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The Quest for 1,100 visited WHS - Year 4
2025 was my fourth year of full-time travel (read here about Day 0, Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3). It was a “Year of Calculations”, as I had a big and expensive trip to #1,000 planned late in the year. The rest of the travel year was moulded to achieve exactly the right amount of WHS at the lowest possible cost.
My best-ranked newly visited WHS of this year, all 4* or more, include Djoudj National Park, the Ahwar of Southern Iraq, Damascus, the New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands and Macquarie Island. I am also glad that I could finally experience Iraq and Syria in a peaceful setting.
You can find my updated Trip Planner here, including the actual ‘results’ of 2025. With an added total of 54 (47 new + 7 from the WHC), I am still right on track.
The best ones are behind me
It’s a tough conclusion to make, but after having seen over 80% of all current WHS, I have to accept that I have already seen the best sites. Of course, there are still some to look forward to, but there is no Angkor, Florence or Virunga NP among them. I even got so far that I now only have 7 WHS left with a 4* or higher rating!
My favourite trips between #765 and #1000
During the past 4 years, during which I have been travelling full-time, these are the trips I look back to most fondly. In random order, they are:
- 5 weeks in Northern Brazil: all self-organized, the high quality of all (T)WHS here, and oh, the people!
- 2 weeks wild camping in Chad: so pure, like travelling in time. A collection of photos from that trip has been the screensaver on my laptop ever since.
- 3 weeks Zimbabwe in-depth, by all means of transport: I felt I got to know the country well.
- And of course, my cherry on the cake: the penguins of remote Macquarie Island!
The strategic approach for 2026
After passing the 1,000-mark, I am now embarking on a new stage of my WHS Quest. The cluster strategy has worked well: I think I have proven that focusing solely on WHS (rarely adding TWHS and no other ‘distractions’), choosing the biggest clusters of sites first and fully finishing these clusters (so not a single WHS in a remote corner is left behind), is a great tactic to get high numbers of ‘ticks’ quickly.
Things will be different for the next 100, because:
- Keeping the same pace is financially unsustainable: it is not possible anymore to hold on to the 650-EUR-a-WHS rule that I set myself in the previous stage, even 1,000 EUR per WHS seems a stretch. The WHS that are left are often isolated, difficult to access and far away from my home base. Or lie in a country I won't travel to right now (Russia, Iran, Israel). So with the yearly budget staying the same, I won’t be able to squeeze the same amount of WHS out of it.
- I got a bit tired of the cluster-approach: for every 10 WHS in a cluster, there usually are 4 poor ones, 4 that are OK and only 2 that are really good. So for the best part of a trip, you’re just ticking without seeing the best sights in the world. The cluster-approach also favours the large countries, and I don’t want to go to the same countries over and over again within a short time period (just to see more Chinese sacred mountains or Australian forests).
So for 2026, I will diversify more and focus on 3 types of sites:
- Countries or regions that appeal to me but got left behind because they have only 1 or 2 or even 0 WHS, or where I first visited ages ago.
- Good visits to natural sites. Taking Cerrado (Brazil) for example: you can have a perfectly tickable one-day visit to Chapada dos Veadeiros, as so many others did, but the real star here is Emas National Park with its Maned Wolves. This takes more time, money and research.
- Back to Europe again. I have done only a few trips around Europe for the last couple of years since I have visited virtually all its WHS already. But as I have written before, the high number of visits to European regions is among the best experiences of the journey overall.
Overall, this year, I expect my trips to be a bit shorter (1-2 weeks), more frequent, and to result in less additional WHS. This way, it will take me 3 years to get to 1,100.
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