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Spain’s apparent objective of gaining WHS status for all of its islands continues in 2019 with Gran Canaria (GC) - Menorca is next in line for 2022! Serendipity, rather than an obsessive chase after potential upcoming WHS, took us there for just 1 day in Jan 2019 and we fitted in a visit to the nominated site of “Risco Caido and the sacred mountains of Gran Canaria Cultural Landscape”

The Canaries (population c2.2 million) already have 3 WHS. A “colonial town” (the rather “average” San Cristobal de Laguna), “Volcanism” (Teide NP) and “relict Macronesian vegetation” (Garajonay NP). So - what could be left for other islands – a “near duplicate” of one of the former subjects? Luckily there is an, as yet unrepresented, possibility - the archaeological sites of the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the Canaries, known as the “Guanche”! They are considered originally to have reached the Canaries from N Africa some time after 1000 BC (possibly no earlier than 500BC) and to have been of Amazigh (Berber) origin. By the time of CE they had, on each island, developed a range of different but similar cultures and appear to have remained reasonably isolated from their continental neighbours until they were invaded in 1402 by a Norman adventurer working for Castille - Jean de Béthencourt. Although they only had primitive weapons, some of the islanders put up strong resistance, and their final defeat took until 1496. Subsequently they were “ethnically …

I am finally writing a review because I have decided I will never REALLY visit the site, and I doubt most tourists have the chance. It is actually super easy to visit but like so many national parks in China the protected area not accessible which are the best part I suppose. The G109 highway as well as the Xining - Lhasa train cut right through the reserve and thus you will have been at Hoh Xil. You won't see much from here but maybe a glimpse of the antelopes extant to this very much uninhabited area. Apparently there is a huge problem with poaching for the underpaid police force, with volunteers helping out (source of this info may be censored news). I do mention this because it makes me wonder how it got listed and not directly onto the in-danger list but I suppose national parks in Africa can have this problem without getting the committee on their @ss right away. Perhaps the idea is that the recognition will lead to stronger support for the area, already there is a communication improvement in the works with satellite dishes at police stations. I should help next time some geologist gets lost in the reserve.

So I had visited this years ago and wanted to join a tour for a proper visit. First of it is not easy to search for it because there is a Chinese movie by the same name as the reserve so most results will be …

Home to just under 500 permanent residents, Lord Howe is also restricted to just 400 tourist beds, and Quantas has exclusive rights from mainland Australia which makes both airfares and accomodation extremely expensive. Very rarely I have to ask help from the local tourism office, but on Lord Howe this was the case, as I was unable to book a bed, after purchasing the airticket from Sydney. They found Hideaway Guesthouse at 250 AUD a night, just a short walk uphill from that very same tourism office which also houses the island’s museum, and the best internet connection to the outside world. Rent a bike or simply walk around the island, clim the hills to make good photos, and swim in the turquoise and azure blue shades beaches with perfect white sugar beaches like Lagoon or Ned’s. Even the airport is surrounded by the most beautiful beaches, and after checking and the boarding pass in the pockets, I could still enjoy a swim nearby.

The historic center of the Pienza is inscribed on UNESCO List because it occupies a seminal position in the development of the concept of the planned “ideal town”, but you have to be a student of architectural history to fully appreciate that. For a relative dilettante, Pienza is simply a gorgeous postcard-size hill town, with no vehicular traffic on its narrow streets and dozens of picture-spot opportunities around every corner. Not too overrun by tourists either, probably on the account of being less famous than the likes of Siena or San Gimignano as well as sitting somewhat away from the beaten path.

Its size means that an hour or so is enough to cover the entire historic part of Pienza on foot. Piazza Pio II and Corso Rosselino are where most of the major architectural landmarks are situated, and there are a number of quaint little walkways and a terrace with sweeping views over Val d'Orcia. The cathedral is certainly worth stepping in; a visit to Palazzo Piccolomini as well as exploration of artisan shops can stretch the time in town to about half a day.

