We saw confirmation in December 2023 that Jamaica planned to submit The Underwater City of Port Royal as its 2025 nomination; whether they did so in time I could not verify. It will be their fourth attempt to get this site inscribed. It was rejected in 1988 (only the terrestrial area, deemed of national importance only), deferred in 2019 (more focus on the 17th century needed and worries about a cruise ship pier) and had an incomplete dossier last year. In 2019 ICOMOS did find some potential OUV though (“a possibly unrivalled illustration of an English colonial town in the 17th century”) and Jamaica may now have taken the right path of approach that will lead to an inscription. It will consist of a terrestrial and a marine part (comprising an underwater archaeological site). My review will only cover the terrestrial part, which I visited earlier this week.

Port Royal, a small fishing town at the end of a tombolo known as Palisadoes, is easily reached by bus from Downtown Kingston. The ride on bus 98 takes 45 minutes and costs 70 JD (0,40 EUR). This bus also stops at the airport, so you could theoretically …

This is a follow-up to last week’s blog post , and to an earlier one : several people have reached out to me saying that they want more statistics! I did have quite a number of these queries already available in raw format, and they were easy to transform into public pages that are dynamically updated. So that’s what I did in the past week.

Most potential I think lies in the data centered around Community Members and around Countries. As a start, I have focused on the Community data. I will look into the possibilities regarding Countries after my upcoming 6-week trip to the Americas.

Preconditions

Of course, it would be technically possible to combine the data of every community member (1563 with at least 1 WHS visited) with every category/connection/year/country, etc, but that would not lead to particularly interesting pages to look at. And running all those queries would be too hard on the database as well.

So I started working with the following preconditions:

• Use the Hall of Fame approach: the travel goal should be relatively hard to achieve.
• The lists should show a diversity of angles so that people …

The reviews this week featured the beginning of a series of updates on the Ethiopian WHS by Wojciech Fedoruk . After finishing a comprehensive trip covering 8 WHS in 15 days, in addition to an earlier trip where he visited 3, he is now the first on this website to have ‘completed’ Ethiopia. The photo below shows what he found at the Lower Valley of the Awash .

Completing Countries can be a satisfying subgoal in the WHS quest, and it doesn’t necessarily belong only to those with high total scores. In this post, I will present a closer look at this based on the ‘ticks’ logged by our community members.

Looking at the countries with at least 10 WHS, I was able to draw the following conclusions:

The easiest countries to complete

The easiest ones are the relatively small European countries where all WHS lie within their European territory:

• Austria: 65 persons
• Belgium: 61
• Croatia: 58
• Switzerland: 56
• Bulgaria: 56
• Israel: 47
• Czechia: 37
• Sweden: 35
• Poland: 31
• Germany: 30

Netherlands by contrast has only 14 people who have …

We’ve had the connection Gorilla habitat for a long time, but my recent visit to those at Bai Hokou (C.A.R.) got me thinking we’re missing something there. A fair number of WHS are inhabited by gorillas, but at only a limited amount of places you can actually as a tourist go and see them. They need to have ‘habituated’ groups, which are (extended) families trained to tolerate human presence. The habituation is a very time-consuming process, taking up to 10 years. And when the dominant silverback that you had singled out for this purpose suddenly dies, it all was for nothing as his family group will disintegrate. The habituated gorillas live wild but their location is tracked daily by staff. They also often are the subject of scientific studies.

Gorillas come in 4 ‘types’: they’re split into two main species, Eastern Gorilla and Western Gorilla, and each of those is made up of two subspecies. I’ve tried to make an inventory of at which WHS and TWHS you can visit them:

Eastern Gorilla

Eastern Gorillas live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. The species is subdivided into mountain gorillas and …

These natural clearings filled with wildlife from the Congo Basin are the holy grail among mammal watchers. For me, Dzanga Ndoki (the Central African Republic part of this transnational site) was to be a splurge visit in March 2020 – but it became my Covid travel disaster. After the park reopened, I still wanted to go but the prices rose beyond belief. Fortunately, I found a group tour operator wanting to do it for much less by entering overland from Cameroon.

This site also had been unreviewed so far on this website. Sangha Trinational WHS consists of 3 parks, of which the one in the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) surprisingly is the best equipped to receive visitors. Lobéké in Cameroon is rundown, while Nouabalé-Ndoki in Congo is temporarily closed and rumours have it that they want to turn it into a luxury destination. I wrote a Getting There topic on the Forum to elaborate on the practicalities of visiting the park in the C.A.R. This review further deals with what you can expect there.

