, the building was donated to a Buddhist monastery …

Myanmar’s very first WHS came as a surprise in 2014: few will have visited one of the Pyu Ancient Cities before its inscription. History wise, it is not an illogical choice however. The Pyu were the first of the civilizations that settled along the Ayeyarwady River, in what is the heartland of current Myanmar. They started building city-states here from the 2nd century BC on. They came from the north (the Tibeto-Burman plateau or India) and brought Buddhism with them.

I'm a sucker for these kind of signs

None of the three Pyu cities Halin, Beikthano and Sri Ksetra lie close to the main tourist destinations in Myanmar. While I was staying in Mandalay, I hired a car plus driver and guide for the day and went for Halin. Though only 95 km, the trip took us 2.5 hours. We found our way out of the busy streets of Mandalay, and then passed the lovely Sagaing with its numerous gilded stupas. Afterwards it’s a long haul northwards in the direction of Shwebo. The guide had been there once before, but they do not make it …

When we were compiling our List of Missing Sites in 2014, two sites from Myanmar made it into the Top 20: Bagan and the Shwedagon Pagoda. The history of Bagan is known and it will be submitted again without a doubt in the coming years, but why isn’t the Shwedagon Pagoda even on Myanmar’s Tentative List? Could it be because it is an active religious site and they want to keep it sacred? Or is it too strongly connected with political activities such as the August 1988 call for democracy by Aung San Suu Kyi addressing 500,000 people there, or the uprise from monks in September 2007?

Glitzy model

I scheduled a visit to the Shwedagon Pagoda on my very first afternoon in Myanmar. I had arrived a bit later from Bangkok than anticipated, so I headed out there only at 4.30 p.m.. The site supposedly is on its best at dusk anyway. I entered via the western gate, after paying the 8000 kyat entrance fee for foreigners (about 5,60 EUR). This gate comes with escalator stairs, not a very usual sight in a temple complex but quite handy …

The Wachau is a riverine landscape in Northeast Austria. Here the Danube flows for 36km through a fertile valley, that has been used since the Middle Ages for growing apricots and grapes - yes, this is another viticulture WHS . Fortunately they have thrown in a number of palaces, castles and picturesque historic town centres to enhance the visitor experience. A wealth of individual monuments and places has been highlighted in the nomination file.

Schloss Schönbühel

I visited on a Sunday, and thought it would be a nice idea to start the day with a hike enjoying the river views. I parked my rental car in Schönbühel, a small town east of Melk. An oversized palace dominates its town center. It provided a tantalizing start, though you cannot get in because it's in private use. Just as in Neusiedl , which I visited the day before, cycling is very popular here: one can traverse the entire Danube valley on a smooth bike path. Unfortunately there is no separate trail for hikers, and there’s a lot of noise from car traffic on the parallel road. Hiking by far turned out …

The Neusiedlersee ( Fertö tó in Hungarian) is a saline lake about an hour east of Vienna. It’s on the WH List as a cultural landscape. “A combination of stockraising and fishing with viticulture beside a lake” seems to be its core value. This is a fairly well-visited site among WH travellers, and the general public also knows how to find it as shown by an annual visitor count of over 700,000. In preparation of my visit I tried to find some things to see or do that haven’t been described on this website before. I will leave the omnipresent vineyards for what they are, but focus on the reed and vernacular architecture.

Layers of reed, with some lake in between

I started my visit in the town of Mörbisch, at the west bank of the lake. The nomination file applauds its “characteristic oblong farmsteads and narrow lanes leading down to the Lake”. My car navigation however delivered me at a huge parking lot at the "Seebad" (Lakeside Resort), without anything particularly interesting to see en route. I had chosen this town mostly for its transport link to the …

The UNESCO World Heritage List owes its existence directly from safeguarding endangered monuments. The succesful campaign for the salvage and relocation to higher ground of the temple complexes of Abu Simbel and Philae because of the construction of the Aswan Dam was an important trigger to create the World Heritage Convention in 1972.

