I’ve always seen the UNESCO World Heritage tag as a good indicator of something worth seeing, like a sort of validation that it’s worth the price of admission.  So here’s the complete list from the UNESCO website sorted by country, taken from their site http://whc.unesco.org/en/list.

Afghanistan

Albania

Algeria

Andorra

Argentina

Armenia

Australia

Austria

Azerbaijan

Bahrain

Bangladesh

Belarus

Belgium

Belize

Benin

Bolivia

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Botswana

Brazil

Bulgaria

Cambodia

Cameroon

Canada

Central African Republic

Chile

China

Colombia

Costa Rica

Côte d’Ivoire

Croatia

Cuba

Cyprus

Czech Republic

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Denmark

Dominica

Dominican Republic

Ecuador

Egypt

El Salvador

Estonia

Ethiopia

Finland

France

Gambia

Georgia

Germany

Ghana

Greece

Guatemala

Guinea

Haiti

Holy See

Honduras

Hungary

Iceland

India

Indonesia

Iran (Islamic Republic of)

Iraq

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Japan

Jerusalem (Site proposed by Jordan)

Jordan

Kazakhstan

Kenya

Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Latvia

Lebanon

Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

Lithuania

Luxembourg

Madagascar

Malawi

Malaysia

Mali

Malta

Mauritania

Mauritius

Mexico

Mongolia

Montenegro

Morocco

Mozambique

Nepal

Netherlands

New Zealand

Nicaragua

Niger

Nigeria

Norway

Oman

Pakistan

Panama

Paraguay

Peru

Philippines

Poland

Portugal

Republic of Korea

Republic of Moldova

Romania

Russian Federation

Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Lucia

Senegal

Serbia

Seychelles

Slovakia

Slovenia

Solomon Islands

South Africa

Spain

Sri Lanka

Sudan

Suriname

Sweden

Switzerland

Syrian Arab Republic

Thailand

the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

Togo

Tunisia

Turkey

Turkmenistan

Uganda

Ukraine

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

United Republic of Tanzania

United States of America

Uruguay

Uzbekistan

Venezuela

Viet Nam

Yemen

Zambia

Zimbabwe

Notes

  1. Extension of the “Australian East Coast Temperate and Subtropical Rainforest Park”.
  2. Renomination of “Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park” under cultural criteria.
  3. The “Belfries of Flanders and Wallonia” which were previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, are part of the transnational property “The Belfries of Belgium and France”.
  4. Extension of “Jaú National Park”.
  5. Extension of the “Glacier Bay/Wrangell/St Elias/Kluane” property.
  6. The “Burgess Shale” property, which was previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the “Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks”.
  7. Extension of “The Potala Palace and the Jokhang Temple Monastery, Lhasa” to include the Norbulingka area.
  8. The “Belfries of Flanders and Wallonia” which were previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, are part of the transnational property “The Belfries of Belgium and France”.
  9. The “Chateau and Estate of Chambord”, which was previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the “Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes”.
  10. The “Hadrian’s Wall” which was previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the transnational property “Frontiers of the Roman Empire”.
  11. At the time the property was extended, cultural criterion (iv) was also found applicable.
  12. The “Brihadisvara Temple, Tanjavur”, which was previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the “Great Living Chola Temples”.
  13. The “Darjeeling Himalayan Railway” which was previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the “Mountain Railways of India”.
  14. At the time the property was extended, cultural criterion (iv) was also found applicable.
  15. At the time the property was extended, criteria (iii) and (v) were also found applicable.
  16. The Committee decided to extend the existing cultural property, the “Temple of Ggantija”, to include the five prehistoric temples situated on the islands of Malta and Gozo and to rename the property as “The Megalithic Temples of Malta”.
  17. The Westland and Mount Cook National Park and the Fiordland National Park, which were previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, are part of the “Te Wahipounamu – South West New Zealand”.
  18. The “Convent Ensemble of San Francisco de Lima”, which was previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the “Historic Centre of Lima”.
  19. Extension of “Biertan and its Fortified Church”.
  20. At the time the property was extended, natural criterion (iv) was also found applicable.
  21. Extension of the “Alhambra and the Generalife, Granada”, to include the Albayzin quarter.
  22. Extension of the “Mosque of Cordoba”.
  23. The property “Parque Güell, Palacio Güell and Casa Mila in Barcelona”, previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the “Works of Antoni Gaudí”.
  24. Extension of the “Churches of the Kingdom of the Asturias”, to include monuments in the city of Oviedo.
  25. Extension of the “Mudejar Architecture of Teruel”.
  26. In 1979, the Committee decided to inscribe the Ohrid Lake on the World Heritage List under natural criteria (iii). In 1980, this property was extended to include the cultural and historical area, and cultural criteria (i)(iii)(iv) were added.
  27. The “Hadrian’s Wall” which was previously inscribed on the World Heritage List, is part of the transnational property “Frontiers of the Roman Empire”.
  28. Extension of “Gough Island Wildlife Reserve”.
  29. Extension of the “Glacier Bay/Wrangell/St Elias/Kluane” property.

