The first time I saw Krampus was on a side street in the Old Town of Salzburg, and I should make it clear that “saw” is an understatement. What in fact took place was that a creature about eight feet tall, dressed in a fur coat and equipped with a…

For eleven days every winter, Venice turns itself into the world’s most elaborate costume party. Step into St. Mark’s Square on a Saturday afternoon during Carnevale, and you might spot a courtier in a gold-beaked plague mask posing beside the Basilica. A woman in a hooped gown the color of…

Thirty miles out in the Atlantic, past the last reliable cell signal, sits an island that once ran the world’s whale oil supply and now mostly runs on cranberry bogs, cedar shingles, and a waiting list for dinner reservations. Nantucket has spent three and a half centuries figuring out what…

At Dong Ba Market, a vendor raises a conical hat toward the doorway and tilts it in the morning light. Between the layers of palm leaf, a shape becomes visible: a line of verse and a bundle of bamboo, something that was not visible a moment before. This is the…

In the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam’s northeastern coast, more than 1,600 limestone islands rise straight from the water. This is Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Southeast Asia’s most visually arresting landscapes. The name translates to “Descending Dragon,” drawn from legend: a celestial dragon,…

A jogger breezes across Lexington Green on a Saturday morning, and a woman walks her dog past Captain John Parker’s statue, the colonial farmer and tradesman who ordered his 77 fellow colonials to stand and not fire unless fired upon.  The Revolutionary War battlefields are mostly quiet now, tucked back…

Zas Cave is halfway up the west face of Mount Zas, a dark tunnel in the side of the mountain that goes back 500 feet or so, and it is already five degrees cooler the instant you duck inside. Legend has it that the infant Zeus was hidden here by…

Williams, Arizona bills itself as the “the gateway to the Grand Canyon,” and for good reason: here, just as would be sightseers have for decades, you can board the Grand Canyon Railway and ride to the canyon’s South Rim. But before we go any further, let’s clear up a few…

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 thirty-five-minute walk 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 the Akrotiri peninsula.…