On a map, the Kazakh WHS of Tanbaly (not to be confused with Tamgaly Tas !) doesn’t look to be too far from Almaty, but it takes quite some time to cover the 170km between the two places (we did it in 2h45). I went with a car & driver which I’d hired for the day via Indyguide , and we first had to navigate the busy and chaotic traffic to get out of Almaty. Then there’s a good stretch of highway west and, after the turnoff to the north which is signposted to the Site of Tanbaly, what remains is a B-road with some potholes but little traffic. The only thing you see by the side of the road are large farms, and they keep sheep and horses as livestock. As so often with rock art sites, Tanbaly lies in a remote river canyon that once had special meaning for people living in or passing through the region but lost its significance later on. It’s also the only piece of exposed rock in an area of steppes and offers protection against the sun and wind.

Our first stop was at the museum, which was given …

As Solivagant has written, China is a new country every 10 years . I hadn’t been there since early 2019 - and even since then it has changed again. It has started to look more and more like Japan, especially in the most prosperous part of the country. If you look closely you may still notice an elderly person spitting into a garbage can, and I even spotted a group of pensioners playing cards (or gambling?) under a bridge in Hangzhou. But the younger generations in the cities seem like a different breed.

To stimulate the return of international tourism after COVID, the Chinese government has allowed a 15-day visa-free entrance into the country for a select group of nationalities (the group seems a bit random but a major factor appears to be the country's appeal to visiting Chinese tourists). So fortunately the Chinese love the Dutch flower fields and I was let into the country without questions.

Please find below my Tips for visiting WHS in China on the 15-day visa-free scheme.

1. You can pack in a lot in 15 days

China is so huge that it doesn’t matter whether you have ‘only’ 15 days or 3 months. …

China usually doesn’t have much trouble inscribing sites, but it did have a hard time with China Danxia . “Danxia” is an elusive subject, even Wikipedia isn’t able to define it in one sentence (it calls it “pseudo-karst” consisting of red-coloured sandstones from the Cretaceous and limited to China). ICOMOS and IUCN couldn’t really wrap their heads around it either – IUCN basically saying there isn’t such a thing as a globally acknowledged Danxia landform and ICOMOS insisting that this should be a cultural site (criterion VI, rich cultural associations) instead of a natural site (criterion VII, natural beauty).

Eight out of the nine locations that comprise the WHS of ‘China Danxia’ have so far stayed unreviewed on this website. I visited a ‘new’ one – the Guifeng section of Longhushan National Park. This site is separate from the main Longhushan park (both in geographical reality and in the inscribed list of components), but they share the same site management and Global Geopark status. The strength of Guifeng is that it is very compact, so you can get a good impression of what Danxia entails within a relatively short amount of time.

Unlike other Chinese …

The WHS of Mount Wuyi has not been covered well by reviews yet - at least I think they do not do justice to the complexity of this mixed WHS. After reading beforehand about what to see and do in the area I decided to spend more than one day here and explore various parts.

On my arrival day, I moved straight to the second location called “Ruin of Han Dynasty City”. This lies some 15km outside of the Wuyi scenic area. From Nanpingshi railway station (formerly known as Wuyishan East) I took the recently installed tramway and got off at Chengcun, from where it’s a 3km walk to the ruins (it’s signposted and you can use the bike path). It’s a location of interest in the inscription history of this WHS, as ICOMOS in 1999 actually considered it a separate site and thought it would be better to split this cultural archeological site from the more nature-focused main site.

The split didn’t happen though and now the Han City Ruins are part of the Wuyi WHS, and they proudly display the WH logo everywhere. Strangely, access regulations are different between the two locations – …

While preparing for my upcoming trip to Kazakhstan I found out that both parks that together form the Saryarka WHS are ‘Strict Nature Reserves’. We already have a connection for that (of course), and I took the opportunity to refresh it. I had always thought that these Strict Reserves wouldn't allow for tourist visits (we had that in our connection description as well: "a zone with the highest wilderness protection and not open to tourism"), but it turns out that the story is different.

What is meant by “Strict”?

IUCN over the years has developed a system to categorize protected areas – the most recent incarnation dates from 1994. It is meant to provide international standards and is used locally to provide a basis for legislation. This system ranks from high to lower levels of protection, represented by categories I to VI with I being the highest. See this source for how it works, the quotes below were taken from this document.

