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The Orto Botanico is yet another gem in the already amazing town of Padova. The garden itself is quite small, but it is notable for its age (founded in 1545) and its contribution to botany and agriculture in Italy. Hundreds of varieties of plants are on display in the circular grounds of the garden in the shadow of the imposing Basilica of St. Anthony, and the entrance fee for students is only 1 euro. Once you've explored the garden, don't miss the Basilica, the impressive Duomo and Baptistry, the truly stunning Cappella degli Scrovegni (with frescoes by Giotto), or any of the other numerous hidden treasures that Padova has to offer.

The Amalfi Coast is one of Italy's most beautiful landscapes. The views of the coastline and the sea are fantastic from everywhere, and the little towns and villages have considerable charm and atmosphere. The town of Amalfi itself is very interesting as well, especially the cathedral. Some towns like Positano cater more to the rich and famous, but everybody will find a place to his liking. I agree that driving on this road is not very easy to do and requires lots of nerve and skill, but there are always public buses as well. All in all, a must-see if you are in the Naples area.

Spent a pleasant midday strolling around the Renaissance city of Ferrara. Really enjoyed the unusual cathedral (pictured) and the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia. Most striking, however, is the city-planning: from the winding alleyways of the medieval old town to the grid-like streets of the Renaissance-era Herculanean Addition. Throw in some fantastic parks and impressive architecture and Ferrara makes a wonderful day trip for those in the Emilia-Romagna region.

The Medina in Sousse is perhaps the nicest in the country to look at, and a cool feeling is given off by the white washed walls and blue medina doors. The Medina has more tourists than the other sites on the WHC list as it is next to the holiday resort stretch of the Tunisian coast, and this does mean that the atmosphere in the medina is not as genuine as in some of the other cities in the country and the quest for tourist money seems to have a more negative effect on shop owners!, but as any traveller knows that if you just go to some parts off the beaten track you will find a much more genuine picture of medina life.

The Ribat offers great views of the Medina especially the Mosque, and the Kasbah perched at the top of the medina has some stunning mosaics and you get a good look at perhaps the best Medina walls in the country!

Sousse is an easy place to visit due to it also being a beach resort and provides a great base to see some of the other UNESCO sites such as Kairouan and the Amphitheatre at El- Jem, also worth a trip is Monastir where the Ribat is stunning and doubles as Jerusalem in many films such as "Life of Brian"!

Right by the German/Polish border and the river Neisse is the small town of Bad Muskau, a sleepy little spa town with 4000 souls that goes back to the 13th century. Bad Muskau’s claim to fame is the Fürst Pückler Park, also named Muskauer Park, the biggest and one of the most famous English-style parks in Germany and Poland, once founded by Prince Herman von Pückler-Muskau in the beginning of the 19th century.

The park was covers 3.5 sqm in Poland and 2.1 in Germany and extends on both sides of the river so if you want to visit the entire park you better have your passport ready when the local border guard turns up behind the bushes at one of the bridges.

The centre of the park is the two castles - the New and the Old - together with stables, orangeries, sanatoriums and a “kurhouse” with healthy mud-baths and even a private railroad. Prince Pückler vision was to design a park as a “painting with plants”, using local plants to enhance the qualities of the landscape and his dream have certainly come true. So if you feel for a “walk in the park”, Bad Muskau is the place to head for.

I can recommend to stay at Am Wasserturm, a nice little B&B just on the outskirts of Bad Muskau - brilliant food and a nice atmosphere and its own water tower on the back yard.

There can be no doubt that Prague is a beautiful city, but, sadly, it has sold its soul to tourism. The old city is enormous and generally in original condition, the lack of war damage is remarkable. The downside is the high cost, compared to the rest of the Czech Republic, the unfriendliness of the populous and the tourist traps.

Kutna Hora is a charming place. The Cathedral of St Barbara is as wonderful as the Sedlec Ossuary is macabre and unique. There are some beautiful buidlings, not least the interior of the Italian court.

Cesky Krumlov is like something out of a fairy tale. You can almost imagine knights riding down the streets and princesses waiting to be rescued from the castle! I recently spent three days there and enjoyed every minute. It is the kind of place that everyone hopes to find in central Europe.