*: transboundary property

G’day again, and welcome back listeners.  I’m in Australia for a couple of weeks right now and it’s fantastic to be home again.  I definitely feel like it’s been a great chance to recharge my batteries.  While backpacking the Silk Road was a unique and incredible experience, I definitely ran out of steam by the end of the end of it and was fed up with just about everything.  I needed to get back here, put my feet up for a while and just chill, and that’s exactly what I’ve done.  Aaaaah…

The trip home was timed to attend my good mate Colin & Bianca’s wedding here in Melbourne, and I’m so glad I could make it their big day.  I also got across to Perth to see my sister Sally’s gorgeous baby Zoe for the first time- aint she a cutie?!  Ohmygod I can’t believe I’m an uncle!!!

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So what next you all ask?  Well this world-weary traveler’s checked the gauge and has got one more left in the tank: I’m jetting off to South America this weekend.  I booked the flights waaaaay back at the start of this Grand Tour of mine, although I recently started to doubt whether I had the energy for it.  There’s still definitely a part of me that just wants to get back to San Francisco, find an apartment, unpack my boxes and get stuck into my new job.  But I feel up for it now, I’m fired up and I’m gonna come out swingin’, and I’m really looking forward to getting across there.  I’ve loved so much about South America on my two previous trips there, and I have some great plans this time around.  I’m going to call Buenos Aires home for the next few months and kick it off by doing an intensive Spanish course.  I plan to do a couple of backpacking trips to explore the rest of Argentina, and hopefully to the countries next door as well (Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia…).  But, as usual, it’s all TBD!

Before I sign off, a HUGE thanks to those of you who poked and prodded me to kick-start this blog again (yes you know who you are!).  After the Silk Road I was soooo sick of doing it and didn’t think I could give it another go.  But here I am, pounding away at the keyboard again (with my two index fingers – I really should learn to ten finger type!) and I have to admit kinda enjoying it.  This blogging thing sure is a good way to purge, and it’s nice to have my own private bit of the world wide web it fill with all my opinionated crap.  🙂

‘Til next time!  Stay tuned!!

I hadn’t thought about it before, but Hong Kong is a fitting place to finish my Silk Road trip.  The trip began in Istanbul, that great city where “east meets west”.  Hong Kong, as a city where “west meets east”, neatly bookends the trip (while not having a think to do with the Silk Road!).

It was a long road from Lanzhou to Hong Kong though, but I made it.  It took me one flight, five buses, a train and finally a taxi ride to get here.  I woke up early in Lanzhou and caught a shuttle bus out to the airport.  The flight was uneventful, but I read with dread in the in-flight magazine that Guangzhou’s annual Canton Fair was starting that day!  Aaaargh!  This is the expo where the world comes to see what China has to offer…

Guangzhou’s brand spanking new airport was chaos.  People everywhere, and definitely more Westerners than I’ve seen over the last three months combined.  Fortunately there was a lot of help at hand and I was able to work out that I needed to catch a bus to one of the city hotels, and then change onto a Hong Kong bus (HK is a couple of hours away).  Of course that hotel turned out to be enormous Dong Fang Hotel (Dad can you believe it – again?!) right over the road from the fair’s exhibition halls.  The traffic was a nightmare and there were tens of thousands of people cramming the streets and the hotel.  But sure enough my bus was there so it wasn’t long before I was on my merry way.

A few hours driving through the “new China” of Guandong’s Shenzen Special Economic Zone and we arrived at the border.  In my ranking of shitty border crossings this one really takes the cake.  It was chaotic, disorganised The scale of it was incredible, and every couple of seconds another bus pulled up with a fresh load of people trying to get over the border. xxxxxx

I’ve been staying with my mate Sung from Berkeley, who’s started his job with Lehman Borthers here.  He’s working investment banker hours (2am and 4am finishes?!?!) so I haven’t seen that much of him, but he’s given me the run of his great little apartment that has some cool views between the skyscrapers towards Kowloon across the harbour.

I’ve been here a couple of days and while he’s been at work I’ve been doing a few of the sights and experiences that I missed last time I was here back in 2001.  On that trip I stayed in Tsim Sha Tsui, the tourist dstrict of Kowloon, so this time I’ve been spending more time on Hong Kong island soaking up the sights and the atmosphere here.  Yesterday was my Hong Kong day (sadly too smoggy to bother going up to the Peak) and today is my Kowloon (and shopping) day.

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Man this is one cool city…  It’s hard to put a finger on it but there’s something about the effortless mix of cultures and ethnicities here and the comforting British legacy left behind, the steep and narrow San Francisco-style streets, and the feeling that there’s always something new around every corner.  In the future I’d definitely consider a stint here for a couple of years (although I say that about around half of the places I’ve been!).