Every year, at the end of October, tens of thousands of people flock to a Buddhist temple in China to see a majestic gingko biloba tree shed its foliage and turn the temple compound from green to gold.

The Gu Guanyin Buddhist temple in the Zhongnan Mountains of China’s Shaanxi Province is home to a 1,400-year-old gingko biloba tree that some say was planted for the Tang dynasty (618–907) emperor Li Shimin, one of the greatest rulers in Chinese history. It towers majestically over the temple, and for a few days every autumn, it rains down a gold carpet of leaves that stands out against the muted tones of the season. Because of its striking appearance, it has been called the world’s most beautiful gingko biloba tree, and has become a tourist attraction in it own right.

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Waterfalls are notoriously slippery, so trying to climb them without specialized gear is usually a bad idea, but at the Bua Thong Waterfalls in Thailand’s Chiang Mai province visitors can climb almost vertical falls using only their hands and feet.

The so-called Sticky Waterfalls get their name from the incredibly grippy limestone rocks that the water runs over. They feel like a very hard sponge to the touch and even though they can be described as prickly, you can easily climb them barefoot without hurting yourself. Because no algae or slimes adheres to this callous rock surface, the limestone creates enough friction to prevent slipping, allowing anyone in decent physical shape to climb even the steepest parts of the waterfalls.

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Developed during the 1980’s in Soviet Russia, the futuristic looking MD-160 Lun-class ekranoplan had been sitting unused at a Russian naval base since the late 1990’s, but has now been beached on the shores of the Caspian Sea, as part of a plan to turn it into an ocean-side tourist attraction.

Known as the Caspian Sea Monster, the giant ekranoplan was designed in 1975 by Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeyev, a prominent developer of of hydrofoil ships and ground effect vehicles. It used a cushion of air beneath its giant wings to hover at about 13 feet above water, making it hard to detect. It was built as part of the Soviet WIG program, which dated back to the 1960’s Cold War, and was the only Lun-class ekranoplan to ever be completed and equipped with supersonic missiles.

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La Casa en el Aire (literally ‘The House in the Air’ in Spanish) is a unique hostel perched on a cliff face, about 30 meters above ground, in the Colombian mountains.

Built primarily out of wood and featuring a tin roof, Casa en el Aire is attached to Cerro San Vicente, a monumental rock formation that rises up among the coffee landscape in rural Abejorral, Colombia’s Antioquia region. It is held in place by several steel wires connected to the cliff and supported by a long wooden pole also placed against the cliff. It stands about 20 meters above ground, at an altitude of about 2,500 meters above sea level. It is connected to a more stable-looking cable via a hanging bridge along the cliff face.

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The Meikleour Beech Hedge, located near the village of Meikleour, in Scotland, measures 30 meters (98 feet) in height, making it the tallest hedge in the world.

Planted in 1745, the Meikleour Beech Hedge now lies alongside the A93 Perth-Blairgowrie Road and can be viewed all year round. It is recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the highest hedge in the world, and is most impressive to behold during Spring, when the young green leaves reflect the light, as well as in Fall, when the trees turn russet and gold.

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There are some long golf courses out there, some covering over 8,000 yards, but they all seem tiny when compared to the world’s longest golf course, which spans a whopping 1,365 kilometers.

Nullabor Links is an 8-hole par-72 golf course that stretches along the Eyre Highway, from Kalgoorlie in Western Australia to Ceduna in South Australia. Legend has it that the course was created to give truck drivers something to do on this remote stretch of road, but according to several sources, it was just a wacky idea born over a few bottles of wine between two golf enthusiasts looking for a way to keep tourists along Eyre Highway in the area for longer. Their concept, to create the world’s longest golf course proved a huge hit, one that continues to grow in popularity.

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Legend says that they are footprints of the gods, others believe that they are UFO landing sights, and scientists have their own theories, but the truth is that no one really knows how the fairy circles dotting the Namib coastal desert came to be.

Fairy circles are uniformly distributed round gaps in arid grassland across the Namib which look like polka dots on fabric when see from the air. Until 2014, they were known to only occur along the Namib Desert in southern Africa, but then almost identical formations were discovered near the mining town of Newman in Western Australia. Still, the fairy circles of Namibia remain the most famous and fascinating to the scientists who have studied them since the 1970’s. Theories about their formation and purpose abounds, but so far no one has been able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that theirs is the true answer to this decades-old enigma.

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Imagine walking into the most pompously adorned room at Versailles to buy a piece of cheese or some yogurt. That’s probably the feeling you get when you step into the Pfunds Molkerei, officially the most beautiful dairy shop in the world.