The Strict Nature Reserve is category Ia . Here, “human visitation, use and impacts are strictly controlled and limited to ensure protection of the conservation values”. The reserves protect natural features “that …

We are awaiting the publication of the documents for the 2024 WHC session, which will become available online in about a month or so. These documents will not only give us the AB advisories for the 2024 nominations but also bring the full list of nominations for 2025 to the table. “Predicting” these possible new WHS has been a significant community effort of this website for years; it makes it possible to plan your travels by taking in the Upcoming Nominations .

So how good are we at predicting? Nominations aren't always as clearly announced as by this Chinese news outlet:

A bit of History

In 2009 we started from a document someone had found floating around on the web, and the years 2010 and 2011 saw similar patterns. For the WHC of 2012, a forum topic was started in late 2010: this was the first time a set of candidates was identified based on media sources before the official UNESCO document set was published.

Kyle/winterkjm now yearly makes neat lists based on crawling the web in various languages. His overviews and the forum topics invite others to amend these lists with sites …

The birding community is probably the oldest and largest in the world of people who travel to complete lists. There has been an intriguing event in that community recently, where two people claimed, on the same day, to have seen over 10,000 bird species – the first person(s) to do so. Even with no interest in birding, the debate that followed has produced interesting conclusions that are valid for all those who travel by lists.

Getting there

The recipe for reaching the high numbers seems to be quite similar. With a total number of identified birds between 10,906 and 11,189 (depending on which list you follow ) and the WHS total currently at 1199, for birders thousands are what hundreds are for WH travellers.

So how do you get as far as 8,000 or 9,000 birds (or 800 or 900 WHS)? Moving up the list slowly via the 400(0)s and 600(0)s can be achieved while working full time: ” Their differences are not time and money but dedication, effort, determination, longevity, obsession, etc. ”. But “ It is the marginal differences that produce 8,000+, 9,000+, etc. Those are big totals. The clean-up trips. The …

For some reason, #900 does not feel as much of an achievement as #800 – maybe because I am already planning toward #1000. It certainly never has been a goal in itself. Still, visiting 900 means having covered 75% of all WHS at the time of writing!

I did not ‘engineer’ #900 - my European to-do list is tiny, and my choices for a short getaway in April virtually were between St. Kilda (wrong season), Odesa (rocket attacks), or Rosia Montana. Roșia Montană Mining Landscape popped up as a WHS in 2021 after I had done the rest of Romania already in 2010. Two nearby TWHS also are up for nomination this year , so it was an easy choice. A direct WizzAir-flight between Eindhoven (NL) and Cluj-Napoca (the only international airport in NW Romania) was an added advantage.

Roșia Montană has grown into something of a ‘cult site’ in the WH Community, while it seems rarely visited by ‘normal’ tourists. Several sources had suggested that if I wanted to see the underground mines from Roman times (that’s where the OUV is), I should announce my visit beforehand. It was funny to read the many …

Plant WHS may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but since my blog post from a month ago Solivagant and I have deep-dived into the Centres of Plant Diversity (CPDs). We got access to the full list and mapped the WHS to CPDs, resulting in two new connections. And, as always with exercises like this, we also learned some other things about WHS and the WH process along the way.

The Books

After a short exploration of the topic on our Forum , it became clear quickly that we could not finish this without having access to at least one (and possibly all three) of the CPD books. These are generally sold new at high prices (60-100 EUR each), but cheaper copies can be bought from online second-hand bookstores. I got Volume 3 (Americas) and Solivagant acquired the whole set including the other continents. It turned out that we needed the full set, as each volume only lists the CPD in its geographical region.

If you’re into encyclopedic specialist works, you might like to have these CPD books in your collection. Each volume is a large hardcover of up to 600 pages, including …

Since its inscription, the Stoclet House in Brussels has been a thorn in the side of the WH community, whose members generally enjoy “the romantic idea that a “World Heritage” should be accessible to the world” (it's even #1 of our Commandments ). Its closure has been compared to that of very strict nature reserves, but there at least the buffer zone often supplies similar values (though a bit more degraded) and a visitor center. No other means of interpretation are available for the Stoclet House and what you can see now is the tip of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' iceberg. Not only can you not visit its interior, but you can also not even see its garden (explicit part of the OUV) and its ‘best’ exterior architecture; any view now is limited to the austere back façade. When you stand on the pavement in front of the building at the Tervurenlaan this is often not understood. Look at this maquette for what the building fully involves:

It's like a small palace (the French name generally used is "Palais Stoclet"), with elaborately designed gardens and terraces and all of that within a city setting.

The exhibition and …