Since Val d'Orcia is a World Heritage site on its own merit, you should combine your visit to Pienza with a leisurely drive along SP146 towards San Quirico - or some other similar route - which offers many good viewpoints to appreciate the scenery for which the valley is renowned.

My visit to Reims took place nearly a decade ago, but the buildings recognized on this site's inscription have stood for centuries, so I expect that my impressions remain relevant.

Notre-Dame de Reims, along with nearby archbishop’s palace (called Tau Palace), are inscribed on UNESCO list both for the architectural merit and for historical significance. The great church is among the most magnificent cathedrals in Christendom, well worth a dedicated visit even if you don't see anything else in town. The present structure dates from the 13th century and have been extensively restored after the damage sustained during World War I. The original seat of Archdiocese of Reims existed on this site since the 5th century, when the most famous of Archbishops, Saint Rémi, first anointed a king of Franks, which gave rise to the ceremony that lasted through almost the entire history of the French monarchy.

The interior of the cathedral is light and airy, and the stained glass is positively sparkling, no doubt partially due to the aforementioned comparatively recent restoration efforts.For whatever reason, Tau Palace did not leave a lasting impression with me, although the audio-guide provided plenty of historic perspective.

Beyond the UNESCO site, central Reims is pleasant to stroll around and not without eye-catching architecture. And, of course, this is Champagne - including a visit to cellars around town is among the musts when in area.

This was certainly the weirdest TWHS I ever visited. Me and fellow enthusiast Nan stopped there on the way from the Danube delta back to Bulgaria. It’s not too far off the highway. But getting close turned out to be a real adventure.

Whatever Romania tried to establish there, they must have given up these plans. The archeological remains are covered by a massive unfinished concrete building in a fenced compound. Through a few windows (rather holes) some features of the site can be spotted. We even trespassed through the fence to get closer, but without much success. Whatever Romania once considered as of OUV lies now abandoned, covered in bird poo and surrounded by wilderness (which we conquered to get a closer look). To top the experience, the area seems to be an active military training ground and we were lucky our car wasn’t crushed by a tank. There was also a monastery on top of the hill, but probably not part of the core zone. I would not count on this ever becoming a WHS. At least the visit was an adventure

I squeezed in this “visit” by having more time than expected as I visited Mount Khajeh. Little did I know that the lake is dry in winter and that the road is only a sandy path for 4WD by taking a left turn instead of going up the mountain. You can probably make out the wetland better in summertime. Thus Lake Helmand is not really worth trying to visit. I understand now that the other two parts are north of Zabol and I did not go anywhere up there, with one of the lakes shared with the Afghanistan border I assume it is off-limits anyway, and one completely in Afghanistan?!. Not a very good review, I know, I suppose mainly due to not being accessible. Even if this gets the notch for an inscription I would think a trans-national site is required with the help of Afghanistan.

Hail Rock Art is one of the easier places to visit in the Kingdom. I wanted to come a day earlier but got stuck on a road leading into the dessert which I guess I wouldn't know without reading an Arabic sign or there wasn't a sign and they assume everyone will pass this area with a 4WD. No point in talking about it more but if you are coming from the southwest you have to get to Hail first, then turn west. If you are coming from Riyadh then it's clear how to drive anyway.

There are two locations, one in the far south of Hail but it's in the middle of nowhere so the choice was clear: Jubbah. I also inquired at the National Museum in Riyadh about a permit and they told me to find someone in Hail but actually that's not true. I think the term “permit” in the KSA means more like “get an official guide who arranges everything”.

