Food, geology, art, and the joy books stand out as particular pleasures from 2025. Stones with stories, museum halls colored with neon, dishes I could not resist, afternoons in cosy cinemas. The places and events making this list were not better than any others; they stand out because something about each—an unexpected landscape, a single piece of art, four cheeses dotted with sesame meltimg on pizza, day with strange plants, and gigantic palms—made my visit unusually enjoyable, exemplary, or exhilarating. Here they are in the order in which in I experienced them, not in ranked but serial fashion.
New Zealand
Napier, Hawks Bay
Napier is a phoenix. The city survived the 1931 Hawke’s Bay 7.9 earthquake and rebuilt in the fashion of the day. The result is an Art Deco architectural preserve. Today the National Tobacco Company Building’ with its floral arch and stained glass, the Daily Telegraph Building woth its zig-zagged fascade, the Marine Parade Soundshell facing the sea, and the Masonic Hotel preside over a city of some 64,000 residents.
An Art Deco building makes whatever it houses better, and at Vinci’s that means a fantastic Four Cheese pizza—ricotta cream, parmesan, mozzarella, blue cheese, sprinkled ingeniously with sesame seeds. I ate there four times in a week..
Website: https://www.vincispizza.co.nz
Pancake Rocks, Paparoa National Park
Paparoa National Park was created in 1987 to protect a strip of limestone coast, rainforest, and rugged ranges on the West Coast of the South IslandI reached Punakaiki on a longer road trip, having made all the predictable first‑timer mistakes of driving on the “wrong” side of the road. My jangled nerves were no match dornthis spectacle.
Where Kiwis see pancakes I saw a coastline of giant geology textbooks left out in the rain. Grey terraces and arches rise abruptly from the green Tasman Sea and blowholes hurl seawater inro a blue sky. It was cinematic.
The loop trail takes you along these stacked layers and tempestuous false geysers. I did it twice and regretted my schedule did not allow me.
Info: https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/west-coast/places/paparoa-national-park/things-to-do/tracks/pancake-rocks-and-blowholes-walk/
Christchurch’s Alice Cinema
Alice is a two‑screen boutique cinema in central Christchurch that doubles as a time machine. It was like an old Blockbuster Store turned into a Victorian library. When you stay long enough in a place, you can do more regular things like taking in a matinee.And when a theater makes you feel you are at both an event and at home, you go more than once..
Info: https://www.flicks.co.nz/cinema/
Australia
Uluru, Northern Territory
Uluru is a 550 million years old geological feature, probably the most famous rock in the world. Photographs of it are mesmerizing even if it remains inscrutable.
What a photo reveals is what geologists call a islenberg, this one of arkosic sandstone. Such formations are abrupt. There is no preamble. Nothing foreshadows its rise from the desert plain — what i like to call as Australia’s interior solar ocean. The sun acts as the set designer as it offers a 12 hour show of changing colors, brown, rust, crimson. What it may lack in range is made up in scale.
On the base walk—about 10 kilometers in total—you move through sections of acacia woodland, claypans, waterways, caves, gullies, and waterholes. What at first hits you as one gigantic object becomes intricate, complex, and faceted. The book opens to its chapters, the play reveals its actors, backdrops, and props, the orchestra becomes strings, horn, and woodwinds.
Uluru is Anangu country. The Anangu are the traditional owners of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, and their Tjukurpa links specific features of the landscape to ancestral beings, law, story, and responsibility. Since the 1985 handback and name change from Ayers Rock, the park has been jointly managed with a majority-Anangu board. The tourist spectacle might remain but its sacred status is now unquestioned.
Park info: https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/[national-parks]
Melbourne (Tipo 00, gardens, library)
Melbourne is a great city. I arrived knowing nothing about it. I immediately loved it.
It is a city of bridges, beautiful architecture, galleries and music halls, great coffee,and I regret to ads, bad pizza). It is one of the world’s great immigrant cities. Roughly two‑fifths of Melburnians were born overseas—in India, China, Vietnam, Greece, Italy, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and elsewhere
This immigrant history is on the menu across Melbourne’s precincts. Italian in Carlton, where Melbourne’s café culture was born. Greek along Lonsdale Street; Vietnamese on Victoria Street; Chinatown and its laneways in Little Bourke. This is where I searched out what David Sedaris has called the world’s best restaurant — Tipo 00. He may be right.