List of World Heritage in Danger

A specific subset of this List contains the sites that are labelled ‘in danger’. Inscription on the List of World Heritage in Danger has the purpose “to inform the international community of conditions which threaten the very characteristics for which a property was inscribed on the World Heritage List, and to encourage corrective action”. That danger can be ‘ascertained’ (sites already facing specific and proven dangerous situations) or ‘potential’ (sites threatened by situations that can have harmful effects, such as armed conflict). ¹ .

Portobelo (Panama): suffering from floodings and general neglect

Some statistics

Since the publication of the first World Heritage List in 1979, 76 different sites have been put on the Danger List:

• 1 immediately was deemed …

The idea came earlier this year in or around Izmir, when after some private meetings among Top WH Travellers Nihal Ege thought it would be a great idea to organize an event related to the WHS website. Holland was chosen as the destination, as it lies fairly central in Europe and it would make things more easy for me as a host. An announcement was posted on this website, and many positive reactions followed.

Original Van Nelle sign

So on Sunday August 23, 20 World Heritage Travellers from 7 countries were present at the gates of the Van Nelle Factory for a tour and meet-up lunch afterwards. Most of the participants had added a few extra days in this corner of Europe to tackle such WHS as the Fagus Factory and the Par force Hunting Landscape (“There is forest. And there are deer, of which we took photos of.”). A Livingstone versus Stanley encounter even occurred at the infamous Flint Mines of Spiennes , where Iain Jackson and Paul Tanner stumbled upon each other.

Our ‘official’ programme started with a tour of the Van …

The Church Town of Gammelstad is a village in the woods some 10 km outside of Lulea in North Sweden. It’s hard to imagine nowadays that people used to arrive here by boat. The sea level in the 15th and 16th century, when the town developed, was 10 metres higher than today. By 1649 though, the harbour had become too shallow. Movement of the tectonic plates had caused land elevation. On site you can still see the spot where the old harbour was located: it now is a parking lot for the neighbouring open air museum.

Typical street in Gammelstad

When I arrived in Gammelstad on a Sunday morning at 9 a.m. its streets were empty. Only a fat Garfield-like cat welcomed me, and accompanied me on my walk around town. The trademark Falun red wooden houses give the town center a coherent architectural feel, though there are more modern houses on the outskirts of town too. I found the town lay-out remarkable: it seems completely haphazard. The cottages were added gradually and as needed. Once all the streets were lined with houses, the land between the roads was …

The Laponian Area is a big WHS comprising 9 nature reserves that needs some time and research to cover. Not many general interest tourists put it on their itinerary: on the web I mostly found trip reports about multi-day hikes, for which you have to take everything with you on your back (25 kg seems to be a minimum). Paths are scarcely marked: those that are experienced enough to hike here get along fine with GPS and/or compass. From the comfort of my rental car I encountered several of these long distance hikers with their huge backpacks by the side of the road, waiting for a bus or just getting ready to start their walk.

Reindeer: check!

The designated area lies north of the Arctic Circle between the towns of Jokkmokk and Gällivare. I used the latter as my base for 2 nights. The town will never win any beauty contest, but if you’re not fussy I can recommend Gällivare B&B and the local Thai restaurant. I started my Laponian exploration with a day trip by car to Stora Sjöfallet National Park. From Gällivare it takes 2.5 hours (184 …

The Wadden Sea WHS covers a huge area along the coasts of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, so it’s an easy site to tick off. Getting a real feel for it though is a whole different story. I believe one should at least try to cover several different areas, and take in both the marine and coastal aspects. Early August 2015 I made my third trip to the inscribed area, still searching for its soul.

Wadden Sea seen from a distance

My first visit was in 1982: I was 12 years old and went on a school trip to the Wadden island of Vlieland. It was the first time that I went away for a couple of days without my parents, not counting a disastrous girl scout camp that I left crying already after one night. Vlieland was more of a succes, it’s a really popular holiday island geared to an active vacation. I still have some very funny pictures of that time. Although the islands are outside of the core zone of the WHS, you’ll inevitably cross the Wadden Sea by ferry. So technically – I had been …