India
Bundi
A decaying palace of faded frescoes looming over a blue-painted town of fifty stepwells.
The palace looms above the blue houses like a cliff face with windows, its faded frescoes in turquoise and gold covering whole walls — open rooms, no barriers, no guards. Below, the stepwells drop into the earth like inverted temples. Bundi is Rajasthan before the tour buses found it.
Bundi is a former princely state under the Taragarh Fort, and the Garh Palace's Chitrashala houses some of the finest Rajput miniature murals in India — hunting scenes, Krishna legends and court life in mineral pigment on lime plaster, kept by the ASI and free to enter. The town below wears its blue rougher than Jodhpur's. More than fifty stepwells survive, Raniji ki Baori sinking 46 carved metres into the earth.
Solo
Climb to the Chitrashala early, count stepwells through the afternoon, and watch the palace light from a rooftop.
Couple
Palace murals in the morning, Raniji ki Baori's cool depths at noon, rooftop dinner facing the fort.
Friends
Split the fifty-stepwell challenge and compare finds over lassi in the bazaar.
- The Chitrashala's turquoise-and-gold murals are open rooms — no ropes, no guards, no queue.
- Raniji ki Baori drops 46 metres through carved sandstone galleries.
- Blue houses climb the hillside — photographed far less than Jodhpur, no less striking.
- Local tradition holds that Kipling drafted parts of Kim here — and the town has barely changed since.
Mirchi bada — a whole green chilli packed in spiced potato, battered and fried — from whichever stall has the queue.
The thali rooms — Rainbow, Lakha — lay the full Rajasthani spread.
St Bathans
New Zealand
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Ayacucho
Peru
Thirty-three colonial churches in a city whose Holy Week is Peru's most devoted.
Mindelo
Cape Verde
Morna drifts from harbour bars where the barefoot diva Cesária Évora first sang for sailors.
Bordeaux
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Eighteenth-century grandeur doubled in the Garonne's water mirror — a wine capital scrubbed back to gold.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island (Ross Island)
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A British colonial headquarters slowly being digested by ficus roots in the Andaman Sea.
Khonoma
India
A warrior village clinging to terraced slopes that traded headhunting for deep forest conservation.
Hampi
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A ruined empire scattered across a landscape of balancing granite boulders and banana plantations.
Bhimbetka
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Prehistoric hunting scenes painted in blood-red ochre across sandstone shelters buried in thick teak forest.