Melbournw boasts other world-class sites:. The Royal Botanic Gardens costs nothing and makes a priceless afternoon. The Victoria State Library is a temple for books and a sanctuary for readers. There was a Yayoi Kasama exhibition at the beautiful National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).
Nearby Hosier Lane is street-art lovers compiment to the somewhat confusingly named NGV. Queen Victoria Market offers fruit, fish, and frying stations thar help you understand why this port city—built on gold and migration and a very serious relationship with coffee— feels like Australia’s true cultural capital.
Tipo 00: https://www.tipo00.com.au[tipo00]
Japan
Expo 2025, Osaka (China, Japan, Saudi Pavilions)
Yumeshima is a 390‑hectare artificial island in Osaka Bay, Expo 2025 turned it into a temporary global public square of ideas for a sustainable future. That felt apt in Osaka, a city of about 2.75 million at the center of a metropolitan region of roughly 11.6 million. It has long been known as Japan’s great merchant city, a commercial workshop. Osaka was not shaped by imperial institutions like Tokyo and Kyoto. It was built by trade, warehouse by warehouse, canal.by canal. It is perhaps Japan’s capital city of practical ambition. At Expo 2026 that praticality took on a grand maybe imperial scale in Sou Fujimoto’s vast wooden Grand Ring. In practice it served as Expo’s central circulation route and as shelter during openning day’s cold wind and rain. Symbolically it represented Japan’s unmatched skill in jointery while forming a porous border between the world aa it is and the world as the national amd thematic pavilions asked us to imagine.
The pavilions varied wildly in tone. Japan’s own “Between Lives” pavilion may have been the most conceptually satisfying for me. It used biogas from food waste and carbon‑recycling technology to turn sustainability into a practice instead of an abstract virtue. Saudi Arabia went for immersive spectacle: a Foster + Partners design that echoed Saudi towns and cities in its sequence of shaded passages and plazas. France chose theater and flirtation, presenting its pavilion as “a hymn to Love”. Spain offered a capitivating ceramic‑clad building organized around the ocean and the sun. It brilliantly used the Kuroshio Current as a shared resource between Spain and Japan. Spain used the specific and particular to tell a story of global import.
See my separate post about China’s phenomenal pavilion.
https://www.expo2025.or.jp (main Expo site referenced via overview)[wikipedia]
Cherry Blossoms at Osaka Castle
Osaka Castle during sakura season is less a park than an amphitheater for three thousand cherry trees. In April the put on a brief, luminous performance. Because the Japanes archipelago stretches almost 3,000 kilometers from subtropical Okinawa to Hokkaido, spring never arrives all at once; it unfolds west to east. Japanese media provide start and peak forecasts like they might for a typhoon.
Cherry trees are not unique to Japan. Wild cherries are native across the Northern Hemisphere The Japanese cherry trees are indigenous or long naturalized. Over centuries, Japanese growers selected and hybridized wild trees into ornamental symbols of the country. Modern sakura landscapes across Japan are as much designed as sites like Osaka Castle.
In the Edo period. Tokugawa shoguns ordered mass plantings of cherry trees along rivers, in temple precincts, and on city hills. This democratized what had been a courtly privilege. Hammani is now a full‑body outing: people spread mats, unpacked bento boxes drink, flirt, and write haiku.
In Osaka Castle Park at dusk, lanterns came on and the blossoms were lit against stone walls and moats. The whole complex became a temporary temple made of petals, picnicking, and poignancy. .
Bloom info: https://osakacastle.org/cherry-blossom/[osakacastle]
California
Los Angeles County Natural History Museum
LA is Hollywood, film, beaches, glamour, and glitz. Nonetheless, I came for a darkened hall of dioramas that had been shut for more than thirty years. In September 2024, the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park marked the 100th anniversary of its renowned dioramas by restoring and reopening a long-shuttered hall. The result was the special exhibition, Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness.
The exhibition returned to public view sixteen restored dioramic habitat scenes, works of art, taxidermy, and place featuring real sites in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. A diorama is a three-dimensional display that combines real objects or models with a crafted background to create the illusion of a complete scene. I love this early museum version of virtual reality. I have been enchanted by them since I was eight years old. I was thrilled by the ambition of adding three new artist-made installations: Saul Becker’s A Peculiar Garden, Lauren Schoth’s The Ever Changing Flow, and Special Species: A Delicate Moment in Time by Yesenia Prieto, Joel Fernando, and Jason Chang.
