1. Kenya: Winged Migration
A migratory stop along the African-Eurasian flyway, the Kenya Lake System in the Great Rift Valley is a cageless aviary - populated by 13 endemic, threatened bird species. Up to four million lesser flamingos congregate among nesting great white pelicans and roving flocks of spoonbills, grebes, and storks. More than 100 migratory bird species make this their home November through March, which local safari guide Preston Mutinda says is prime bird-watching season. A two-hour drive north of Nairobi, the shallow, alkaline bodies of water combine to cover 122 square miles, with Elmenteita, Bogoria, and Nakuru Lakes arranged, as Mutinda puts it, “like pearls on a string along the Great Rift Valley.” The valley’s floor ripples with hot springs, offering a rich feast of green algae for foraging fowl. Zebras, black rhinos, cheetahs, lions, and giraffes also wander along the shoreline - but even they play supporting roles for the star attraction, the flurry of pink taking flight.
This and other wonder sites in this list, and other UNESCO World Heritage sites, are featured in “2012 World Wonders” in the August/September 2012 issue of National Geographic Traveler.
2. Italy and Switzerland: Track Star
To the eager adventurers of the mid-19th century, the Swiss Alps seemed to have it all - majestic peaks, sinuous valleys, exuberant vistas. Just one piece was missing: an efficient way to get there. The launches of the Rhaetian Railway’s Albula (1904) and Bernina (1910) lines reached the previously unattainable, with a series of 196 viaducts and bridges and 55 tunnels opening up a remote domain. The narrow-gauge railway and its trademark red train cars delivered a speedy link to, among other places, Tirano, Italy. As a result, an active winter sporting scene emerged, culminating in the 1928 and 1948 Olympic Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Jack Helfenstein, who lives on Lake Zürich, advises Bernina riders to stay on board past the tony Swiss resort. “The next leg is even more spectacular, as it passes glaciers and the snowcapped Bernina Massif.” In continuous use since their debut, the click-clacking tracks offer an antidote to the blur of jet-set travel.
3. Hungary: Masked Avengers
When the calendar turns to pre-Lent carnival season, one thing’s a given in the river town of Mohács in southern Hungary: The busók are coming. Not that anyone could miss them. Arriving by rowboat on the Danube and cloaked in shaggy pelts, carved wooden masks, ram’s horns, and the scraggly chops of a barbarian, some 500 men (and a few women) parade through town, bombarding the air with the jangle of cowbells. Folk singing, craft fairs, and brandy keep spirits high over the course of the rollicking six-day masquerade, called Busójárás, which crescendos into the burning of a coffin that ceremoniously drives away winter. In the centuries since Mohács’s Croatian minority started the carnival, residents have embraced the rowdy ritual as a spectacle with roots in resistance. One legend holds that the tradition began in defiance of the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, when locals retreated to the woods, created their demonic alter egos, and then reappeared to send the Turks packing. Today, the busók embody street theatre at its most authentic - diabolical grins included. “It’s like traveling through time,” says Hungarian-born Joe Petersburger, a biologist and photographer. “You feel an ancient nomadic power fused with Christianity. The devilish horned masks conceal the revellers, so you never know if you’re looking at a skinny teen or a 200-pound bodyguard.”
4. Belize: Life Aquatic
Second in size only to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the 237,962-acre Belize Barrier Reef System is a watery realm of mangrove cays, coastal lagoons, and coral shelves teeming with seabirds, 500-plus fish species, manatees, and American marine crocodiles. It also features a cobalt abyss called the Great Blue Hole. In 1971, Jacques Cousteau sailed the Calypso here on a mission to map its depths and unlock the mysteries of its formation. He determined that a series of geological shifts, starting 150,000 years ago, created a 412-foot-deep cave pierced by massive stalactites and submerged by the rising sea level. In the decades since, an uptick in scuba diving has taken a toll on its delicate coral reef. “Nothing compares with the sensation of swimming with whale sharks along this vibrant reef,” says National Geographic Emerging Explorer Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of the famed French voyager. “But poorly planned development and rapid human expansion threaten Belize’s well-being.”
5. Brazil: City of the Future
In the lobby of Brasília’s Itamaraty Palace, a spiralling staircase rises like a helix - one example of the way modernism underpins Brazil’s forward-looking capital. A marvel of urban planning built to fulfil an 1891 constitutional pledge, the “Capital Federal” spun into order in 1960 with an emphasis on curved lines and monumental forms, a layout sometimes likened to a bird in flight. Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s dramatic structures radiate from an axis in which an arc of residences intersects a straight stretch of public buildings. Designed for a population of 500,000, the city of 2.5 million has far outgrown its original vision, yet Brasília’s centre retains the romance of a time when sleek lines materialized as a language for expressing big ideas. “I always find something new in the ingenious designs of Niemeyer,” says Indira Fernandes, who lived in Brasília as a child and says she loves admiring the sunset from the Dom Bosco Sanctuary. Renowned for its Murano glass windows, the concrete-columned landmark was named for an Italian saint who, in the 19th century, dreamed of a New World utopia that was to become Brasília.