The whole place is in excellent condition and rates as one of the best WHSs that I have ever visited.

I was station engineer on Aldabra 1973-1976. I was also on the construction team in the late sixties when the station was first built. Aldabra was, (and I'm sure still is) a fascinating place. We used to take great care during the turtle breeding season to keep lighting on the station to a minimum so as not to confuse the hatchlings when they left the nest. They had enough predators to contend with without us adding to their problems. Crows, crabs, rails, all knew when the nests were ready to erupt; all this before they even reached the sea.

I am very pleased to see that the station is now a World Heritage Site

Telc is a wonderful place to spend a day or so. It isn't a large site - really nothing more than a town square, but that square is well worth it's place on the list. The facades of the buildings are in excellent condition and are some of the most beautiful in the Czech Republic. It is also relatively free of tourists. A visit to Telc is recommended.

This must be one of the largest sites in area in the world. Glacier Bay is best seen from a boat. Even the view from a large cruise ship is unforgettable. An echoing rifle shot crack of the glaciers calving warns you of a giant splash and sea otters and whales can be seen from the waters.

Tatshenshini-Alsek doesn't have many roads but is full of wildlife, wide open spaces without even a power line or a road to spoil the view. Wrangell St. Elias has some of the largest mountains in North America as well as a historic abandoned copper mine.

You need at least 2 weeks to see this site properly. Pack warm!

Abu Simbel is just 40 km from the Sudan and 100 km from any decent sized Egyptian city. The best way to visit is to fly there from Luxor or Aswan. Return flights are less than US$80. The temple was completely dismantled and moved to a higher site when the Aswan High Dam was constructed. If that hadn't happened, the site would be 60m underwater right now. That action was UNESCO World Heritage's first big save at an expense of US$40M in the 1960's and 70's.

Abu Simbel is massive and is perched high on a cliff at the edge of Lake Nasser. The 4 statues of Ramses II at the entrance are more than 30ft high each. The interior is covered with exceptional carvings and paintings.

Philae is at the edge of Aswan also on Lake Nasser. You have to take a quick ferry to get there. This is considered the most beautiful temple in Egypt -- (sort of their Aphrodite). ALthough the structures are less intact that most other Egyptian temples, the island site is beautiful, especially at sunset.

Over the years the World Heritage List have taken me to a number of brilliant architectural sites - from the Bauhaus sites in Dessau and Weimar, the Rietveld Schröderhuis in Utrecht, Victor Horta’s brilliant Art Noveaux houses in Brussels to the exceptional architectural pearls in Barcelona by Antoni Gaudí. I am absolutely sure that there are much more to appoint in this category and I hope this is something Unesco will prioritise more in the future.

The Tugenhat Villa in Brno is a functionalistic, open-plan Bauhaus building from 1929, that was built by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for a rich newlywed couple. With WWII and the communist period to follow, the beautiful villa in the suburb of Ĉerná Pole, have had quite a different history than maybe once intended but over the last 10 years it has been carefully restored to the state it was once meant to be in.

Guided tours are made every hour, unfortunately only in Czech, and I hope that tours in additional languages will be available in the future as well as a removal of the ridiculous photo-ban that no one seemed to follow anyway. At the time of my visit, many other disappointed people had to walk away since only groups of approx 20 people are allowed in per hour. My advise for your visit is therefore to pre-book well in advance.

Old Rauma is a delightful town of wooden houses from the 18th through 20th centuries (about 600) each of which has its own name written on the side in gothic letters. The helpful folks in the tourist office, a short walk from the bus station, have materials in many languages about the town and region including a self-guided walking tour of the tour that should take a leisurely 2 hours to do. (Highly recommended). I was there in April but I understand the town can get very crowded with bus tours in the summer months. There are several homes that have been converted into musueums (the Merla House is the most interesting)and many shops (lace is their speciality) and restaurants in all price ranges. It's a lovely place to just wander around the narrow cobblestoned streets and enjoy the scenery. It's a 4 hour bus ride from Helsinki (two or three direct buses Monday through Saturday) or an hour and a half from Turku, which has more frequent bus service.

To whom it may concern:

It has been three times now that I have visited the great temple of Cambodia. It's amazing everytime I looked at all those stone carvings on the stone wall, they looked so real. The Apsaras smile is fantastic, it looks so real.

