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The Reality of Montreal: The Hill Above the Skyline
A skyscraper in Montreal has to know when to stop. The city measures its towers against the summit of Mount Royal, the wooded hill…
North America
50 stories →
The Reality of Montreal: The Hill Above the Skyline
A skyscraper in Montreal has to know when to stop. The city measures its towers against the summit of Mount Royal, the…
Cheap flights to Montreal: check the airport code before you pay
A cheap ticket to “Montreal” can look settled right up to the payment screen. I would stop there and read the airport…
The Reality of Guanajuato: The City Poured Into a Ravine
Guanajuato fills a narrow cleft in the hills of central Mexico, on a floor barely wide enough for the stream that cut…
Cheap flights to Guanajuato: the airport on the plain, and the road beneath the town
Travelers planning a journey into Guanajuato arrive through an airfield that belongs to an entire region rather than to an individual municipality.…
The Reality of Vancouver: The City With a Rainforest at the End of the Bus Route
Walk fifteen minutes north-west from a glass office tower in downtown Vancouver and the noise stops. The light goes green. There are…
Cheap flights to Vancouver: the train inside the terminal, the surcharge that only runs one way, and the eTA to buy before the ticket
Vancouver's airport gives you the best arrival in North America and then charges you for it — once, in one direction, in…
South America
19 stories →
The Reality of Medellín: The City That Made Cable Cars Public Transport
You queue on a platform above a river, in a station as clean as a hospital, and the thing that arrives to…
Cheap flights to Medellín: the airport over the mountain, the one in the middle of town, and the morning fog that reshuffles both
The most useful thing I can tell you about flying to Medellín is that when you land at Medellín's international airport, you…
The Reality of Cusco: The Capital the Conquerors Overwrote
Cusco is a city judged twice, with the final verdict delivered by geology. It was the capital of the Inca Empire until…
Cheap flights to Lima: the brand-new terminal that moved everything overnight, the airport with no train, and the June week Cusco sells out
On one of my first trips to Peru, I booked a tight connection through Lima's airport, landing on a late-afternoon flight from…
Europe
135 stories →Cheap flights to Budapest: your bank card is the airport ticket
Budapest doesn't give arriving passengers an airport train to hunt down. It gives them a bus that does the job, runs around…
The Reality of Brussels: Where Comics Climb the Walls
Turn into a side street in Brussels and a gable that should be blank has grown figures, outlines and a scene that…
Cheap flights to Málaga: let the train line choose the room
Before I book Málaga, I want the hotel pin on a map. The airport sits on a commuter railway that can carry…
The Reality of Milan: The Cathedral That Came by Water
The marble under your hand on the roof of Milan Cathedral was cut in the mountains north of Lake Maggiore, and it…
Cheap flights to Edinburgh: pick the door before the fare
Flight search results make Edinburgh look like a single destination with a single price. It has two doors: the tram outside the…
The Reality of Split: The Town Inside an Emperor’s Palace
A café chair on Split's Peristyle can sit beside a Roman column without either object seeming misplaced. That is the clue. Diocletian,…
Asia
79 stories →
Cheap flights to Chiang Mai: choose the connection before the booking
A cheap flight to Chiang Mai can be a bad booking with a nice headline. From the States, the plane does not…
Cheap flights to Hanoi: Noi Bai is not the city
A cheap ticket to Hanoi gets you to Noi Bai. That is not the same thing as getting you to Hanoi. The…
The Reality of Kyoto: The City That Put Water to Work
Kyoto often asks you to look up: temple roofs, painted gates, mountains holding the basin. The more revealing habit is to look…
Cheap flights to Cebu: the airport is not the beach
A cheap ticket to Cebu can make the trip look finished when it is barely started. CEB puts you on Mactan, across…
Russia
24 stories →
Surgut: Siberia’s Oil Capital, and Why People Actually Go
Surgut is a company town on a continental scale. There has been a settlement on this bend of the Ob river since…
Tyumen: Siberia’s First Town and Its Winter Hot Springs
Tyumen has two claims worth knowing before you arrive. It was the first Russian town founded in Siberia, established in 1586 as…
Chelyabinsk: The Meteor City on the Edge of the Urals
Let us be honest about Chelyabinsk: it is an industrial city, and it does not pretend otherwise. It grew up on iron…
Samara: The Volga, a Secret Bunker and a Rocket in the Street
Samara is a big, easy-going city on the left bank of the Volga, and for most of the Soviet era outsiders were…
Pyatigorsk: Spa Town of the Caucasus and Lermontov’s Last Duel
Pyatigorsk is not a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else; people come here specifically, and usually for their…
Ufa: A Guide to the Capital of Bashkortostan
Capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Ufa spreads across hills between the Belaya and Ufa rivers in the southern Urals — a…
Africa
21 stories →
The Reality of Fez: the city that never let the car in — what a medieval city sounds like when nothing has an engine
Fes el-Bali is widely cited by convention as the largest car-free urban area in the world. The medina's lanes are simply too…
Cheap flights to Marrakesh: the low-cost boom into RAK, the airport six kilometres from the square, and the summer the fares invert
On one of my early trips to North Africa, I booked a cheap flight to Marrakesh, planning to spend my summer exploring…
Cheap flights to Cairo: the two-airport question nobody asks, the visa you sort out before the queue, and the museum that finally moved the calendar
On my first flight to Cairo, I arrived at the terminal assuming that purchasing a visa on arrival would be a simple…
The Reality of Tunis: The Medina and the Ghost of Carthage
Stand in the Tunis medina in the middle of the morning, and the city hits you all at once. The vaulted, stone-roofed…
Oceania
5 stories →
The Reality of Rotorua: Geothermal Power and Living Māori Culture
Walk down a quiet suburban street in Rotorua at dawn, and you might see thick white steam drifting casually from a front…
Cheap flights to Auckland: the long haul, strict biosecurity, and the NZeTA
Here is a quick way to earn an instant, non-negotiable fine: walk off a fifteen-hour flight at Auckland Airport, feel a wet…
Cheap flights to Sydney: the long haul, the Kangaroo Route, and the airport curfew
Here is a quick way to experience pre-flight panic: stand at the check-in desk in Los Angeles, hand over your passport, and…
The Reality of a Holiday in Australia: Visas, Flights and Distances
Australia has a strange place in the imagination: everyone wants to go, and almost everyone assumes they can't. It sits in the…
Sydney Opera House: History, Architecture and How to Visit
Some buildings are famous; a much smaller number have become shorthand for an entire country. The Sydney Opera House belongs to that…