India
Sidhpur
Empty streets lined with pastel European mansions built by a globe-trading merchant community.
The mansions line the street in pastel — lime green, lilac, rose pink — their European facades incongruous against the Gujarat heat. Built by the Dawoodi Bohra merchant community, they mix Art Deco with Neo-Gothic with Indo-Saracenic, and many stand empty. The money left; the architecture stayed.
Sidhpur, in Gujarat's Patan district, holds one of India's most unexpected concentrations of European-influenced architecture: the havelis of the Dawoodi Bohra community, whose Indian Ocean trade in the 19th and early 20th centuries brought European architectural ideas home. The facades run rich with carved wood detail in lime green, pale pink, lilac and mandarin. The town is also ancient sacred ground — Bindu Sarovar is counted among India's five holiest lakes, and the carved remains of the 12th-century Rudra Mahalaya stand near the centre.
Solo
Walk the Bohra vads with a camera at first light, before heat and traffic wake.
Couple
Wander the pastel streets together, then take the lake ghats at Bindu Sarovar toward evening.
- Whole streets of pastel European facades, built by Bohra merchants and left to the light.
- Art Deco, Neo-Gothic and Indo-Saracenic sit side by side — an accidental architecture museum.
- The carved wooden detailing rewards walking the same street twice, once each way.
- Bindu Sarovar draws pilgrims making offerings to maternal ancestors — Sidhpur is to mothers what Gaya is to fathers.
The Gujarati thali does the day's work — dal, kadhi, vegetables and fresh rotli, sweet tea after.
Dudhi halwa — bottle gourd gone silk in milk, pistachios on top — from whichever sweet shop is busiest.
El Jadida
Morocco
Atlantic light enters Mazagan through cannon embrasures while fishing boats work below the ramparts.
Tamnougalt
Morocco
Covered earthen lanes hide caïd, servant and mellah quarters above a sea of palms.
Berwick-upon-Tweed
England
A fortified border town that changed hands between England and Scotland thirteen times.
Culross
Scotland
Cobblestoned lanes frozen in the 1600s, shadowed by one of Scotland's darkest witch-hunts.
Mawphlang
India
Sacred groves where thick moss absorbs all sound and removing a single leaf is taboo.
Hampi
India
A ruined empire scattered across a landscape of balancing granite boulders and banana plantations.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island (Ross Island)
India
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.