In a city better known for back lots and sound stages, the reopened hall made the old art of the diorama Hollywood’s newest and best special effect.
Wyoming
The Brinton Museum and Bistro, Big Horn
The Brinton Museum is grand like Wyoming’s famous Teton Range and intimate like some of its national forest and park lodges. I visited this hillside museum of Native and Western art in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. It was October, the aspens were holding on to their golden leaves. It made a beautiful setting for Bradford Brinton’s Quarter Circle A Ranch now turned improbable fine art site. Following her brother’s death, Helen established the museum in 1960 to preserve the ranch and the collection. Inside, the holdings reach beyond ranch-house nostalgia. The collection gives special emphasis to Native American art and culture, along with American fine and decorative art tied to the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The American Indian collection has grown from Brinton’s own holdings into a broader representation. Its contemporary holdings include artists such as Wendy Red Star, Fritz Scholder, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Arthur Amiotte, and Rhonda Holy Bear. Recent offerings have ranged from exhibitions such as The Unfinished War, marking the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn through Native perspectives, to the annual 5th Grade Student Art Show and summer art camp for young artists.
Eating afterward at the Brinton Bistro, with its farm-to-table menu and long mountain views, completed the experience. It made the afternoon feel less like a museum visit than a sustained encounter with Wyoming’s grand landscapes, intimate interiors, and surprising artistic endowment
Museum: https://thebrintonmuseum.org[thebrintonmuseum]
New York
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Met.
Reopened in 2025 after a four-year renovation, and named in honor of the son of New York long-serving governor. this modern corner of the Met presents the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas. The new galleries are brighter, more spacious, and more attentive to context than the older installation. They are also haunted.
I have been many times but never before did I know the tragic story of Michael Rockefeller. Young, eager, and enthralled by Asmat art, he traveled to southwest New Guinea in 1961. Months later he disappeared. That story casts a shadow over the objects that entered the museum through his collecting and that of his father, Nelson Rockefeller.
Two years earlier, while in Indonesia, I happened upon Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest. He argues that Rockefeller may have been killed and canibalized in nearby New Guinea by Asmat men. His body was never found and the official ruling from the Dutch colonial authorities remains drowning. Part detective story, part ethnography, part travel log. Hoffman tells is a gripping story.
As I entered the new wing, I did not see it as only a triumph of design. I saw extraordinary human skill everywhere—in the carved surfaces, the charged forms, the patience and imagination required to make objects that seem alive. I also felt the ache beneath the polish: the desire that gathered these works, the distances they traveled, the losses attached to them, and the young man whose story hovers over the galleries like a ghost. For me, the wing became a kind of cenotaph, not just for Michael Rockefeller, but for all that a work of art can outlast and all that it cannot repair.
Info: https://www.metmuseum.org/hubs/the-michael-c-rockefeller-wing[metmuseum]
Colombia
Salanto & Carbonera.
Here’s a version with those details woven in:
Revised passage
In the high, damp green pastures outside Salento, wax palms rise out of cow‑grazed slopes. They look like something sketched by El Greco, too long and thin to be real. Their improbable height and spacing—telephone pole trunks topped by tiny crowns—turn a muddy, manure‑marked valley into an impromptu cathedral, its ceiling floating up and down with the cloud forest of the Andes.