So I got to the Jubbah site in the morning and the signs are very clear to find it. There was a huge tourist bus with a few Asian tourists standing nearby and I thought after a week of no foreigners I would get hit by an annoying tour bus from SE Asia or something but it turns out it was just 5 friendly Thai guests and their tour guide uses the massive bus for any tour group size. I walked into the administration …

Batroun has one special feature: a piece of Phoenician wall at the coast. This is something I never saw before and worth a visit. It almost looks natural, made of the same material as the shore. It was built to protect the town from tidal waves. The rest of the center however is nothing special at all. There is a souk, some churches and that is basically it. Part of the nomination is a small, but funny looking crusader fortress on a small rock, close to the town. You can see it from the highway on route to the Qadisha valley. Not sure this site will ever make the list.

The town can be reached very easy on the costal highway. It's just a few minutes north from Byblos.

It takes a visit to the national museum to comprehend the significance of the temple of Eshmun. The number and quality of exponents found at this temple almost matches the one’s from Tyre ore Byblos. Look out for the baby statues. They are amazing.

The temple is easy to reach, close to Sidon and the coastal highway. There is a small parking lot and entrance is free. No information at all is available on site, so you need to read up first. You can wander around freely and explore, but this is done pretty fast as the whole premise is rather small.

I personally think the temple would make a worthy entry on the list. It’s a Phoenician temple, dedicated to the god of healing and Phoenician sites (at least with clear focus on Phoenician) are not exactly overrepresented. It still has some features to admire, such as the Throne of Astarte and some mosaics. Unfortunately, they started the construction of an ugly building on the hill in the back of the temple, destroying a bit the view. Also it doesn’t seem to much conservation work is going on. I really hope this changes in future.

Qalhat looks like a joke nomination but apparently there is more than the lone building at the side of the highway. Unfortunately I can't report better news than the other visitors and my visit was in Dec 2018; you can “get” to the site in three ways:

• Snap a picture from the highway coming from the East. There seems to be a parking lot just for this purpose. If you have a good sense you can get a really close up view of the mosque standing there, or binoculars. Yes it is lame. Let's try number 2.

• Drive into Qalhat new town by following the misleading brown signs to the archeological site. Well, actually the signs stop after the highway turn-off but follow the road along the coast/beach and do not turn right into the town instead continuing onwards to the river where the road bends right and you can see the raised area beyond the river. Soon there is a gravel road turning left. No sign to indicate the archeological site is that way but soon a “CLOSED” sign greets you on the other side. For a brief moment you may think if you should drive up anyway but let me tell you there is a gate at the top and you will need to reserve downhill a gravel road. I didn't see any guards but this is probably out of the question. Still though, you could walk up the hill and see what's going …

I visited this beautiful national park in June 2012. LC Peru operates daily flights from Lima to Huaraz, the perfect location to explore the park and “nearby” Chavín. I wish I could write about a several days hike through the park, but we also took the lazy way in and visited Lagunas Llanganuco. We did not book a tour but went for public transport instead. From Huaraz we took a public bus to Yungay. Taxis are waiting at Yungay bus station to bring you to the lagunas and back. The lagunas provide stunning views of Peru’s highest mountain and an overall very beautiful scenery. We walked around the lake to do at least a bit of hiking. But I’m sure this area would deserve a much more serious hike.

Like most visitors, we also passed through a different part of the park when driving to Chavín. This high plateau looked like a random Swiss mountain area over the timberline. Still beautiful, but nowhere close the beauty of the Llangnuco region.

If any site in India should be de-listed it is Champaner. Unlike Manas which I find has no more value left, this inscription makes a mockery of any kind of buffer zone and management plan requirements. There is definitely value here and I enjoyed what I saw, a massive fort area that covers the two prominent mosque, several tombs and city walls, a hill that I didn't visit because there was a festival and I think the driver wanted to avoid getting stuck in traffic for hours (or an excuse), definitely value. However, even 7 years on since the last review nothing has changed. It has been inscribed for 13 years now. The slums are still inside the archeological park, the trash keeps piling up and we get charged 600 rupees for two mosque entries. The best part of these are the carvings but you will admire it for 20 minutes max and it is not as spectacular as other carvings in India.

