I don’t think I am a very anxious traveller and I daydream about the sunny side of travel a lot. But a couple of times a year, I wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, where I am trapped in a travel-related loop that gets worse and worse….

The Chad Visa

I am in line for a visa to Chad. Well, that’s to say the queue with the people all getting their visas is to my right. I am standing on the left side of the desk. For some reason, I am trying to pick up this visa in Germany, not at an embassy, but at a counter that resembles a post office. All the other people are receiving their visas, but there’s something wrong with mine. They have the application with my name on it, but I need to make another appointment. But I only have 3 weeks left! I try to plead, go through other options (Brussels!) in my head… and then wake up.

I visited Chad years ago, so I no longer need a visa for Chad. Also, for my upcoming trips, I have no difficult visa procedures. Could it be because I …

For those in the Gulf region in early November, there's an option to join me on a short (T)WHS-focused trip.

The plan is:

Saturday, November 1, 2025: visit to Faya Paleolandscape WHS (both the Mleiha entrance and the Buhais Geology Park entrance), Mleiha TWHS (some later remains across the street) and Hatta Hill TWHS (shortlisted).

Sunday, November 2, 2025: road trip along the Tentative Sites of the UAE in the north of the peninsula, taking in all Emirates except for Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

You can join for 1 or 2 days, bring your own car or ride with me. All options are open. I will be starting from Sharjah City.

More details can be found here. Send me a message if you want to join.

I made at least two earlier, failed attempts to visit Syria. I rediscovered a Bradt Syria guidebook from 2006 in my bookcase, so I probably tried around 2008-2009, but the trips got cancelled. But as I now can see the end of my “country wish list”, Syria was at the very top. As a destination, it also has the advantages that it does not require a long international flight from Western Europe and that its “Cost per WHS” is low.

So here are some tips for travelling to Syria at the moment (September 2025), with the caveat that the situation on the ground can change at any time for better or worse in this highly flammable region.

It’s open for business

It is hard to find the “best” time to visit Syria, but now it is easier than it has been for years. It still is slightly earlier on my 'Windows of Opportunity' curve (as described here) than I usually do, but it definitely is past the “sights have yet to reopen” stage. All WHS and all major Points of Interest were easily accessible, no need for permits, except for Palmyra and the Aleppo Citadel. There are many checkpoints …

Some three months ago, I announced to the other members of the WH Map Data Working Group: “I found my new summer hobby!”. And I was right: I love learning a new skill and there is a meditative quality to nailing down a core zone in a specific way so it can be shown on our maps.

Here are my main findings after having added core zone maps to some 200 WHS. You can follow the current standings and future progress at the dedicated Forum Topic.

We cannot do all, but we can get far quickly

It seems a gigantic task, but progress has been good. On average, it takes me about 20 minutes to make one. And yes, of course, I am picking the low-hanging fruit first, but most natural WHS (often national parks displayed correctly on any map already) or the more recent cultural ones are easy to do. Cultural landscapes are a drama as they are a WH-specific “fiction”.

We can also import them from other sources: community members who did some mapping in the past, or “professional” resources such as Protected Planet (cooperating with IUCN for the natural WHS but not always correct), or the …

As a final new feature before we take a break to travel in September, we are now introducing Galleries.

They can be reached from each Site Page (WHS and TWHS). On the main site page, a set of featured images remains to introduce the site. It is displayed in a carousel - no longer automated (as it irritated some people), but it can be scrolled through using the arrows to the left and right.

Above these featured images, you will find a link to Gallery. This opens a new page that shows all the photos we have of this site. Look, for example, at the Pile Dwellings Gallery: it shows photos for each location as far as we have them (collected by Philipp, thanks!). The location photos are the same as displayed in the pop-ups when you click on one of our icons on the maps. We also show Point-of-Interest photos, Review photos and other categories if present.

If you click on one of the photos displayed on this page, you can view it in full size and original format.

The feature may need a bit of tweaking here and there, and the captions with …

The prominent role of photos in the new version of this website cannot have gone unnoticed. We even invested in a specific server to store all images! So far, the feedback on this aspect has already been great and hundreds of photos have been added. What I noticed as well is that this feature attracts "new" people: members that had not been that active before, who maybe found writing a review too cumbersome, or just are better photographers than writers. Submitting photos has become a simple and worthwhile contribution to the website.