Yet the wax palm is more than a marvel of proportion. Declared Colombia’s national tree in 1985, it has carried a layered meaning in the country’s history: once prized for Palm Sunday bouquets and religious ritual, it was later recast as a national emblem and a species to be protected. That double identity gives the landscape around Salento an added force, because Salento itself—the oldest town in this part of the coffee region—still feels like a threshold between lived culture and high-country myth, with its bahareque houses, painted balconies, Willys jeeps, and views toward Cocora and Los Nevados. And beyond the more visited valley lies La Carbonera in Tolima, a colder, remoter stronghold of wax palms, often described as a far denser forest than Cocora and one of the great refuges of the species.[1][2][3][4][5]
Bogotá Botanical Garden (Jardín Botánico José Celestino Mutis)
Bogotá’s José Celestino Mutis Botanical Garden feels especially compelling because it gives pride of place to the páramo, the high tropical ecosystem that begins above the Andean forest line and stretches toward the snow line, where cold, wind, mist, waterlogged soils, and intense ultraviolet light shape every form of life. In Colombia, the páramo is not some remote fringe landscape but a national source of water and biodiversity: the country contains nearly half of the world’s páramos, and these highlands function like a sponge, absorbing and slowly releasing water to the lands and communities below. That larger ecological story gives the garden its quiet gravity, because its collections are not just decorative displays but living interpretations of one of the Andes’ most consequential environments.[1][3][5][6][7][9][10]
The Tropicario reinforces that seriousness by recreating Colombian ecosystems from superpáramo to tropical forest, so the garden feels less like a park of isolated specimens than a compressed map of the country’s vertical worlds. You move through it as a visitor, but you also read it as an argument about altitude, adaptation, water, and survival in a nation defined by mountain ecologies. That is why it can absorb an entire day so easily: every turn shifts the scale from leisure to science and back again.[7][10][16]
If you want one vivid sentence inside the post, lean into the vegetation that makes the páramo look both ancient and improvised: tussock grasses, giant rosettes such as frailejones, and other plants built to survive freezing nights, high winds, and sudden hard sun. The ecosystem is also unusually rich in endemic life and is recognized as a major biodiversity hotspot, supporting species such as the spectacled bear and mountain tapir as well as a remarkable range of specialized plants. That makes the garden’s emphasis on Andean and páramo collections feel less ornamental than civic, a reminder that high landscapes shape life far below them.[5][6][8][9][10][12]
“For native trees, frailejones, orchids, and high-Andean flora, Bogotá’s botanical garden does something like what the Gold Museum does for pre-Hispanic metalwork: it gathers a dispersed inheritance and makes its richness visible all at once”. Or, if you want a more lyrical line: “The garden is Bogotá’s quiet archive of altitude, water, and survival, a place where the páramo descends into the city without losing its austere grandeur”.[5][6][7][9]
Official site: https://jbb.gov.co[jbb]
Gabriel García Márquez Birthplace, Aracataca
Gabo’s family home in Aracataca does not overwhelm at first sight. It is not the kind of literary house that tries to stun the visitor into reverence, nor does it carry itself like a monument already embalmed by fame. Instead, it feels modest, sunstruck, and slightly fragile, a place still held together by air, heat, family habit, and memory. That modesty is part of its force. The house does not so much explain García Márquez as quietly suggest the human scale from which his fiction once rose.
Walking through it with his books in your bag, you begin to feel how easily literature can grow out of ordinary rooms. A corridor opens onto a patio; a bedroom gives way to another patch of light; a chair, a doorway, a kitchen space, the arrangement of shade and heat—all of it begins to read less like exhibit design than like the residue of a life once lived without any thought of posterity. The effect is moving precisely because so little is overstated. The house does not insist on its importance. It lets you discover, almost reluctantly, how much imaginative weather may have gathered here before it ever found its way onto the page.
And so each room starts to feel like a prompt rather than a display. You do not walk through it collecting facts so much as sensing origins: the domestic scale of things, the intimacy of family space, the stillness of afternoon heat, the way Caribbean light can make a house seem both exposed and dreamlike. With Macondo somewhere in the back of your mind, the patios and bedrooms begin to feel like footnotes to a larger mythology—not because the house is grand, but because it is not. Its power lies in the opposite of spectacle. It reminds you that the lush, crowded world of the novels did not emerge from palaces or cathedrals, but from something simpler, more tender, and more local: a household, a climate, a way of listening.
That may be what lingers most in Aracataca. The house narrows the distance between the monumental García Márquez of world literature and the child who once inhabited rooms like these, under this heat, among these domestic rhythms. It brings the scale of things back down. The baroque abundance of the novels begins to seem less like an act of invention detached from place than a flowering from it—an enlargement of voices, courtyards, weather, memory, and family lore into something immense. Standing there, you feel not that Macondo has been reduced to biography, but that biography has acquired the strange clarity of fiction.i
Comuna 13, Medellín
Comuna 13’s steep hillsides and outdoor escalators tell a compressed history of internal displacement, state violence, and community persistence. Maybe best of all it decorates with storey high murals that refuse to let the barrio fade into a tourist zone. On a guided walk, Medellín’s once most feared neighborhood, turns into a stage of its vitality.
Leave a Reply