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1. Son Doong, the world’s largest cave in Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, has ceilings so high (600 feet) they could accommodate the Washington Monument. Its widest expanses (450 feet) could fit a pair of Boeing 747s side by side. A shimmering blue river runs through it. Most spectacularly, a jungle flourishes under shafts of sunlight in stretches where the ceiling fell in long ago. You want to go deep? The cave is more than five miles long—about five times longer than its nearest competitor for the world’s longest, Deer Cave in Sarawak, Malaysia.
Hang Son Doong—the name means “mountain river cave”—has been open to visitors for only two years. (A tour operator says more people have summited Everest than traversed this underworld.) The cave entrance was discovered in 1991—and promptly lost. Ho Khanh, a local man then in his early 20s, went to the national park in search of aloe, whose resin he planned to sell to perfume makers. After he hiked a dozen fruitless miles, rain clouds gathered and Khanh took cover. “I sat down with my back to a huge boulder, then something strange happened,” he later recalled. “I heard the sound of a strong wind and running water coming from behind me.” Back at his village, Khanh’s report of his thrilling discovery was met with skepticism, which only increased after he failed to find it again. He became a kind of semi-tragic figure—the young man who dreamed he’d found a giant cave.
Nearly 20 years later, a team of British cavers recruited Khanh to search for the legendary entrance. They made three expeditions, and found many caves, but not Khanh’s great pit. Finally, he returned to the jungle once more in 2009. “I stopped by a big boulder,” he said. “There was the same strong wind, the sound of water running—I knew I’d found the cave at long last.”
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2. Home of the God Particle: Cern Laboratory, Switzerland
Stephen Hawking worries that the field responsible for the Higgs boson (or God particle) may destroy the universe one day. Do you? Perhaps a trip to the laboratory of CERN—short for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—is in order. CERN, in Meyrin, Switzerland, houses the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. Fired up in 2008, this device smashes atoms together at incomprehensible speeds to answer all conceivable questions we could have about the physical world. It answered one of the most compelling of those questions in 2012, when experiments first detected the formerly hypothetical Higgs boson and buttressed the Standard Model of particle physics.
Before this machine went operational, there were fringe fears that it would be so powerful it would create a black hole that would suck in all of the earth. When that didn’t happen, the facility began admitting tourists, if only in the most serious of ways. Visits are limited to specially designated Open Days, the last of which was in 2013, and the next of which has yet to be scheduled. But stay alert, bucketeers: If you end up getting to boast that you were there when scientists did something like isolate 38 atoms of antihydrogen, as they did in 2010, you can be sure nobody will show you videos of themselves water-skiing at the lodge ever again.
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3. Leaving the Earth: Spaceport America, New Mexico
Before the moon landing in 1969, earthlings had a vision of space travel, and boy, was it banal. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a moonshot aboard a Pan American Spacecraft was as much of a grind as a trans-Atlantic flight. Sadly, both Kubrick and Pan Am expired without even the hope of commercial space travel flickering on the horizon. That could change soon, perhaps by the end of 2016.
Virgin Galactic, a “spaceline” founded by the entrepreneur Richard Branson, has more than 400 people working in Mojave, California, to attain the objective. Though Branson acknowledged that he was shaken by the crash last October that killed a test pilot, he reaffirmed his commitment to “truly opening space.” The plan is to take as many as six passengers at a time on a suborbital trip. Taking off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, the craft would rise to about 361,000 feet, where you can see past the curved horizons and into the black edge of outer space. Then it would come straight down, offering a moment of weightlessness. More than 700 people have signed up, most recently at $250,000 apiece. Meanwhile, two other companies, in Arizona and in Spain, may steal a bit of Branson’s thunder by taking travelers to the edge of the stratosphere in high-performance balloons. Phileas Fogg would love it.
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4. Gorillas in Their Midst: Mountain Trekking, East Africa
Most people who have seen gorillas have seen western lowland gorillas; nice creatures, but weighing in at just a few hundred pounds, they might as well be drinking from teacups and working on their macramé. They are not the majestic animals made famous by the intrepid zoologist Dian Fossey, the mountain gorillas that weigh nearly 500 pounds. To see them—and you might want to move it, since only 800 or so remain, and they are critically endangered by habitat loss—you have to go to the verdant heights of the Bwindi area of Uganda or the Virunga Mountains, which spread over parts of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo.
And thanks to Gorillas in the Mist, the Fossey biopic, and the 2014 Oscar-nominated documentary Virunga, gorilla tracking (or trekking) has become increasingly popular. But it is expensive and highly regulated. Permits are limited in number and range from $400 per day in Congo to $750 per day in Rwanda; visitors may spend no more than an hour with the animals. Beyond those precepts, the rules combine common sense and good manners: Speak quietly; stay at least 20 feet from the animals; if one charges, crouch down slowly, avoid eye contact and wait for the animal to pass. In other words, act as if you were taking your tween daughter to a One Direction concert.
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5. The Starriest Night: Alma Telescope, Chile
If you like stars, head for the desert—Chile’s Atacama Desert. It’s one of the world’s driest places—scientists believe it received no significant rainfall between 1570 and 1971—and the absence of moisture offers the clearest view of the night sky on terra firma. That’s why in 1999 European, Asian and North American nations partnered with Chile to create ALMA, or the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. Perched atop the Chajnantor Plateau at 16,570 feet above sea level, the observatory is one of the highest instruments on earth. ALMA’s state-of-the-art telescope utilizes 66 radio antennas, most almost 40 feet in diameter, to create images comparable to those that could be obtained with a 46,000-foot-wide dish. It’s been said that the scope could spot a golf ball nine miles away, but usually scientists use it to study ancient galaxies and to probe around young stars for nascent planets. That is, of course, a far better use of this equipment than investigating any of the half-dozen or so UFO sightings that have been reported in Chile since 2012.
