Australia
MONA
Art about sex, death and everything awkward descends into darkness beneath a river peninsula.
MONA descends into a sandstone peninsula through galleries with little natural light and no safe curatorial script. Ancient objects, biological machinery and contemporary installations make the museum deliberately funny, confronting and hard to predict.
The Museum of Old and New Art occupies subterranean galleries cut into a peninsula beside the Derwent River. David Walsh's private museum mixes ancient objects and contemporary work without a conventional chronological route, and installations rotate by design, keeping the collection deliberately unpredictable. The ferry from central Hobart makes the arrival part of the day.
Solo
Move through the underground galleries without a fixed route and let the museum steer the argument.
Couple
Take the ferry, compare reactions to the installations, then keep room for the grounds and food.
Friends
Treat the museum as a prompt for debate, not a highlights checklist.
- Subterranean galleries turn the descent into part of the museum's physical experience.
- Ancient objects and contemporary installations are deliberately juxtaposed rather than arranged as a standard survey.
- The dedicated ferry from Hobart gives the museum a distinctive river arrival.
- Rotating installations keep the museum changeable by design; no two visits meet the same collection.
Faro, MONA's own restaurant, where the food is as provocative as the art on the walls.
Smoked salmon, Bruny Island cheese and leatherwood honey from Salamanca Market's open-air stalls.
Fukuoka
Japan
Yatai street stalls steaming under canvas where the city eats ramen at midnight.
Sokcho
South Korea
Squid stuffed with noodles by families who carried the recipe south across the 38th parallel.
Malmö
Sweden
A skyscraper twisted ninety degrees overlooks a strait where Swedes commute to Denmark for dinner.
Seoul
South Korea
Sesame smoke and midnight neon run right up to the walls of Joseon palaces.
Arnhem Land
Australia
Escarpment rock-art country, floodplains and empty tropical coast make up a vast living Aboriginal homeland.
Kata Tjuta (The Olgas)
Australia
Thirty-six domes swallow the horizon; the Valley of the Winds leads between them.
Uluru
Australia
Desert light turns 550-million-year-old arkose from ochre to crimson across Uluṟu's weathered face.
Carnarvon Gorge
Australia
Ochre stencils crowd sandstone walls deep beyond a gorge of palms and creek crossings.