6. Spain: Social Climbers
Northeastern Spain’s ritual of castell construction, an 18th-century tradition turned contemporary competition, expresses the strength, not to mention structural integrity, of Catalan culture. Human towers, which punctuate festivals in Catalonia like daredevil exclamation points, methodically rise to soaring heights within minutes. A young enxaneta (rider), often a child, tops the steeple of people and salutes the crowd before the construction is carefully reverse engineered to the ground. “The best enxanetas are light kids who go up and down with no fanfare,” says Bernat Olle, who grew up near Valls, where castell building originated. “I topped a four-tier tower once in high school with friends. Without skills, for me the feeling was like trying to stand on one of those gym stability balls - except that you can fall and break your neck. Going down isn’t any easier.”
7. Virginia: Renaissance Land
When Thomas Jefferson travelled, he collected wine and books - and also ideas that would change the course of history. Nowhere is the electricity of his imagination brighter than within the academical village of the University of Virginia and at Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation home in the rolling Piedmont region of Virginia. “Monticello pays homage to Palladio and Old World neoclassical architecture,” says Leslie Greene Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs the estate. Though the Founding Father’s plans were rooted in those ideals of antiquity, his adaptations signalled the inventive pragmatism of his young country. Completed in 1809, Monticello debuted designs for skylights, round windows, and a domed room. Jefferson had a knack for novelties, from wine dumbwaiters to a rotating clothing rack. “He carved off a mountaintop for Monticello and included terraces and Venetian porches to take advantage of the views,” says Bowman. He also pioneered wine cultivation in the fertile land around his estate. Though such experiments bore little fruit in his lifetime, today the Virginia wine industry thrives. The Jefferson laboratory lives on.
8. Mali: Mud, Sweat, and Tears
Built on a floodplain along the Bani River, Djénné’s Great Mosque, the largest mud-brick structure in the world, dominates the Mali town, southwest of Tombouctou (Timbuktu), in fact and folklore. With its smooth, sun-dried mud walls and towers scaffolded with bundles of sticks (called toron locally), the mosque appeared like a mirage for trans-Saharan camel caravans during the Middle Ages, when Djénné served as a trading hub. These days the century-old mosque houses a network of arched corridors and prayer rooms constructed on the site and in the style of the circa 13th-century original. Devout locals rally for the annual Fête de Crépissage to slather the edifice with a new layer of mud. A few rainstorms have been known to wash away their work, making the hand-smoothed surface a fleeting attraction. That cycle is accelerating as climate change lowers river levels, which in turn degrades the quality of the mud for bricks and plaster. A military coup and conflicts among rebels recently put the country in turmoil, but this seems only to enhance the town’s survive-against-all-odds mystique. “Djénné is imbued with both Islamic and animist magic,” says journalist Karen Lange, who has covered the West African city for National Geographic magazine. “What sets it apart is the people who still believe in the life-and-death power of those traditions.”
9. China: Water World
In Chinese culture, the all-important balance of yin and yang wavers on the “double fifth” - the fifth day of the fifth lunar month (falling on June 12 in 2013). That signals a series of rituals intended to shake its bad luck and flush out illness, ranging from hanging herbs at home to the show-stopping, chaotic Dragon Boat Festival. Fiercely competitive boat races pay tribute to the dragon (the mythological ruler of water) throughout China and with related events in Malaysia, North America, and Japan. Ornate boats crowned with dragon heads, scales, and tails are each powered by a crew of up to 50 paddling frenetically to a pounding drumbeat and, these days, pop tunes. The revelry hits its apogee in Hong Kong, where the Tuen Ng Festival features splashy sprints at Victoria Harbour accompanied by a field day of ritual cleansing, song and dance, and feasts of zonzgi (rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves). “For me, the real thrill is the meaning of the races,” says Hong Kong resident and Traveler editor at large Daisann McLane. “They commemorate the poet and statesman Qu Yuan, who threw himself into China’s Miluo River more than 2,000 years ago rather than follow the dictates of a corrupt emperor. Behind the colours and excitement, his story of honour reverberates through the centuries.”
10. Jordan: Scaling the Sands
Southern Jordan’s sandstone and granite Wadi Rum Protected Area has been called the Valley of the Moon. Another possible nickname - “rock garden of the gods.” T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) was so enchanted by Wadi Rum, he wrote of how “the crimson sunset burned on its stupendous cliffs and slanted ladders of hazy fire down the walled avenue” in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the British Army officer’s autobiography inspired by his time on the Arabian Peninsula during World War I. For the past 12,000 years, successive peoples, from pre-Islamic Arabian tribes and Nabataeans to today’s Bedouins, have tried to chronicle the place’s wonders, with more than 40,000 petroglyphs and inscriptions giving testament to these cultures. By camel or four-wheel drive or by soaring in an ultralight aircraft, visitors traverse the expanse of red sand and craggy rock formations - called djebel (Arabic for mountain) - that some archaeologists now fear may be in jeopardy due to inadequate tourism management. No matter their conveyance, travellers are likely to feel the insignificance that Lawrence described: “Our little caravan grew self-conscious, and fell dead quiet, afraid and ashamed to flaunt its smallness in the presence of the stupendous hills.”
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