In this week’s blog post, I’ll zoom in on three examples where you can make a difference with your photos.

1. Fill in the empty blocks on the List pages

Our goal is to have at least one identifying photo for each WHS, Tentative Site and Former Tentative Site. The ones we're still lacking can be recognized on the List pages, where they are displayed as an empty purple block:

Especially if you have visited many Tentative Sites and/or Former Tentative Sites, it can be a fruitful exercise just to browse through these blocks and see where you can add from your private photo collection.

Tip …

Inselbergs is a Connection we have had for a long time, and it has 23 entries. They may be so popular because they are literally "outstanding" features in a landscape. Let’s have a closer look at Inselbergs and their position on the World Heritage List.

What is an Inselberg?

An inselberg is created when a body of hard, erosion-resistant rock is left standing after the surrounding softer, less resistant rock has weathered away. This process is called differential weathering.

Where does the name come from?

“Inselberg” literally means “Island mountain”. It is a loan word from German, as it was coined by the German geologist Wilhelm Bornhardt in 1900. They are known as "monadnock" in the US (an indigenous Abenaki term), or "kopje" (Afrikaans) in southern Africa.

Globally?

The 23 connected WHS with Inselbergs show a wide geographic spread:

Still, you won’t find them everywhere:

Europe has very few inselbergs. This is mostly due to the impact of the recent Ice Ages. Vast ice sheets acted like colossal bulldozers. This erased any inselbergs that might have been forming. After the glaciers melted, they buried the landscape with massive deposits of sediments such as sand and gravel, preventing the classic "mountain …

This weekend, we are introducing a new feature to our maps of WHS: Points of Interest (POIs). These are spots to visit in or near a WHS, based on insider tips aimed at the WH Traveller.

A feature on the WHS maps

These POIs will be added to maps of WHS only, so they are not visible on any other maps on this website.

They will, of course, not replace the formal location(s) of the WHS, as determined by UNESCO or found by us where the info was lacking, the so-called Community Identified Locations. The formal locations can be recognized by their bright colours: a blue monument for a cultural WHS, a green tree for a natural WHS, and a purple mountain for a mixed WHS.

Note: these formal location(s) will in the future be shown as Core Zones, which will demarcate the full inscribed area. This is a long-term project, however, so most WHS locations for the time being will solely be marked as a colourful dot on the map.

The POIs

With the migration, we have already added over 1,000 plaque locations as POIs to our maps of WHS. The plaques are representative of the idea of …

Last Tuesday, Yemen’s new tentative list was published on the UNESCO website. It contained no less than 31 new entries. This was a remarkable event as (a) we rarely see such large updates, and (b) Yemen is a country at war, with a struggling central government, and all its current WHS, except for the archipelago of Socotra, are In Danger.

The New List in numbers

We could have seen this New List coming, as in December 2024, UNESCO reported on a series of online workshops that were held to revise Yemen’s World Heritage Tentative List.

These workshops resulted in 37 new proposals, of which almost all (31) have now been added to the Tentative List. Four out of nine sites from the old Tentative List also remain active. Four of the new sites were replacements for existing ones (one of those is still double-listed on the UNESCO website). Additionally, two FTWHS were incorporated into the newly listed selection.

The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention do not put a limit on the number of sites on a State’s Tentative List, but speak of an “important planning tool .. as they provide an indication of future …

While building the new version of this website, we had a lot of tedious tasks that we gladly wanted to outsource to Artificial Intelligence (AI) tooling like ChatGPT. This was true both for the technical side (Nan plans to do a full reveal there in a future blog) and for the content. For the latter, it was my first time seriously working with AI tooling. This is what I found.

Member since

When you look at the Community Page, you see an option to sort by “Joined”. It will show you the community members in order of when they signed up. This is a new feature.

We only actively started registering the sign-up date in 2017, so we had to gather additional data to give credit to the hundreds of early users who have been with us since around 2005. We used ChatGPT to create a script to crawl through all the old community index pages in the Wayback Machine to see where the first occurrence of a member's name was.

It ended up with a pretty good list – the dates may be off by 3 months or so, but the order is fairly correct. I carefully …