India
Mandu
Afghan palaces floating on monsoon reflection pools among ancient baobab trees far from Africa.
The Ship Palace floats between two lakes — the Jahaz Mahal, an Afghan pleasure palace built on a strip between reservoirs to read as a vessel at anchor. Around it a forested plateau hides mosques, tombs, and baobab trees that have no business being in central India. The whole city is a stage set the audience forgot.
Mandu was the fortified capital of the Malwa Sultanate from the early 15th century, set on a plateau 600 metres above the Narmada Valley inside a 40-kilometre wall. The 120-metre Jahaz Mahal rides its strip between the Munj and Kapur lakes. The Hindola Mahal leans its buttressed walls like a swing, and Hoshang Shah's Tomb stands among India's earliest marble buildings. Through all of it runs the love story of Baz Bahadur and Rani Roopmati.
Solo
Cycle the plateau's full day — palace, tombs, stepwells — and end at Roopmati's Pavilion for the Narmada view.
Couple
Jahaz Mahal in monsoon reflection, then Roopmati's Pavilion at sunset — the love story does the rest.
Friends
Divide the forty-kilometre wall's worth of ruins and reunite at the market for bafla.
- Jahaz Mahal floats its 120 metres between two lakes — best in the monsoon, when the reflections double it.
- The plateau takes a full day by bicycle — mosques, tombs and stepwells surfacing from the forest.
- Baz Bahadur and Roopmati's story is built into the stones — romance as architecture.
- African baobabs grow between the Afghan ruins like misplaced giants — how they got here is its own argument.
Dal bafla — dough balls boiled, roasted and crushed into lentils with ghee — at the market eateries around Jami Masjid.
Baobab fruit sherbet, tart and acid-bright, appears at fort-side stalls in season.
St Bathans
New Zealand
A gold-rush village of mud brick beside a flooded mine pit turned sapphire lake.
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.
Naples
Italy
Chaos and devotion in equal measure, pizza folded at street corners, shrines in every alley.
Hampi
India
A ruined empire scattered across a landscape of balancing granite boulders and banana plantations.
Khonoma
India
A warrior village clinging to terraced slopes that traded headhunting for deep forest conservation.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island (Ross Island)
India
A British colonial headquarters slowly being digested by ficus roots in the Andaman Sea.
Mawphlang
India
Sacred groves where thick moss absorbs all sound and removing a single leaf is taboo.