I love all the temple in Cambodia. My favorite is the

Ta Prom temple. There is a tiny temple in the center of

Ta Prom where you can pound your chest and you can hear your chest sounds like a thunder, it's fantastic!

There are so many Apsaras statues needed to be renovated, also there are so many stones that have fallen on the ground and almost disappeared into the ground.

I'll be the guide to my Canadian and German friends who will visiting Cambodian temples in November this year 2005. I hope to see other temples renovated by the time we visit.

Thank you.

Sincerely Yours,

Sim Moneek

sie@kayjon.com

Hatra was a very impressive place. I was there in 2003 with the 101st airborne. There was a unit there securing the site from looters. The man who was the caretqaker there gave us a tour. I remember walking in to the city itself, the plaza was impressive, there was an arena fairly close to an altar to one of the gods I believe. The main building held the throne room, the court room and a temple. For me it was my first trip into something that old. I loved it.

Pompeii has been described so many times that I don´t need to add that much. But if you have never been there, go there or you will miss the most amazing archaeological site anywhere. History really does come alive here, despite the huge crowds. Unfortunately I could only be there for a couple of hours, but I certainly hope to return there as soon as possible, hopefully also to visit Herculaneum, which supposedly has the more interesting remains (if that´s at all possible), and maybe the Villa Oplontis. If you can, combine a visit to Pompeii with a hike up Mount Vesuvius (auto road, walking route for the last few hundred meters over slippery terrain) so it all comes into perspective. The mountain is very interesting both from a historical and from a geological/volcanological perspective and offers great views of the Bay of Naples (unless it´s foggy or the smoke from the crater covers your vision), one of the most beautiful vistas in Europe.

I toured the caverns on September 3rd. I took the natural entrance route and the Big Room tour, then came back up on the elevator which penetrates through 750 feet of solid rock back up to the visitor center. I then came back in the evening to watch the bats on their daily exodus in search of dinner. The Chihuahuan Desert is alive with birds, insects and other creatures and is quite scenic to take in this time of year, with all the flowers in bloom.

Instead of staying in the motel near the park entrance, I opted for a much cheaper room 20 miles up the road in the town of Carlsbad.

The next day I went hiking in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, about an hour south of the caves.

After a long and hot summer trip to Greece I decided to wind down for a couple of days in my beautiful neighboring country Norway. I had already visited most of the World Heritage Sites in Scandinavia but not yet the Stave Church of Urnes, a fact that had annoyed me for some time. So it was now high time to “tick it off” as my 146th site. Once in Oslo I embarked on the Bergen-train and traveled up the mountains to Myrdal where I hopped off in order to take the world-famous Flåm-banan down to the fjords and here catch a connecting bus to Sogndal.

Flåm-banen is a major tourist attraction in itself and as the train slowly makes its 860 meters way down to the fjords, through tunnels and mountainsides, you can enjoy a wonderful view including mountains, waterfalls and small villages. In Flåm you can catch ferries to Bergen and other destinations along the Norwegian coast.

My bus trip from Flåm to Sogndal took about 2 hours and on it’s way it passed through the 24,5 km long Laerdal-tunnel, the longest tunnel in the world. At the time I was ignorant enough not to be aware of it’s existence and certainly not of it’s length so after some 15 minutes of traveling through the tunnel I was beginning to wonder whether this was a surreal dream where I was captured in the mountain!??? Despite my worst worries the bus did get out and arrived in Sogndal and …

What more can be said about Venice that hasn´t been said before? One of the greatest cities of Europe, if not the world, and a place everybody should have seen. Sure, it´s usually very, very crowded, the streets are a complete maze, and when there´s acqua alta (and that´s frequently), you wouldn´t want to be there without boots. But hey, it´s Venice, and you can accept a few inconveniences to see St.Marks´s Square, the Basilica of St.Mark´s, the Ducal Palace, a score of museums, the Rialto Bridge, the Grand Canal, the gondolas, the Academy,...well, you know what I mean. Just wandering the narrow alleys and not knowing exactly where you are going is half the joy of exploring Venice. And if you are fed up with the crowds, just take a boat to one of the islands in the lagoon that are usually very quiet places.