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This is probably the best sight I have seen in Korea. Beautifully located in the mountains (in a national park actually), miles from everywhere. Haeinsa is a big and colourful temple complex. There is a lot to see and to do in the area.

The wooden blocks are of course the main point of interest. They are housed in 4 buildings behind the main temple. You can look at them via the windows.

Remarkably, the blocks are still in their original housing, and due to the way of construction, they are well preserved. A few years ago a new building was erected for them, but the condition of the carved blocks started deteriorating quickly. So they moved them back, to their original places.

Seowons were private institutions combining education (in the form of preparation for admission to the national civic service) and Neo-Confucian worship. A serial proposal such as this is always worth checking out in detail, as there may be hidden surprises among the selected locations. Personally, I was happy to discover Dosan Seowon among the entries listed, a site that I visited on my Korea trip in 2001.

Dosan Seowon is located not far from Hahoe WHS, and I visited both on the same day (I even included a third 'national treasure', Jebiwon Buddha). My trip notes about Dosan Seowon are brief: “Idyllic location. Very quiet, only a handful of visitors. Lots of Korean film directors apparently come here for shooting traditional Korean footage.”. All memory of my activities of that day have since blurred, and the fact that I had not labeled the photos in my Korea photo album does not help either (mind you, 2001 was the pre-digital age).

There’s a large difference between the way I am visiting (future) WHS nowadays and how I travelled 15 years ago: I now put considerably more effort into arriving prepared. This research has only become possible because there is so much more information readily available. Dosan Seowon for example has a very detailed official website, where you can virtually walk through the complex. Each structure is shown and described. Thanks to that I was able to add captions to the photos.

Trying to relive my visit, I found …

To be able to take a look inside I had to take part in a guided tour. Normally not my cup of tea, because the time is so limited and other people always get in the way of your pictures. That proved to be the case also this time, but I wouldn't have missed Changdeokung itself.

What I liked most - apart from the scenery - was the ondol, the heating system. Traditionally, Korean houses were heated by generating heat under their floors. This system can be seen clearly at Changdeokgung, and it comes with two delicately pretty chimneys too.

Pulguksa Temple is one of the main points of interest in the Gyongyu-area, so it was full of (Korean) tourists. A picturesque place.

The Buddha in Sokkuram Grotto is a very delicate one. Three meters high, and very white. Unfortunately, you can only see it from a distance (behind glass). Photos are not allowed.

To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed by Kyongju (now spelled "Gyeongju" by the way). The historical relics are scattered around town, but most of them are not major sights. The cute Cheomsongdae Observatory is the one thing that you really must see here. So old, so delicate, and in such a good condition.

Mrs. Schröder lived in this house until she died in the 1980s. Nowadays it is open to the public and you can visit it on a guided tour.

The most remarkable aspect is that when Rietveld built this house, it was situated on the outskirts of the city of Utrecht. Only one year later a four-lane motorway was developed next to it, ruining both the sight and the quietness. Rietveld and Mrs. Schróder must have been devastated by this.

I took the tour with my mother, and we both thought it was very worthwhile. There are so many little ingenious aspects of the house that it's amazing. And to think that it was built in 1924, what a revolution it must have been at the time.

Fifteen minutes by boat from Helsinki Harbour gets you to Suomenlinna. The Helsinkians seem to favour it as a leisure park: to picnic, lie in the sun and drink a lot of alcohol.

For the curious visitor, there's a lot to see though. The Suomenlinna Museum shows a good documentary about the history of the island. It's also a lovely island by itself: the fact that about 900 people still live here permanently gives it an extra edge and takes it beyond an open-air museum.

Although I've seen quite a lot of so-called "medieval cities" in Europe, Tallinn came as a surprise. Its whole Old City is without modern buildings or distractions. I had a great time just roaming around without a map, peeking around corners.

Highlight - though not medieval, dating from 1900 - for me was the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It's a wonderful Russian-Orthodox church that looks like a big birthdaycake

Modern Paphos is a beach resort as there are so many in the Mediterranean. It's an unlikely place to find treasures of the past, treasures that are carefully being unearthed. The most spectacular findings are the Tombs of the Kings, graves that are set up like houses. There's a strong Egyptian connection here, and also a comparison with Petra (Jordania) has been made.

Only a few hundred meters from there, the most beautiful mosaics I have ever seen have been discovered. We're not talking about a few colored stones here and there, but about the floors of whole rooms and even of one total house. An amazing sight.

With some of these very ancient sites, your mind has to work hard to transform a bunch of stones into the great place it once was. This could also have been the case with 9000(!) year old Choirokoitia, but here they decided to rebuild a group of houses in the original style, just outside the archeological finding place.

From this, you learn that the inhabitants of the village lived in round, African-style huts. A few of them together formed an entity and shared the same courtyard. With this picture in mind, you walk up to the main part of the site and recognize easily the round clusters of stones that used to be the houses of the ancient Choirokoitians.

Far away, deep in the heart of Cyprus, a number of very old and special churches can be found. They are like hidden treasures, and also in the age of paved roads and cars, it takes some stamina to visit them.

