So out of that vast array of places, what should be on your bucket list first? Here are our six top choices for your World Heritage odyssey, from north to south:

1. Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland

Only by going to Antarctica is it possible to see larger scale glaciers calving into the ocean than you’ll see at the Ilulissat Icefjord site, where the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier meets the Arctic Ocean. This glacier is replete with superlatives:

• Fastest glacier in the world, moving around 40 meters every day
• Calves around 46 cubic kilometers of ice every year, more than the annual consumption of water in the USA
• Produces 10% of all the icebergs in Greenland, up to 1.5 cubic kilometers — the size of 30 football fields covered by ice as high as Mount Everest

Whether you hike along the fjord and watch the endless procession of white mountains grinding their way out to sea, or sail amongst them and have your boat rocked alarmingly from nearly a kilometer away every time a new monster berg hits the ocean, or take a helicopter flightseeing tour over the apparently endless expanse of this monstrous river of ice … vistas just don’t get much more epic than this.

And for ethereal beauty, take a sunset cruise; the colors over the water and through the ice are unforgettable — that’s a guarantee! What’s not guaranteed is a chance to see the Aurora Borealis dancing in the heavens, although if you go from January through March you have the best chance of seeing them, it’s reputed; although it is very cold in Greenland in January!

Ilulissat lies 250 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle on Greenland’s west coast; there are expedition cruises that stop by, but the usual way to get there is flying from Iceland’s Reykjavík Airport.

2. Historic District of Old Québec, Canada

The closest that you’ll get to visiting Old Europe while staying in North America is Ville de Québec (Québec City), the cradle of French civilization in North America and the only fortified city north of Mexico; it’s cobblestoned streets rising from Basse-Ville (Lower Town) along the St. Lawrence to the monumental constructions of Haute-Ville (Upper Town) make up the Historic District of Old Québec site.

The iconic structure of Vieux Québec — and allegedly the most photographed hotel in the world — is the Château Frontenac, dominating the skyline from its perch atop Cap Diamant the headlands on which Upper Town is built. There are 37 National Historic Sites all over the place, but not that often do you have the chance to stay in one, especially not one this emblematic!

Besides the Château, there are 36 other National Historic Sites in the neighborhood; the three generally acclaimed must-sees are the Citadelle de Québec, the Fortifications of Québec and the Notre-Dame de Québec Basilica-Cathedral. However, the attractions of Québec City are not simply historical; many come for the various festivals throughout the year — the Carnaval de Québec (Quebec Winter Carnival) is one of the world’s leading winter festivities, with everything from snow sculpture competitions to ice canoe racing — or to simply enjoy the Olde Europe ambiance of cobblestones, cafés, street entertainers and shopping.

Québec City is easily reached by land, air (via Toronto or Montréal most likely), and sea; it’s a popular endpoint for cruises from Boston and New York in particular.

3. Yellowstone National Park, USA

North America is endowed with dozens of national parks of natural wonder that are also World Heritage Sites, just within the continental United States you have the world’s tallest trees in California to the spectacular Grand Canyon to the world’s largest cave complex in Kentucky to the sub-tropical wilderness of the Everglades; but for uniqueness plus historical and future significance, we give our nod to Yellowstone National Park of Wyoming (and nibbles of Montana and Idaho) for a place on our Top Six List:

• The United States’, and arguably the world’s first, national park, established in 1872
• The largest protected northern temperate natural ecosystem, refuge for emblematic wildlife like bison and grizzly bears
• Over 300 geysers, two-thirds of all known geysers in the world
• Over 10,000 geothermal features — half of all known worldwide
• Lies atop the Yellowstone Caldera, arguably the most dangerous supervolcano in the world after Lake Toba in Indonesia

That last one makes it particularly notable for its future as well as historical significance, a rarity on heritage lists: not many — in fact, no other — World Heritage Sites are fairly certain to devastate the continent they’re part of in the foreseeable — if hopefully remote — future, as explored in science fiction author Harry Turtledove’s Supervolcano series!

Unsurprisingly, Yellowstone is one of the most visited national parks with over 4 million visitors a year; June to September are the peak seasons. Personally, we recommend visiting in late April through the beginning of June — there’ll still be parts of it closed with snowfall, but that is your best season for seeing grizzly bears with their cubs and bison, elk, and antelope calves, and there won’t be the crushing crowds of summer. And we can assure you, there are not many cuter things to watch than a couple grizzly cubs gamboling in the spring sunshine.

Yellowstone can be driven into from all directions, but the generally recommended approach is to fly into Jackson Hole, Wyoming as your gateway to Grand Teton National Park as well as Yellowstone.

4. Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacán, Mexico

Contrary to the general thoughts of pyramids being associated with Egypt, there are in fact more pyramids in the Americas than in the rest of the world; and our choice for the most impressive and mysterious — in fact, an alternative name for it is ‘City of Mystery’ — is Teotihuacán, the largest, most influential, and most revered city of the pre-Columbian Americas, which influenced all later cultures and is today the most visited ancient site in Mexico.

The mystery starts with what the name of the place actually is: Teotihuacán is its name in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, which means roughly birthplace of the gods or perhaps the place where men became gods — the Aztecs discovered it when it was already in ruins, and for unclear reasons decided that it was the place of the origin of civilization. What the original inhabitants called it and what language they spoke is completely unknown; it’s debated whether the extensive pictographs found there is a writing system at all, which is even stranger considering that the literate cultures of the Maya and Zapotec are known to have had diplomatic relations with it.

Likewise, the two commanding pyramids at the site are named the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon; they were given those names by the Aztecs, and we have no idea what their builders named them; as mentioned above, the Aztecs believed this was where the current cycle of the universe began; the Spanish recorded Montezuma making pilgrimages to the site, believing it the home of “wise men, knowers of occult things, possessors of the traditions” and that the pyramids were tombs built by giants in the distant past.

And that’s not the end of the mysteries that fuel wild theories about the builders, either; one thing you can see for yourself in aerial photographs that is very odd indeed is that on the Giza Plateau, at Xi’an in China, and also at Teotihuacán, you have an arrangement of two large pyramids along the main axis and a smaller one off to the left, in proportions that strongly resemble the arrangement of the three stars in Orion’s Belt. Strange, indeed. But even without the shroud of mystery surrounding it, Teotihuacán’s influence on the Zapotecs, Maya, Toltecs, and Aztecs ensure it a place on our list.

Teotihuacán is 40 km northeast of Mexico City; it’s easily reached by car or bus or you can take a great variety of day tours, up to a hot air balloon flight over the site.

5. Tikal National Park, Guatemala

A list of this sort must have a Classical Mayan site on it … but which? Chichen-Itza? Palenque? Uxmal? Copán? Calakmul? You could argue their relative merits of architectural and cultural value endlessly, but what we decided for this list is to pick the one Mayan site that the most people in the world by far have seen on the movie screen, as it was the location of Yavin IV, the Rebel base in Star Wars: Tikal National Park in Guatemala.

Also, Tikal is one of the few World Heritage Sites to be inscribed for both its cultural and natural value; the 5 million acre Maya Forest Biosphere Reserve is located in the largest tropical forest north of the Amazon and generally considered one of the world’s foremost examples of balancing sustainable development and forest management; the cleared parts of the site are scattered throughout the jungle, so you have miles of hiking trails and even two zip lines, one with 11 platforms.

Tikal is the largest excavated site in the continent by area, with five major pyramids to visit, the tallest of which is over 70 meters high; so while you can do those five must-sees in a day trip, we recommend overnighting nearby so that you can catch the sunset over the jungle from the temple tops and then be back in the morning to catch the sunrise burning off the fog as the howler monkeys greet it with their arresting howls.

Tikal is in northern Guatemala; the nearest major airports are Belize City to the east and Guatemala City to the south, from which you can take land tours or fly to the airport at nearby Flores.

6. Cocos Island National Park, Costa Rica

Most World Heritage Sites are on land, but the 70% of the planet that is ocean has its sites too: the Archipiélago de Revillagigedo and Belize Barrier Reef are other examples, but our choice for the must-visit scuba adventure World Heritage Site in North America — in the world, actually — is Costa Rica’s Cocos Island National Park, 530 km out in the Pacific and spectacular enough to make the list of Jacque Cousteau’s top ten dive spots.

The outstanding attraction of Cocos Island is that it’s the first landmark the North Equatorial Countercurrent meets and is a confluence point for other major currents, so it’s one of the best places in the world to see large pelagic (open ocean living) species, especially hundreds-strong congregations of scalloped hammerhead sharks, but also whitetip, blacktip, silvertip, and tiger sharks, not to mention the occasional whale shark.

If you ever get tired of hundreds of schooling sharks to swim with, there are swarms of eagle rays, manta rays, marlin, sailfish, tuna, endless schools of fish, and mammals such as dolphins and even humpback whales.

Even if you’re not a scuba diver, you can still experience the deeps at Cocos; the DeepSee Submersible will take you 80 meters down at the Everest site or up to 400 meters down The Wall. For a price, but in return for a well-nigh priceless experience!

