Peter Neville-Hadley

As ever more European cities complain that tourist numbers have grown to the point of making ordinary life impossible, it’s long past time to abandon checklist tourism, “must sees”, and the look-at-me locations infinitely repeated on Instagram.

Even the most popular cities have corners of interest that see few visitors, and museums and other places of historical relevance in which you may find yourself perusing the displays alone, which, these days, is true luxury. Here are five crowd-free museu...

In 1845, theologian John William Burgon wrote one of the most quoted lines in English poetry: “Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, a rose-red city half as old as time.”

Petra, his only poem, was written in homage to the well-hidden labyrinth of rock-cut tombs, temples and monuments that was the capital of the 3rd century BC-1st century AD Nabataean kingdom, and whose remains lie in modern-day Jordan.

But only 500km south, across the border with Saudi Arabia, there's a match for Petra. Here, relatively undiscovered Hegra, stands at a point where trade routes met.

Every New Year’s Eve, all six tiers of the haughty Vienna State Opera’s glittering auditorium are packed for a performance of the only light operetta the company condescends to perform, the same Strauss’ Die Fledermaus.

But at midnight, television, radio and the internet all broadcast first the chimes from Vienna’s venerable St Stephen’s Cathedral, and then The Blue Danube. Across the country, in bars and in restaurants, on ski slopes or just on the street, young and old alike begin the New Year by dancing to the most famous waltz in the world.

In Austria, the arrival of the New Year is always celebrated to the sounds of Strauss, and in particular the great swirling tune that has become the country’s unofficial national anthem – Johann Strauss II’s An der schönen blauen Donau, or The Blue Danube waltz.

And in 2025 the band will play on as the country spends all year celebrating the 200th anniversary of Johann II’s birth. In addition to the many glamorous balls held every year until late February, and where dancing to Strauss is guaranteed, there will be 65 Strauss-related performances and three exhibitions at 71 locations.

‘I’m the worst daughter ever,” says Delia Hou over the music of a tango orchestra. The lissome 35-year-old Taiwanese-American quotes her parents: “You graduated once and you’re still not married. You graduated twice and you’re still not married.”

Ms. Hou has degrees in astrophysics and law, but here in a milonga, or tango-dancing club, they are forgotten. She and other Asian milongueras speak of the dance in almost metaphysical terms.

“Tango is about what you really genuinely want but you don’t even dare to admit,” says Ms. Hou. “Here you are, you don’t have a serious respectable job, you’re spending your evenings pressing your body against strange men. It’s not really typically Asian behavior.”

Visitors to Antarctica have to follow increasingly strict rules to safeguard the wildlife, but travellers can still explore the frozen continent in style

Post Magazine takes a trip on the Seabourn Pursuit, a luxury cruiser equipped with Zodiac inflatables and two submersibles

The visit to Longzhou begins unpromisingly.
Why, the policeman at a checkpoint on the edge of the city wants to know, am I going to a little-known town two hours’ drive southwest of the Guangxi provincial capital of Nanning.
“Lüyou,” I say. Tourism.
“Mei you shenme hao wan,” he objects. There’s nothing interesting there.

"The whole purpose of CERN has always been, 'What are the building blocks of the universe? What are the Lego bricks that you can no longer break any more?'" says Goldfarb.

So by the end of my visit am I going to understand the origins and the meaning of the universe?

"Oh yes," says particle physicist Steven Goldfarb, cheerfully. "We can get that done in the first five minutes."

Among the drawn-out conflicts rarely out of the news is one in which entrenched campaigners from assorted countries, demanding the return of antiquities they claim as their own, lob shells of rhetoric at the equally dug-in Western museums that now house them.

Those institutions mostly keep their heads down and avoid returning fire, shying from both the big guns of books and newspaper editorials, and the strafing via social media that any retort, however well-reasoned, tends to attract.

The seaside community of Aranya, about 2.5 hours from Beijing by high-speed rail, is luring in young Chinese visitors with its minimalistic design and otherworldly serenity. The “lie flat” youth in China, who’ve rejected the rat race like those “quiet quitting” in the U.S., come for space, slowness, and spirituality reflected in structures that sometimes merge with sand and sea.

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More than 150 years after British and French troops sacked and razed the Summer Palace, in Beijing, the incident is regularly revisited in the Chinese press. Articles usually appear around the October anniversary of the destruction, after yet another announcement of plans to catalogue looted antiquities now overseas, or when Summer Palace items appear at foreign auction houses.

As well as their incomplete and inaccurate descriptions of the palace and its destruction, these stories often contain transparently false accusations against foreign institutions holding collections of Chinese treasures, as well as unsustain­able claims of a legal right to them and demands for their uncompensated return.