Submitted by Michael Kan on Mon, 03/01/2010 - 11:17
At 5:30am, the ancient town of Pingyao is a black mass that disappears in the darkness. There are no signs of street lights, save for the few red lanterns that dangle outside these still sleeping homes. The alleys here seem more like one long labyrinth, a giant shadow the seeable destination. Very quickly, I wonder where I am and if I might get mugged.
A few hours later, Pingyao begins to awake. And soon I find that nothing here resembles the modern China I know.
There are no high-rises in sight. No bustling shopping malls within town. In fact, there’s hardly anything over three stories tall.
Pingyao is one of the most well-preserved medieval town in all of China and has become a major tourist destination. The town is notable for its still existing city wall along with the hundreds of buildings that date back to the Ming and Qing dynasties. During the 19th century, the town became a banking capital for the country.
The tourist climb to the top of Australia's most famous ancient site, Uluru, could be closed following the approval of a new management plan for the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. However the final decision to close the controversial climb will not be made until one of the following three conditions is met.
Submitted by Mary Harrsch on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 16:22
At the Fall 2009 Membership Meeting of the the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Bernard Frischer, Director of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory at the University of Virginia said his team of "digital humanists" that were responsible for the development of Rome Reborn are turning their attention to UNESCO-listed Hadrian's Villa, also known as Villa Adriana, in Tivoli. In his talk, Beyond Illustration: New Dimensions of 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites and Monuments (see the video at the bottom of this page), he discusses how 4D virtualisation would increase our knowledge of the ancient world.
The British Museum had agreed to lend the artefact – a 6th century Babylonian treasure, regarded as the world’s first declaration of human rights – to the National Museum of Tehran back in September, but then delayed the cylinder’s transfer citing the “political situation” in post-election Iran. Last week, the British Museum declared its intention to delay the loan of the Cyrus Cylinder once again, until the summer in order to complete research, sparking an outraged reaction from Iran’s state cultural organisation.
Canterbury City Council is the latest local authority set to close museums as part of cost-cutting measures. The council is wielding the budget axe – and it’s decided that saving the city’s Christmas lights is more important than keeping the Roman Museum open to the public.
Photography is often a case of having to wait for that perfect shot, as Vit Hassan discovered when visiting Meroe. The golden sands of the desert against the ancient Nubian pyramids gave the perfect backdrop, and after taking his photograph, Vit Hassan took the one Heritage Key features ten minutes later as the shadows set into the landscape, and the scenery became more defined.
The Sahara desert covers the length of Egypt, down to the site of the city of Meroe, near the modern day border with Sudan aside the River Nile. Meroe intrigues many archaeologists for the sense of mystery surrounding it - a city where little is known about the people who lived there or why they left, just simply disappearing.
There are hundreds of tourist sites and experiences that are too crowded, too over-developed or too expensive. They’re the places we always see on TV or as backdrops in movies, or places we’ve read about in books or seen on the covers of travel magazines; it’s always sunny in the photos, and the sites always look pleasant and amazing to visit. But are they?
It’s a question publisher Dorling Kindersley has tackled head-on in The Road Less Travelled: 1,000 Amazing Places Off the Tourist Trail, a book that controversially picks the world’s top tourist sites – and then casts them effortlessly aside in favour of less publicised places. Instead of visiting the Pyramids of Giza, with their “unbroken procession of tourist buses”, the book’s authors say tourists should head to the pyramids of Meroe in Sudan, where they can “have the tombs all to themselves, with little more accompaniment than the sound of the desert wind in heir ears”.
Submitted by Garry Shaw on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 17:14
Driving through the desert in search of whales sounds counterproductive, but I had been assured that if I hired a jeep and drove seventy kilometres from Egypt’s Faiyum Oasis out into the Sahara this is indeed what I would find. If this was a ruse it was a clever one, and UNESCO were in on it.
Submitted by Sean Williams on Mon, 11/30/2009 - 12:23
Remember the 'groundbreaking discovery' of Cambyses' lost Persian army a few weeks back, in the Western Desert of Egypt? Almost as soon as it had been announced, Zahi Hawass' Supreme Council of Antiquities were all over it, rejecting the Castiglioni brothers' claims they'd found the legendary fleet near Siwa Oasis.
Iran has followed through on its threat, lodged in October 2009, to 
Driving through the desert in search of whales sounds counterproductive, but I had been assured that if I hired a jeep and drove seventy kilometres from Egypt’s Faiyum Oasis out into the Sahara this is indeed what I would find. If this was a ruse it was a clever one, and UNESCO were in on it.
Remember the 