To get to Cocos Island, you’ll fly into San José, Costa Rica, and then transfer to the port town of Puntarenas and a liveaboard diving boat.

So there are our choices for the top six World Heritage Sites to visit in North America; if this has whetted your appetite for more, come follow along with us at Every World Heritage Site, where we’re working our way through not just the 1073 currently inscribed WHS, but the 1696 on the Tentative Lists for future inscriptions as well!

Suggested next reading: I Went To North Korea: Here’s What Happened

The post Top 6 World Heritage Sites You Should Definitely Visit In North America appeared first on Modern Trekker.

Lumbering down the deserted highway a hundred kilometers from Pyongyang outnumbered three to one by your minders is perhaps not the best place to start kicking up a fuss, but prudence has never been one of our more notable virtues, and just because we happen to be in the world’s most totalitarian state an’ all, doesn’t seem like any reason to start changing that.

Besides, we’re feeling particularly trollish this morning—that’s our nickname, “The Troll,” it works on so many levels—due to having unfortunately drunken a bit too much soju over the last 24 hours.

North Koreans In Their Own Words!

See, to get to Pyongyang last night, we’d taken the overnight train from Beijing for two reasons:

Firstly, that way you get to see parts of the north of the DPRK that foreigners can’t see any other way—no doubt the parts you can see from the track are better than the parts you can’t, but hey even that much is surreal—there was one particular place where we saw the peasants staggering along with outsized bundles on their shoulders, followed placidly by an oxcart with a high stack of outsized bundles, followed by a higher stacked oxcart that had its tongue hooked up to some possibly-extracted-from-a-washing-machine-type “engine” thingy straight out of the pages of the more fanciful steampunk adventure novels, followed by a swoopily aerodynamic cargo truck looking as ultramodern as anything on the Chinese superhighways.

There are lots of places around the world where you can see modernity juxtaposed with Stone Age technology—but nowhere other than North Korea that you see quite this mixing by degrees of a 2,500-year span of technology in the space of a couple hundred feet. And their cutting-edge technology has this steampunk edge to it as well; when we were there, the papers were full of the exciting news of a breakthrough in electro-refining using pure graphite anodes.

Well, that’s very impressive and all…but it’s a breakthrough of late-1800s technology that’s quaintly archaic in any part of the world where you have access to rare earth metals not found within North Korea’s borders. It’s exactly the kind of thing that you find in the more thoroughly thought out steampunk worlds, (as opposed to the ones that are an excuse for goths to wear brown) which is where we came up with our soundbite to describe North Korea: a steampunk dystopia, and far more surreal than any of the fictional attempts you’ll ever read.

Secondly, by all accounts, the sleeper train from North Korea is the best chance you’re going to get to be in close quarters all day with North Koreans that are not official government minders—and we figured that would be a great story, “North Koreans In Their Own Words”!

But we’d somehow failed to account for the fact that we are not, in fact, capable of conversing with appreciably more fluency than “want eat” and “need bathroom” in either Korean or Chinese, which of course were the only languages collectively spoken by my three compartment mates.

Drinks On Me, Boys

So the all-day trip from the border to Pyongyang featured mainly that at every stop, as I would stroll out to the platform, find the RMB-only seller at this stop who was extracting foreign currency from the Chinese nationals who are the usual passengers on this train, buy a bottle of soju, and our compartment would proceed to finish that bottle before the next stop.

Buying rounds of liquor for the locals is pretty much a pro travel tip for instant acceptance anywhere you go, and for some reason it seems to be associated particularly with Canadians—happy to hold the end up! —But particularly so when you’re buying with your foreign currency for your new friends who couldn’t buy that liquor in their own currency at any price.

So by the time the four of us staggered off the train in Pyongyang, the cause of Korean peninsular peace had been thoroughly achieved as far as we were concerned, we were assuring each other in a haze of soju fumes of our new lifelong friendship with complete disregard for our mutual unintelligibility.

I guess not realizing that we were drinking a bottle of soju every stop from Dandong to Pyongyang does that…everything we say here that might cast shade on the state of North Korean technology should not be taken to apply to their craft of soju brewing, which is, in fact, superb.

Traveling “Independently” In North Korea

So here we were in the car the next morning, and we’re off-a-days-soju-bender cranky, so we’re not being very accommodating with “Miss O,” who along with “Miss Kim” are the two guides that every tourist party in the DPRK must have accompany them, even if your party is, in fact, just you. Plus our driver; a genially hulking fellow. This, in North Korea, is what passes for independent traveling. And we were being very independent:

“I don’t want to go to the DMZ. I have my itinerary here from Tongil Tours, and the DMZ is not on it.”