The good news is that the road from Vadodara only take 40 minutes now, and if you want another approach you could get off Godrah junction and find a ride from there. I took an Ola for 1,400 half day outstation trip, with the driver coming sightseeing himself. Interesting enough there was NO guide service touting at either mosque. I expected a lot more from this and scheduled half a day else I would have rushed to somewhere else for the afternoon but instead I spent …

I visited Sopocani as part of a road trip through Serbia, starting and ending in Belgrade. The site is a bit off the beaten path and certainly not in a tourist region. Novi Pazar is one of these towns that make you doubt you are in a developed part of the world. The sites within the city however are easy to find. St Peter’s church and the cemetery were open for visit without entry fee. We spent the night in Stari Ras, which is actually just a hotel and some ruins.

From the hotel (RAS Pazatiste) there is a small footpath leading to the fortress ruin on the top of the hill. It’s a nice little hike and chances are you won’t meet anybody and have the ruins all for yourself. From the hotel you can follow the road to the Sopocani monastery (around 7mins by car). You will find a smaller version of the Studenica monastery, but still enjoyable enough to be worth the effort.

An attractive city to the south-west of Barcelona, Tarragona’s claim to UNESCO recognition revolves around its Roman past, as evidenced by a significant number of architectural remains in and around the city. Its long history means that the medieval, Renaissance, and modern architecture coexist with the remnants of Roman glory. Find yourself in the Plaça del Forum for the best example of that: a standalone fragment of the erstwhile Forum walls surrounded by much later architecture.

On my visit to town in the summer of 2016, I stopped by a number of locations named in the UNESCO description. A walk along city walls is both pleasant and educational, with a lot of information about the city history displayed on stands along the path (in several languages, English included). The walls were built up from different types of materials in different eras, fascinating in their own right.

I also explored the Circus, with ruins on the ground level and several impressive spaces underground. Amphitheater can be seen from a number of points above it, and I decided to limit myself to the exterior observation.

Less than 10 minutes away from the town center is, for me, the most impressive of the surviving Roman monuments, an aqueduct that bears the name of Ponte del Diablo. Walking across it was among the highlights of my trip. The aqueduct sits in a natural park that practically knocked me out with the smells of pine needles and flowers. Nature lovers will find …

In December 2018, I visited the Omo Valley in far southwestern Ethiopia, including the Hamar people (known for their bull-jumping ceremonies and where the women curl and color their hair with ochre clay and butter), Daasanach people (the most southernly of the tribes who live in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, where I attended a Dimi ceremony), Karo people (known for painting their faces and bodies with white chalk, red ochre, yellow mineral rock and black charcoal) and Mursi people (known for the lip plates and outrageous headdresses worn mostly by elderly women). As best as I could tell, the Karo village that I visited sat above the lower valley of the Omo River. I arranged my tour with Fitsum Ashebir, the founder of Omo Valley Tours, one of the best guides with whom I have ever worked; instead of paying a per photo fee (as so many seem to do in the Omo Valley), Fitsum, who is well known by all the village chiefs, arranged for us to pay a flat fee that allowed unlimited photos and made for a much more pleasant experience than I understand was experienced by some friends who paid per camera photo (where the subjects counts camera clicks).

Ras al Jinz is more than the resort/museum, tagged along a huge coastal nature reserve Ras al Had, which in turn I don't think it is accessible without going to said hotel. I'm totally up for turtle preservation and this coastal beach area gets all FOUR species laying eggs here at different times of the world. I don't think the world heritage committee would have any problem inscribing this. Okay, so let's get into detail:

The museum is 3h from Muscat with the Qalhat WHS a decent picture stopover. You obviously need a car for getting here. The resort is a very VERY expensive hotel, and the rooms are very basic. I thought hard about staying nearby and just arranging a timeslot but the emails were not returned and after calling them I still wasn't sure what is going on. I went ahead and booked the hotel to guarantee a night viewing slot and THEN the email for answered. As a guest your visit is included. I know now that not everyone got to go who wasn't a hotel guest. It was low season so they don't have enough turtles attempting to lay eggs and the max seems to be 3 groups per female with maybe 20 people per group but so many people showed up at the lobby to see it there must have been 200. Honestly the turtle laying eggs were disappointing and some tourists just kept creeping closer for pictures (that will look crap anyway as …