Of the 9 enlisted churches, I visited 3: Panagia tou Asinou, Panagia tou Araka and Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis. Although they won their inclusion in the list mainly because of their interiors, I fell for their simple outside beauty. Often "just" a robust stone building, but in the best natural settings you can think of.

On my tour of the south of Nepal, I travelled from Chitwan (Sauraha) to Lumbini by public buses. A Japanese guy and I were dumped at the roadside, amidst flat agricultural lands and some forest. 'This is Lumbini', they told us. It's a quiet area, natural in outlook, and with its temples hidden from first sight.

The actual site is quite small: a few excavations and a large tree, that is all to see. Still, it is a very serene place. For a few years several Buddhist Asian countries are building their own temples and monasteries around the original site (according to the "Lumbini Masterplan" by a Japanese architect). They try to surpass each other in beauty. The very different building styles make for an eclectic view.

It certainly is not Africa: the big 5 is not to be seen here, but it is possible to go on a safari in Chitwan. In the early morning, I did a jungle walk. My two guides and I encountered a rhino and climbed up a tree to observe the magnificent animal.

Later that day I did a jeep safari, probably the best thing to do. Among others, we saw several sloth bears, recognizable for their white noses. No tigers, though ...

Well, this hobby of visiting world heritages really takes you off the beaten track: to a cemetery in this case. As it is a public place, you can just walk in and roam around freely.

Most remarkable is that the graves are hidden in the pine forests. The rest of the place impresses as a series of monuments.

All was relatively quiet then, that week in August when I visited this magnificent site. Highlights were the Dome of the Rock, the Armenian quarter including St. James Cathedral, and the weird Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The hundreds of bigger and smaller historical and religious remains are piled up in an area with a size of only 1 square km. That means that sometimes you have to look very well for something your travel guide names as a top attraction. And maybe you discover something much more beautiful on your way ...

Hagi housed the feudal lords of the Kyushu-Yamaguchi region, ending with Lord Takachika Mori (1819-71) who is associated with the proto-industrial trials around Hagi. The site includes the ruins of Hagi castle and many original buildings and streets in the well-preserved town, which has avoided the natural disasters that Japan is so prone to.

I visited Hagi on my first trip to Japan, in the year 2000. I did so on a day trip from Hiroshima. Hagi was (and probably still is) way off the beaten track. It is situated on the northern coast of Honshu Island, and it took me 2 hours on a bus and a train to get there. The ticket seller even had to ask twice if I really wanted to go there. "Hagi in Yamaguchi district you mean?"

The charm of old Hagi proved to be easy to find. Most of its historical buildings lie in the old samurai neighbourhoods. Long, whitewashed walls that line the streets are characteristic of this area. Some of the old houses are still lived in, others are museums. I started at the spacious house of the Kikuya family of Merchants.

Not far from there lies the cute little temple Ensei-ji. It is a combination of a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple. Besides the usual colourful ticket and a brochure in English, they also provided me with a poster of Hagi. And there were more gifts to come: at the little restaurant where I ate my …

The museum in the Park tells the story about the bomb on Hiroshima, but also about all the nuclear tests that were executed after that. I found this, and the rest of the Park, very impressive and tasteful.

Hiroshima itself is of course a very modern city, but I liked it a lot. It has a lot to offer, for example ... another World heritage! The Itsukushima Shrine is situated on an island in front of Hiroshima-City.

Within the valley, I visited the village of Ogimachi, a two-hour bus ride from Takayama in the middle of the Japanese Alps. There quite a lot of the Gassho-zukuri houses can still be found together.

Although it was packed with Japanese tourists, I liked it a lot. The environment is totally unlike the stereotype Japan. In a way, the scene remembered me of Bhutan, where in the green valleys also this kind of big houses annex farms still stand (however without the characteristic thatched roofs).

There are a lot of temples in Japan, but the ones at Nikko I liked most. Nikko on its own disproves the common remark that Japan does not have world-class sights.

The Toshogu-shrine is the best example of this. The main gate inside the complex is 11 meters high and painted with animals, flowers, and human figures. Especially the smallest details (which you can only see with binoculars or the zoom lens of your camera) are magnificent. What at first just looks like a coloured border later turns out to be a whole scene.

Nagasaki seems to have missed out on getting in early on the List, and will have a tough time making it now. Hiroshima has beaten it on the 'Peace'-theme, and I'm afraid Macao has done so on the 'European influences'-theme. So they're now aiming for the 'Christian'-theme, which has already 100 sites on the List!

During my stay in the city in 2000 I visited Glover Garden, Dejima, the local Chinatown, the freaky Fukusai-ji Zen-temple, the temple route between Kofuku-ji and Sofuku-ji, the Urakami Atomic Bomb museum, and (yes!) Oura Church. This probably is one of the proposed 'Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki', although you can't be sure as the sites are not named in the nomination file. Oura Church is a 19th-century catholic church with, according to my travel diary, 'beautiful stained glass windows'.