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
Burton Holmes filmed far-flung places and toured theaters, where audiences paid to watch his travel films. His shows brought destinations most middle-class…
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Taking your car abroad can require a huge cash deposit
The Carnet de Passages en Douane is a customs document for taking a vehicle across borders. It can require a large bank deposit to ensure the car leaves the…
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Ida Pfeiffer turned collecting specimens into a way to keep traveling
Pfeiffer began major journeys in her forties and later circled the world twice, starting in 1846 and 1851. She collected natural-history specimens and sold…
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Sightseeing boats visited Krakatoa before its catastrophic eruption
After volcanic activity resumed in May 1883, boats came to watch the ash clouds and glowing displays. The devastating explosions followed in August. People…
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Nellie Bly traveled around the world with one dress
Nellie Bly circumnavigated the globe in 72 days with one dress and a single handbag, racing to beat the 80-day journey in Jules Verne's novel.
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The Nansen passport gave refugees a document without a homeland
Introduced in 1922 for Russian refugees and later extended to other groups, the certificate addressed a practical trap: people without a national passport…
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The Summer of Love overwhelmed San Francisco
National media coverage drew 100,000 young people to Haight-Ashbury in 1967, overwhelming San Francisco's services and turning the gathering into a logistical…
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Disney put a rocket scientist on television before Sputnik
Wernher von Braun helped explain spaceflight in Disney's 1955 program Man in Space. Animation made rockets, weightlessness, and imagined voyages…
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Freya Stark turned journeys through Iran into The Valleys of the Assassins
Her travels in the late 1920s and early 1930s produced a book that reached several printings within a year of its 1934 publication. Geography, encounters, and…
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Empty ship cabins helped invent budget cruises
After U.S. immigration restrictions in 1924 reduced demand for steerage, shipping lines marketed the empty berths as “Tourist Third Cabin”—cheap European…
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Yellowstone was protected before it had a proper park budget
Congress created Yellowstone National Park in 1872, but its first superintendent initially served without a salary or regular funding. Preserving the…
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Britain once legally barred Black people from bus jobs
Until the 1960s, the Bristol Omnibus Company legally barred Black and Asian people from bus crew jobs. An organized boycott inspired by the 1955 Montgomery…
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When train rides included shooting bison
Railroads marketed “hunting by rail” to affluent tourists, who fired from velvet-lined cars and left hundreds of dead bison to rot.
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The pirate whose journals influenced Charles Darwin
Between raids, Dampier logged wind currents, animal behavior, and plants; his detailed travel journals later influenced Darwin.
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Some Bunong homes bring the roof almost to the ground
Traditional houses in Cambodia's Mondulkiri region can have a low thatched roof, one entrance, and no windows. Inside is a shared room rather than a series of…
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Ijen's blue glow is burning sulfur, not blue lava
Sulfur-rich gases escaping the volcano burn with blue flames that become striking after dark. The glow can make the landscape look like a stream of blue lava,…
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Norway's road with 13 terrifying hairpin turns
Built by hand in the 1840s, the 1.5-kilometer road climbs a 20% gradient through 13 hairpin turns. It was cut into the mountain to give travelers access to a…
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The Dutch village shaped like a perfect star
Built in 1593 to control trade routes, Bourtange later became a farming village before local authorities restored its star-shaped fortifications in the 1960s.
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The giant trolls hidden in forests are made of trash
Artist Thomas Dambo builds giant trolls from scrap wood and recycled materials, then hides them in forests. Visitors follow clues rather than exact GPS pins…
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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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Venice’s abandoned quarantine island became a ghost-story magnet
Poveglia once helped isolate arrivals from Venice and later housed a medical institution. Empty buildings and the island’s history of separation made it…
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Slovenia has a lake that drains into the ground
Lake Cerknica fills when incoming water outpaces drainage through its limestone landscape. In dry periods, underground passages carry the water away, exposing…
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The artist who lived inside a giant sculpture
Niki de Saint Phalle lived inside the mirrored breasts of the giant Empress sphinx while building her Tarot Garden in Tuscany, a project that took two decades.
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Afsluitdijk turned the saltwater Zuiderzee into freshwater IJsselmeer
Completed in 1932, the Afsluitdijk cut off the saltwater Zuiderzee and created the freshwater IJsselmeer. The change devastated the region's saltwater fishing…
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