If you pick the wrong time to climb the “999 steps” of the Palamidi Fortress, those first 857 are the most difficult. In fact, there are not 999 steps; there are 857, and even for the physically fit, especially beneath the midday summer sun, the climb is strenuous. The best…

Hallstatt, Austria, has made an entire identity around being too idyllic to be real. However, its reputation is well-deserved and, for a reputation, strangely problematic, which is why the place is worth knowing for what it is rather than simply being photogenic. Humans have harvested salt from the hill above…

It is noon on Castle Hill, and the shot fires from a small battery near the old fortress walls. It has been going off at noon since 1860, when a Scottish resident,  Sir Thomas Coventry, reportedly sick of his wife’s habit of serving lunch late, asked the city if he…

The ?sign at Gouverneto Monastery described a walk of about thirty-five minutes down into a gorge. Almost casually, it informed me that the monastery we were looking for had been abandoned for roughly four hundred years. The walk descended a series of cut stone steps, switchbacking down a cliff on…

A man selling roasted sweet potatoes wheeled his cart directly into six lanes of moving traffic, set up between two idling buses, and kept working as though he were standing in a quiet kitchen. Around him, cars braided past each other with no visible signaling system beyond the horn, which…

Animal tourism’s worst offenses don’t come with an abuse sign per se. They come with an opportunity sign. Ride an elephant. Cuddle a tiger cub. Swim with a dolphin. Drink the world’s most expensive coffee. Such operations often use the word “sanctuary,” which in most countries literally means nothing and…

The island of Madeira is about 500 miles southwest of mainland Portugal, and 320 miles west of Morocco, closer in latitude to Casablanca than to Lisbon’s cafe tables. One of only two inhabited islands in the archipelago also includes the smaller Porto Santo; the other islands, the uninhabited Desertas and…

Somewhere ?between Waterbury and Stowe, a section of Vermont Route 100 holds up traffic every October. You round a hill, and it clicks: forty cars have pulled onto the shoulder, their hazards flashing, doors open, figures standing in the road with phones held aloft, trained on a hillside of sugar…

Chiang Mai has a charm that feels like Bangkok yet unlike it. The inhabitants of both cities share the same warm, mild disposition characteristic of Thai people, the same reflexive smile visitors often misread as shyness, and locals will tell you is closer to patience. Chiang Mai is small enough…

The conductor on the Railjet from Vienna to Salzburg pointed my friend Claudia toward car 21 without being asked.  She carried a folded stroller under one arm and a four-year-old by the hand, wearing the particular look of parents who had already tallied the price of three different forms of…

At ?the rental car counter inside Tirana’s airport, the clerk asked if I was heading straight to the coast like most of her other customers. Albania’s beaches are two to four hours south, cheaper and much less crowded than Croatia’s or Greece’s, and enough people who land here treat Tirana…

Crushed grass, green and slightly sweet-smelling, is piled higher than the people making the pile. It’s the second week of June on the banks of Peru’s Apurimac River, and four Andean Quechua communities, Choccayhua, Chaupibanda, Huinchiri, and Collana Quehue, have gathered on either side of a canyon to do the…