United States
Niagara Falls
In summer, six million cubic feet of water a minute plunge into mist felt streets away.
The mist reaches you before the sound does, a fine cold spray on your face from blocks away. Then the roar builds, and you round the corner onto white chaos: the Niagara River throwing itself off a ledge with a violence no photograph has ever managed to file down.
Niagara is the most powerful waterfall in North America by volume, up to six million cubic feet a minute in peak summer flow, with the 167-foot Horseshoe Falls carrying the bulk of it. The American side holds the country's oldest state park, laid out in 1885 and open every single day of the year, its islands walking you to the very lip of the drop. The Maid of the Mist has sailed into the spray since 1846, and the Cave of the Winds boardwalk descends 175 feet into the gorge to the Hurricane Deck, where Bridal Veil Falls lands close enough to drench you through the supplied poncho. After dark the falls glow in rotating colours, and twenty miles south, Buffalo adds its own pilgrimage: the bar where the buffalo wing was invented in 1964.
Couple
Take the boat into the spray by day and the illuminated terraces by night, then drive to Buffalo for wings where they were born.
Family
Children who know waterfalls only from screens go genuinely silent here, and the poncho-soaked Hurricane Deck is the best kind of chaos.
Friends
The falls take half a day; the rest is a wing pilgrimage, a beef on weck and an argument about which country got the better view.
- This is North America's most powerful waterfall by volume, with summer flow reaching six million cubic feet a minute.
- The Maid of the Mist has carried passengers into the spray since 1846, one of America's oldest continuously running tours.
- The Cave of the Winds boardwalk descends 175 feet into the gorge to the Hurricane Deck beneath Bridal Veil Falls.
- The surrounding reserve is America's oldest state park, open 365 days a year with islands walking to the very lip.
Buffalo wings at the Anchor Bar, where Teressa Bellissimo deep-fried the first batch in 1964 and changed bar food forever.
Beef on weck, thin roast beef on a salt-and-caraway kummelweck roll with horseradish, Buffalo's older signature.
Pinhão
Portugal
Terraced vineyards plunge to the Douro so steep the harvest travels by shoulder.
Lindos
Greece
Sugar-cube houses cascade to a bay below an acropolis older in worship than the Parthenon.
Naruto
Japan
Whirlpools twenty metres across spinning beneath a bridge where two seas collide.
Ha Long Bay
Vietnam
Two thousand limestone pillars erupting from emerald water where cruise boats drift in morning fog.
Telluride
United States
A box canyon so steep the waterfall lands in town and the only road dead-ends.
Silverton
United States
A narrow-gauge steam train delivers you to a mining town at 9,318 feet.
Juneau
United States
No road reaches this state capital, just fjords, glaciers and a harbour full of humpbacks.
Yellowstone
United States
Earth exhaling through turquoise pools while bison block the only road ahead.