“Everybody has to go to the DMZ!” she responded.

“Well, good thing I’ve already been there from the South Korean side then. Some blue huts on the border, a concrete building on each side, pretty much as totally overrated as places to visit get, especially twice! I can prove it too, want to see pictures on the phone here?” I retorted.

Our Crazy Goal

See, we have this ambitious bucket list to visit every inscribed and tentative World Heritage Site, and Kaesong has twelve separate places listed in its Historic Monuments and Sites in Kaesong inscription, and my plan was to see all of them today, because what’s the chances of ever making it back to Kaesong? Pretty slim, that’s what. So we didn’t figure that the DMZ was a particularly valuable use of our limited time.

So Miss O and I were arguing this, and Miss Kim and the driver were watching us bicker with big smiles on their faces, apparently uncooperative guests are a distinct novelty, when BANG! out goes a tire.

Conveniently, a rest stop was just a couple hundred feet ahead to bump our way to. Only to find that the tire was trashed past patching, and the spare … well, in North Korea the concept of “spare” anything is a decidedly foreign one. There being no such thing as a North Korea Automobile Association either, this would require a significant effort to remedy; stranded halfway between Pyongyang and Kaesong is a pretty darn stranded place indeed.

Not So Stranded

But while they’re frantically phoning around to see what options there are, here comes another vehicle, pulling into our rest stop no less! —A bus full of a Chinese tour group. So my minders flock with theirs, and in short order, it’s established that the girls and I can join their group and our driver will find us whenever he’s mobile again.

OK, that beats hanging out most of the day in the featureless middle of nowhere, yes. And, as if I couldn’t guess, where by chance were we and our new friends going?

“The DMZ.”

“Of course we are. Miss O, you’re smirking. Ni hao, new Chinese friends!”

Mind you, it only heightened the surreality of this whole visit to be escorted into the same blue negotiation huts built exactly half on each side of the border by North Korean troops denouncing invasion by the South, after having been there before but escorted by South Korean troops that time denouncing invasion by the North; all of North Korea strikes you constantly as a Bizarro mirror world inversion of South Korea, but the DMZ in particular produces … well, it’s not déjà vu if you actually have been there before is it? Don’t think language actually has a word to describe that particular experience…

DPRK: A Restricted Secret

Anyways, we met back up with the driver at lunch, and over the course of the afternoon managed to get to most of the places on the inscription, definitely all that most people would consider worth visiting, and a few more besides…particularly the Kaesong Chomsongdae, which even as perhaps the most hardcore World Heritage Site geek on the planet, we do not recommend you bother trying to find.

(More details and pictures over at the Every World Heritage Site blog if you like.)

Managing to drive the better part of an hour because all four of us totally missed that we had driven directly through the old city walls we were looking for is a particularly good one.

Driving issues were a recurring theme on this tour, mind you. See, in case you haven’t picked up on this already, the general run of visits to the DPRK are extremely restricted; you see the very short list of government-approved attractions and monuments to the Party and so forth, and that’s it.

Planning this trip, we had a significant amount of trouble finding an organizer that would put together a custom “visit all the properties we can fit in of North Korea’s two inscribed WHS” tour—pro tip: Tongil Tours is your custom tour arranger of choice—and despite the driver and my minders having just short of two decades collective experience in the North Korean foreigner-minding industry, none of them had ever been to most of the sites we visited…or even heard of them, as was the case for the more justifiably obscure “National Treasure” like the Chomsongdae. And there are no signposts or maps because that would make it far too easy to get around; if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re almost certainly not supposed to be going there.

Even when you are supposed to be going there, that’s not always a sure thing. For instance, on our second trip out of Pyongyang, it was to visit a day’s worth of properties on the Complex of Koguryo Tombs site inscription. Which are somewhat less than monumental from the outside, as you can see in the pictures in our blog write-up of the site, and as far as we can tell, nobody ever visits for all practical purposes; each property has a groundskeeper that looks shocked to actually see a visitor, and a few grassy mounds with locked doors, and … that’s about it.

100 Euros For A Mural

The murals inside are reportedly spectacular, but dashed hard to find pictures of on the net—here’s a few—and at one of them, we were offered to have that door unlocked and see the wondrous insides for the low, low price of only a hundred euros. Usually we’re pretty good at bargaining, but in this particular instance we didn’t manage to get the price down at all—but we did manage to get Miss Kim and Miss O included, as they’d never been to these tombs either, let alone inside, and they were veritably ecstatic to get to see the murals. Rather telling, that.