As an Australian, I'm completely fine with all manner of poisonous insects, bugs, spiders, and other creepy crawlies. They just don't bother me that much. Leeches, however - they bother me. A lot. So although we were quite keen on doing some hiking around the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka, when we learned that all of the national parks were infested with leeches, our enthusiasm waned somewhat.

But, we pressed forward with our plans and came up with probably the cheapest and easiest way to access the World Heritage site. We did a self-guided day trip to Knuckles Range, using entirely public transport from Kandy. To do this: catch bus #22 to Mahiyanganaya from the central bus station. Hop off at Hunnasgiriya, about 90 minutes into the journey (tickets cost us 80 rupees each in Jan '19, or about $0.45 USD). From here, grab a tuk-tuk up the 7km mountain road to Deenstone Conservation Centre - we negotiated 500 rupees each way, and tipped him for waiting around. Entrance to the Knuckles Range here cost us 575 rupees + 15% VAT.

From here, you can do a gentle one-hour hike to a couple of viewpoints called Mini Worlds End 1 and Mini Worlds End 2. I don't think they compare to the proper Worlds End views at Horton Plains, but it was still quite nice and we enjoyed the views across rugged mountains, tea plantations, rice paddies and the like. The path is well-defined and after covering ourselves …

What struck me during my recent China trip is that one is constantly time-travelling here: one city can be ultra-modern and the ‘next’ one still functioning in a time-warp 15 years back. This also is the case with Xiamen and Quanzhou, superficially similar cities located half an hour by fast train from each other on the South-East Coast. Where Xiamen feels like a subtropical version of Shanghai including the European architecture, Quanzhou is a run-of-the-mill Chinese city diligently working for progress. If we are interpreting the signs well, Quanzhou's historic monuments will be China’s WH candidate for 2020 after 'earning' a referral last year.

Quanzhou had its heydays in the 10th – 14th centuries when it was an important stop on the Maritime Silk Road. The Chinese traded from here with countries in the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific.

Quanzhou’s nomination undoubtedly will focus on its multi-religious character. Its Unique Selling Point for that is the Qingjing Mosque. Built in 1009, it today is the oldest Arab-style mosque in China. I visited on a Friday, it was prayer day and from all sides Chinese (and foreign-looking) Muslims were arriving. The old mosque has mostly fallen into ruins, but next to it is a new building that is still in full use.

Tourists have to buy a ticket for 3 Yuan at the visitor center at the back before being allowed to enter through the impressive gate. The old part of the mosque complex consists of 2 …

Kashan is potentially a hotspot for WHS but even without the title it is a superb stop for a full day of sightseeing. The brochure handed to me talks of more activities in and around town but the highlights surely are the Fin Garden (already WHS), Agha Bozorg Mosque as well as the numerous historical houses in the center of town plus Sialk Hills once they finish setting up the museum.

The houses are hard to miss. The center of Kashan has an entire district with them. I cannot say which one is the “best” because as great as they are after 3 it becomes a little repetitive so I didn't visit more. Even with the cheap ticket I didn't want to spend more time on it. I personally liked Borujerdiha the most. It is impressive, gave me a wow effect stepping into the courtyard which doesn't happen often, the beautiful decorations and perhaps because it was the first one I visited. The benefit for the house is the close location to the main road entrance so I started out there.

The stone carvings all over are beautiful. The courtyard have steps going down at each corner into the neat fountain, and the main attraction is the house at the end. The cellar is empty but the back has wood carvings in between the well designed upper section stone carvings. Each corner of the room shines something new into your eye. If a section of the room is …