ALMA opened its control room and laboratories (but not the array itself, for safety reasons) to tourists this past March. So far, only earthlings have shown up. Or so they say.
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6. The Incredible Shrinking Glacier: Mendenhall Ice Caves, Alaska
Just 12 miles from downtown Juneau, in the Tongass National Forest, is the 12-mile-long Mendenhall Glacier, which began forming about 3,000 years ago and stopped growing in the mid-1700s. Now it’s melting away, leaving ever less time to see one of the most breathtaking visions available. The glacier is partially hollow; melting reveals astonishing ice caves where blue water runs over blue rocks, creating surreal lava-lampish images. To see them, however, a visitor must kayak or otherwise boat through icy water to the glacier or clamber across the dangerous peninsula that protrudes into Mendenhall Lake. (When state troopers say the caves and their approaches are the “most-rescued” area of the Tongass, they’re referring to people, not the landscape.) The roof of a popular cave partially collapsed in summer 2014; what remains is unstable. Park authorities strongly suggest hiring a guide; two companies lead expeditions to the glacier.
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7. The Fastest Rollercoaster: Ferrari World, Abu Dhabi
You might have thought Ferrari World would be found in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy—perhaps in Modena, where the brilliant Enzo Ferrari was born, or in Maranello, where he moved his factory and race car operations during World War II. But no. Ferrari World, the planet’s largest indoor theme park, opened in 2010 in Abu Dhabi. And in Ferrari World you will find Formula Rossa, the world’s fastest roller coaster. It uses a hydraulic launch system similar to the catapults used on aircraft carriers, and it goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in two seconds and to its top speed of 149 mph in five. (The previous record holder, Kingda Ka of Six Flags Great Adventure, in New Jersey, topped out at 128.) In keeping with the Formula One theme, passengers are required to wear goggles. Alberto Minetti, a professor of physiology in Milan, says that at 150 mph, “even dust that is not normally harmful is. Even dust like when you are sitting at your desk, it’s like a bullet in a way.”
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8. The Deepest Dive: Cayman Trench, Caribbean Sea
You may be one of those for whom a vacation isn’t a vacation unless it offers a dip in the ocean. If so, you might consider the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration, or RIDE, a Honduras-based outfit that offers to take tourists as deep as 2,000 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. The owner and operator of RIDE, Karl Stanley, has been in business since 1998, but in the early 2000s he designed and built a small submarine called the Idabel, capable of deep dives. Stanley and his vessel today offer several experiences in the Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean; they vary in length and fee, starting with a 90-minute, 1,000-foot dive that costs $500 and offers a close view of sea lilies, glass sponges, pompom anemones and lace coral.
For those who do nothing halfway, RIDE offers a $1,500 trip that guarantees a close view of sixgill sharks, among the largest but least-known predators in the sea. Their appearance is assured by the attachment of meat carcasses to the Idabel’s exterior. The submarine descends below 1,500 feet into total darkness and waits for the sharks to appear, jostling the vessel as they enjoy their buffet and providing a signal to turn on the sub’s exterior lights. This trip can last up to nine hours. Voyages on the Idabel are designed for two people and a pilot, but any combination of humanity that weighs less than 460 pounds can be accommodated. The record, says Captain Stanley, is six.
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9. The Mecca of Islamic Art: Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar
Fourteen hundred years in the making, the world’s greatest collection of Islamic art—textiles, manuscripts, metalwork, woodwork, ceramics, jewelry and glass—is housed at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. Designed by I.M. Pei after his immersive study of the life of Muhammad and the architecture of Islamic nations, the museum was described as his last major cultural building. (He was 91 when it opened, in 2008.) Concerned about how future construction in a rapidly growing city would affect the way the building is perceived—no architect wants to build a museum and then have a Dunkin’ Donuts come along and photobomb his masterpiece—Pei had a word with Qatar’s emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. The sheik, who is also chairman of the museum’s board, responded by building an island in the Persian Gulf just off Doha’s new waterfront corniche to serve as an unobstructed pedestal for the museum and its astonishing collection.
Assembled over 20 years from sources in Spain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, India and Central Asia, it covers religious and secular concerns, including geometry, science and calligraphy. Take special care to see the bronze Andalusian fountainhead in the form of a doe and the calligraphy and illuminations in an extraordinary copy of the Dala’il al-Khayrat prayer book from Istanbul dating from 1216.
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10. The Greatest Restaurant: Noma, Denmark
Almost anything can be the world’s best something for a moment. When something has been deemed the world’s best four times in the last six years (with a plummet to second and third places in the Years We Don’t Discuss), it commands attention. Located in a waterfront warehouse in Copenhagen, Noma—a mashup of the Danish words nordisk (“Nordic”) and mad (“food”)—is co-owned by chef René Redzepi and dedicated to serving a pure and inventive Nordic cuisine. Dinner comprises perhaps 20 small courses, each based on ingredients foraged from nearby forests, fields and seacoasts. Past dishes include fried reindeer moss and mushrooms; blue mussels and celery; caramelized milk and cod liver; pickled quail eggs; radish, grass and—no kidding—simulated soil; preserved fish pancakes; sea urchin with dill and cucumber; and a dessert of carrot and sea buckthorn. If the dishes seem extraordinary, the way they appear on the plate is so out of this world that set designers for future Star Wars movies should study them for inspiration.
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