Usually when we go to obscure World Heritage Sites, from the Sacred City of Caral-Supe to the Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park, the standard way it goes is that we’re the only foreigner in sight and the place has a bus or two full of elementary school age students who are just about completely uninterested in these dumb piles of rocks their teachers are going on about as being their marvelous World Heritage and all.

But what about with a troll? Now he’s fascinating to follow around. Korea has got to be the only place in the world where even the professional tour guides, never mind average citizens, have barely heard of their World Heritage never mind visited.

North Korea Is DIFFICULT!

And the reasons why they don’t visit were brought into sharp relief on our way back to Pyongyang after the tomb-hopping day:

“GET BACK IN THE CAR!”

See, we’d found our way back to the main highway to Pyongyang, and we’d stopped at a checkpoint, who’d told us to pull over, and they’d left me in the car, and now it was some 20 minutes later and I’d figured some leg-stretching was in order. “Just getting some fresh air, not going anyplace…”

“NO! GET IN CAR!”

Right then. If Miss O is shouting and apparently about to cry, probably not a good time to be difficult. So I got in the car.

Eventually they came back, and with a little bit of coaxing, the issue came out; although they had a permit for me to see the Koguryo Tombs, the car did not have a permit to drive on this highway. And this was a disaster of monumental proportion. Not for me, but for the driver. Who, never having had a group like me before, had no idea whatsoever that the guides might not have had everything arranged for him. And they had no idea that they had extra arrangements to make.

Think that’s what was going on, anyways. Point is…getting around this country is difficult.

Back To Tourist Safety In Pyongyang

The rest of the visit was pretty much the standard tourist fare in Pyongyang, you can read that over here as we did manage to see three of the properties on the Historical Relics in Pyongyang Tentative World Heritage Site listing, so we’ll tick that one off our bucket list too; but nothing particularly more amusing than we wrote there.

Until the day of our leaving, when we figured that with all the adventures they’d had minding a troll who was actively trying not to be minded, they deserved a nice tip. But tipping is an issue here—between that it’s illegal for you to possess North Korean currency, and it’s illegal for them to possess foreign currency, that doesn’t leave many financial options.

However, knowing this, and wanting to make friends as always, we’d bought some twenty-odd dollars worth of touristy Bangkok souvenirs, figuring those would be exotic novelties in the DPRK. Which indeed they were…problem was, since everyone we met was completely uninterested in taking anything from foreigners, we still had all of it on the last morning. So alright ladies: here I have a good five pounds of Bangkok’s most gaudy souvenir tat, how would you like to divide it up?

The driver, well that was much easier; he’d been quite enthusiastic about matching me shot for shot with our dinner soju each night, so a bottle of the most ornate looking bottle on display in the hotel shop took care of that—along with a healthy tasting of it to make sure it was quality stuff, as indeed it was, just the thing indeed to produce the right mood for our visit to the Mansudae Grand Monument, seventy-plus feet of bronze Communist deities: Kim Il Sung & Kim Jong Il, the Great and Dear Leaders.

And deities are barely an exaggeration; you must bow, cannot face your back to the statues, and must bring a bouquet of offering. Well, technically you don’t have to buy the bouquet, but Miss Kim got such a hurt look when we mumbled something about worshipping their dead leaders, we decided ok…fine…let’s go buy the biggest bouquet we can then.

And off to the airport for our exit, on Air Koryo—the world’s only one-star airline, according to Skytrax, but personally we feel that’s totally undeserved. Just for starters, they’re always on time—not that hard when your flight network has no connections—and they never overbook. As for the 1960s vintage Soviet airliners, well, far as we’re concerned it’s a renaissance of the Golden Age Of Aviation, with that same strange out-of-time vibe the rest of the country has.

Our Verdict

So that was our visit to North Korea. Before we got there, we thought that Bhutan was the most unusual country on the face of the planet, but we have quite thoroughly changed that opinion now.

Although it costs considerably more to arrange a custom tour, we absolutely recommend you do that—as we’ve mentioned before, Tongil Tours are the people who hooked us up, and we thoroughly recommend you call them too—and ask for Miss O and Miss Kim as your guides, they were far more entertaining than we’d ever expected!

So, what’s next for me? More World Heritage Sites I guess! On that note, here are my top 6 World Heritage Sites you should visit in North America—if you’re interested.

The post I Went To North Korea: Here’s What Happened appeared first on Modern Trekker.