A block from Havana’s famous Malecon, I found myself standing on a curb, sharing a bottle of rum with my good friend and traveling companion Sandra, and three strangers. We’d all met earlier at a nearby salsa club tucked in an alleyway between the Centro and Old Havana neighborhoods, a local joint.

Sunlight streamed in as I parted the window curtains of the double-decker luxury bus my husband and I were taking from Mumbai to the popular summer destination of Mahabaleshwar, 264 kilometers East of India’s biggest city. Outside, low-hanging tufts of clouds touched the opulent carpet of green that rolled down the hills.

Seventeen miles down a gravel road that cuts through an empty expanse of desert to reach the northeastern edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake is an enigmatic art destination that’s worth the pilgrimage. And pilgrimage it is.

When travelers think of Poland, Krakćw and Warsaw, the country’s two largest and most popular tourist centers are typically what come to mind. But Poland is a huge country with a myriad of interesting cities for visitors. Here are five alternative cities you should check out when in Poland.

Dharavi, in central Mumbai, is considered one of the largest slums in Asia, but deep within this neighborhood, below the shanty grey roofs, loosely comprised of scavenged, upcycled metal, lives a resourceful and innovative community that plays an imperative role in Mumbai’s city-wide waste management.

The volcanic island of Tenerife, the largest and most diverse of the Canary Island Archipelago, is a fabulous year-round destination with record-breaking numbers of visitors each year.

The sprawling mansion looked like a medieval European castle with its arched bay windows and turrets in each corners, the dark red laterite façade gleaming in the morning sun. We got down from our car, and were immediately greeted by Debjit Singh Deo, who owns and runs this heritage building amid the bucolic settings of rural Odisha in eastern part of India. Debjit’s great grandfather King Jyoti Prasad Singh Deo of Panchkote had built this two-storeyed mansion in 1933 as a royal hunting lodge.

The cult TV show Portlandia pushed Portland, Oregon to hipster fame, but behind the city’s heralded “cool” veneer, lies a white supremacist history. Black people were explicitly forbidden from living in the city when the state entered the union in 1859.

Farfetched as it may seem, the tiny Malaysian mountain town of Kundasang is sometimes compared to the pastoral villages in the Alps. S

The science fiction that binds Jurassic Park’s storyline together is that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from mosquitos and other biting insects preserved in amber.

Most people think of Santa Fe when visiting New Mexico, but Albuquerque, where Native culture combines with New Mexican and Mexican influences throughout this quirky city, is a fascinating place to visit.

Previously overlooked in favor of its neighbor Turkey, the Caucus country of Georgia, which sits at the crossroads of Western Asia