Our first day was spent at Dzanga Bai, the most famous forest clearing, known as ‘the Serengeti of the Forest’. It’s …

The topic of foreigner pricing (“WHS where differential pricing is practiced between local and foreign visitors”, a.k.a. dual pricing) has already been discussed a few times on this website. But with 117 entries in the connection (and I am sure there are many more), it seems to be a common and accepted practice globally. So in this post, I’d like to draw a few conclusions from the data we have gathered. It also gives an insight into the pricing of WHS overall, as we managed to collect exact and fairly recent entry fees of almost 10% of all WHS.

Wealthy countries practicing foreigner pricing

Despite the practice being discriminatory and thus morally wrong, in the earlier discussions some people gave understanding to the poorest countries for introducing higher prices for foreigners (or maybe discounts for locals). Cambodia and Angkor is the classical example here. But are there also wealthier countries that do it? I used the UN’s country classification , which ranks countries from High Income to Low Income, with Upper Middle Income and Lower Middle Income in between, to verify this.

It turned out that, sporadically, a few High Income countries use it: …

2023 was my second year of full-time travel (read here about Day 0 and Year 1 ). It felt like a routine already, as I found the right balance between being home and away and I can now budget (travel) expenses like no other!

There were memorable trips to Madagascar, Pakistan and Zimbabwe (photo 3 shows a "bender" at Mana Pools NP), and I finally got to see what New York is in reality. You can find my updated Trip Planner here , including the actual ‘results’ of 2023. With an added total of 63 (44 new + 19 from the WHC), I am still right on track to reach 1,100 visited WHS before 2028.

Things I learned about WH Travel this year:

The best ones for the quest are the “free” ones

The ones that help the most to stay on track are the ones gained from a WHC session. In 2023 we had a double session with a lot of new inscriptions, of which I already visited 19. These made my total go up significantly without additional cost and compensated for the more expensive trips I did this year.

Going …

It’s the final day of the year – time to squeeze in another yearly overview of the reviews submitted to this website. 2023 was the year of a double WHC which gave most of us large numbers of bonus ‘ticks’.

Community Travel

Zoë (finally) has taken the top spot and crossed the mark of 1,000 visited WHS as the first on this website. Slowly we see that the people who still travel a lot are taking over the high rankings from the names we have become so familiar with over the past 10-20 years. The Top 10 was entered by Roman , climbing from position 16 to 9. Overall there was a strong rise in totals, aided by the high number of new WHS that were added during this year's double WHC session.

Memorable Reviews

We saw 510 new reviews published, 60 more than last year. 85 different people wrote them. I ( Els ) wrote the most (71!), followed by Clyde (42), Zoë (33) and Timonator (27).

We saw the first reviews for Dholavira ( Randi & Philipp ), Rachid Karami International Fair ( Christravelblog ), Lorentz NP and Ogasawara (both …

I had been looking forward to my trip to Pakistan , one of the few countries that were still on my “must-see” list, and the reality surely met my high expectations. People are friendly (they give you a bit more space than their Indian neighbours), the food is very good (if you like meat) and the country looks quite cheerful thanks to the colourful decorations of vehicles and even food stalls. Pakistan has become more accessible since it eased its visa requirements a few years ago to a fairly simple e-visa, and the region has seen less violence since 2021 although there is plenty of internal conflict left . Herewith are some tips for travelling to Pakistan as a WH Traveller.

1. Take in many of its TWHS

Pakistan only has 6 WHS to date. All are fully deserving and are rated between 3 and 4 stars by our community. But India, with whom it shared most of its history except for the past 75 years, has managed to get to 42 WHS! So Pakistan which is about a quarter of its size could easily aim for 10-12 as there is plenty of potential still …

The Monuments of Uch Sharif are on Pakistan’s Tentative List under the cumbersome name of ‘ Tomb of Bibi Jawindi, Baha'al-Halim and Ustead and the Tomb and Mosque of Jalaluddin Bukhari ’. They comprise a cluster of three stand-alone monumental tombs and a mosque-mausoleum in the town of Uch Sharif. They’re probably the most colourful sights you will encounter in Pakistan, and posting a photo of its iconic Bibi Jawindi tomb anywhere on social media will attract countless ‘likes’ from those who have never seen it.

Uch Sharif is considered the cradle of the ‘shrine worship culture’ that is still very present in today’s Pakistan. In the later Middle Ages, religious missionaries and scholars came from as far as Bukhara to Uch Sharif to convert local tribes to Islam. When they died, a tradition was started of veneration of their tombs and local people wanted to be buried close to them.

The four buildings of this ensemble stand together on a low hill adjacent to a river, which caused them severe flood damage in 1817. The compound has kept its original desert-like conditions and is mostly covered with small cemented graves.

The visit starts …