Petra, in southern Jordan, is not an obscure site. It was the capital of the Nabataeans, a trading people who carved and built a city into rose-coloured sandstone at a…
Rice is the most widely eaten staple on the planet, and the interesting thing is how differently it gets treated. Some traditions want every grain separate, some want it deliberately…
Travel advice tends to assume everything goes to plan. In practice, the useful skill is knowing what to do when it does not — and most of that skill is…
The great railway stations were built to impress, at a moment when rail travel was new and cities were competing to announce their arrival. Most airports have never attempted anything…
The Taj Mahal was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, and it has become the world's most recognizable monument to grief.…
Most people picture the Panama Canal as a ditch: a channel cut through the isthmus, joining two oceans, with ships sailing along it. That picture is wrong in a specific…