Travel
Discover facts about travel. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Travel
The Victorian inventor who turned travel into a slide show
Long before obnoxious influencers pitched detox tea from Bali, a Victorian hustler coined the word 'travelogue' and made an absolute fortune charging people…
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Taking your car abroad can require a huge cash deposit
Taking your vehicle overland sounds liberating until you realize you need a specialized paper passport and a massive bank deposit just to prove you won't…
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The traveler who funded her journey by selling insects
You think backpacking on a budget is tough, try being a middle-aged Austrian woman in 1842 financing her trip around the world by literally hunting exotic…
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The disaster cruises that followed Krakatoa
Nothing screams 'relaxing vacation' like sailing a steamship through literal floating pumice and debris to gawk at a volcano that just murdered 36,000 people.…
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Nellie Bly traveled around the world with one dress
Packing light is an art form, but Nellie Bly turned it into a world record when she circumnavigated the earth in 72 days with a single handbag. Driven by a…
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The travel document created for people without a country
In a world obsessively divided by borders, the UN had to literally invent a bureaucratic ghost passport just so millions of displaced people could legally…
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The Summer of Love overwhelmed San Francisco
What started as a utopian hippie enclave quickly devolved into an absolute logistical nightmare when national media coverage essentially published a travel…
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When rocket scientists pitched hotels on the Moon
Decades before billionaires started joyriding in rockets, Wernher von Braun and mid-century rocket scientists tried to secure government funding by pitching…
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Freya Stark explored Iran's Valleys of the Assassins
Why write a boring memoir when you can casually wander into the unmapped, hostile territories of the Middle East during the 1930s just to spice up your…
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Empty ship cabins helped invent budget cruises
When the U.S. slammed the door on immigrants in 1924, desperate transatlantic shipping companies had to figure out what to do with all their empty steerage…
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Why Yellowstone’s useless land became a park
Following the 1871 Hayden Geological Survey, Congress didn't officially establish Yellowstone as a National Park because they were suddenly overcome by a deep…
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Britain once legally barred Black people from bus jobs
Think the UK was entirely above the segregation fray while the American South was protesting? Not quite. Well into the 1960s, the Bristol Omnibus Company…
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When train rides included shooting bison
The 1869 completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad is lauded as an engineering marvel, but it was also a massive ecological catastrophe marketed as a…
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The pirate whose journals influenced Charles Darwin
William Dampier was a ruthless 17th-century buccaneer who violently plundered Spanish galleons, but he was also a massive science nerd. In between looting…
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Why Bunong families share homes with livestock
Personal space is a hilarious modern myth inside the traditional Bunong longhouses of Mondulkiri. These massive, windowless thatch tubes curve almost to the…
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Why tourists brave Kawah Ijen's blue fire
Giving yourself a minor respiratory injury is a small price to pay for an aesthetic midnight photo of electric blue fire. Tourists wake up at midnight to…
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Norway's road with 13 terrifying hairpin turns
Sweaty palms and grinding gears are the main attractions on the Stalheimskleiva, one of Northern Europe's steepest roads. Built by hand in the 1840s, this…
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The Dutch village shaped like a perfect star
Obsessive-compulsive map nerds absolutely lose their minds over Bourtange, a Dutch village shaped like a flawless, geometric star. Originally built in 1593 to…
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The giant trolls hidden in forests are made of trash
Forcing adults to play hide-and-seek in the mud to find sculptures made of literal garbage is Thomas Dambo's brilliant contribution to global tourism. The…
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Japan's abandoned mining town is now a ruin-tourism site
Why stay at a luxury resort when you can hike through thick fog to stare at the post-apocalyptic remains of a collapsed mining empire? The Matsuo Ghost…
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The forbidden island said to contain plague ash
Paying a rogue Venetian fisherman to illegally drop you off on a quarantined plague island in the dead of night is peak dark tourism. Poveglia is strictly…
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The lake that disappears for half the year
Planning a fishing trip to Lake Cerknica requires checking the calendar carefully, because half the year, the lake literally does not exist. Slovenia's famous…
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The artist who lived inside a giant sculpture
Escaping reality takes on a literal meaning when you wander through Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden in Tuscany. The renegade artist spent two decades…
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The dam that turned a sea into a lake
Nothing says 'vacation' like a brisk walk across a 20-mile dam built purely because the Dutch were tired of their living rooms flooding. When the Afsluitdijk…
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