Located at Bautzner Straße 79, in Dresden, Germany, Pfunds Molkerei is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the German city, with over 500,000 tourists stopping by every year. That’s fairly unusual for a dairy shop, but then again, this isn’t your average dairy shop; it has more of a palace vibe, although some say it looks much better than most palace interiors. The whole place is decorated with ceramic tiles produced by Villeroy & Boch and hand-painted in the Neo-Renaissance style by local artists. In 1998, Pfunds Molkerei was awarded the title of “World’s Most Beautiful Dairy Shop” by Guinness Records.

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Wat Pariwat, in Bangkok, Thailand, gets its famous nickname – “David Beckham Temple” – from a gold-plated statue of the English former football player holding up a statue of Buddha. But that’s just one of the unexpected characters you’re bound to notice visiting this unusual holy place.

David Beckham’s statue was installed at Pariwat Temple in 1999, when the sculptor, who happened to be a die-hard Manchester United fan, was allowed to include it as a permanent temple decoration as a symbol of his love for the club. It has since become famous all over the world and has even given the temple its nickname. But this statue isn’t all that’s unusual about this Buddhist temple, not even close. Among Buddhist-themed artworks and representations of mythical creatures, you’ll notice some characters that don’t quite belong, like Batman or Albert Einstein…

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A unique tourist attraction in southeastern China’s Fujian province lets wuxia fans fulfill their dream of experiencing the flying techniques of the kung-fu masters they used to watch on TV growing up.

If you’re a fan of popular wuxia films like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or “House of Flying Daggers”, you’ve probably fantasized or even tried reenacting scenes where protagonists soared through the air or battled their rivals while defying gravity. Not the easiest thing to do without the right props, but luckily there is now a place where you can reproduce all your favorite kung-fu movie techniques to a stunning backdrop of traditional Chinese architecture and waterfalls.

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There are plenty of interesting places to visit in South Korea, but if you’re all about adding new and exciting content to your Instagram feed, the you simply must add the Purple Island on your itinerary.

With the Covid-19 wreaking havoc around the world, South Korea included, international travel isn’t what it used to be just a few months ago, but that just means more time to plan your next great adventure. And if you have your sights set on Instagram-worthy destinations, South Korea’s new Purple Island is a must-visit. As the name suggests, this place is a purple paradise complete with vast fields of lavender, empress trees that bloom purple, purple painted houses, bridges and even purple roads.

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Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the founder and first leader of the Soviet Union, lives on in the hearts and minds of the Russian people, but also in one little-known geoglyph in the country’s Siberia region – pine tree forest that spells “Lenin” in Cyrillic letters.

Russian photographer Slava Stepanov was planning a business trip to the city of Omsk, when he remembered a fascinating Google Earth satellite image captured in that region a few years earlier. Taking a day off from work, Stepanov decided to drive to the town of Tyukalinsk and look for a very common-looking grove on the outskirts of the settlement. Planted in straight rows, typical for man-made forests, the pine grove only revealed its secret when Stepanov released his drone to get a view from high above.

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The county of Staffordshire, in central UK, is home to a mysterious and rather eerie attraction – an old oak tree with branches shackled in heavy metal chains tied to a creepy local legend.

The story of the Chained Oak near the village of Alton is the most famous legend in Staffordshire. It is said that one day during the 1830’s, as the Earl of Shrewsbury was returning home to his home at Alton Towers estate a beggar woman stopped his carriage in the middle of the road and asked him if he could spare a coin or two. The earl cruelly dismissed her and urged the driver to move on, at which point the woman allegedly cursed him to lose a member of his family whenever a branch fell off a magnificent oak on the side of the road.

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Slope Point is known for being the southernmost tip on New Zealand’s South Island, but also for hosting some of the strangest-looking trees in the world. They are shaped by the relentless winds that constantly pummel this place.

Trees don’t usually grow in the Slope Point area. It’s not that the soil isn’t fertile enough, but the winds blowing through the slopes and fields of this place make it an inhospitable place. Still, the farmers that bring their sheep here for grazing planted patches of trees as shelter for the animals. Only instead of growing upright, like other specimens, most of these trees are twisted and crooked, with their canopy looking like windswept hair. They look unlike anything else in the world, and they have made the otherwise unremarkable Slope Point famous around the globe.

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Among the rolling hills and vineyards of the Tuscan countryside lies one of the most stunning tourist attractions not only in Italy, but in the entire world – a cascade of white limestone pools overflowing with warm, turquoise water known as Cascate del Mulino.

Translated as “Waterfalls of the Mill” in Italian, this surreal-looking natural wonder is located on the grounds of an old mill, just a few kilometers outside of the village of Saturnia. Since the time of the Roman empire, people have been coming here to have various ailments cured by the special water of the underground springs in the area, which is rich in sulfur and other minerals. But nowadays, Cascate del Mulino has become a popular destination for tourists and Instagram travel influencers, offering both stunning views of the surrounding Tuscan countryside and attention-grabbing social media pics.

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