Places alessandralee Wants to Go

Tokyo’s only Vaudeville-cuckoo clock–steampunk-Victorian curio cabinet time piece.

Rainbow-hued local gem in Venice.

The palace of the King of Kings, burned by Alexander the Great.

The menacing creature had a tremendous influence on the local culture before being exposed as a hoax.

Woven tree art gives this towering Australian woodland a touch of mystical whimsy.

A creepy statue of a hooded ghost hauls itself up from the water in a historic Lithuanian city.

A stunning 18th-century site where pilgrims ascend by a series of punishing stairs only to return via funicular.

This funicular railway rumbles along for a mile up the nearly vertical face of Chattanooga’s Lookout Mountain.

There aren't too many operational funiculars around, but Pittsburgh has two!

The United States’s oldest funicular railway glides up and down a steep Pittsburgh street.

The bright red cars take travelers through breathtaking Tuscan scenery.

This steep cable railway has been hoisting passengers in the heart of Québec City for over a century.

The railway carts travelers to central Athens's highest peak, which offers stunning vistas of the city.

The oldest funicular in Lithuania has been climbing this steep hill since 1931.

Over thousands of years, this slot canyon was carved out of the bed of an ancient lake.

Twelve hundred stone carvings guard this off-the-beaten-path Buddhist temple.

Greenery cloaks this serene sculpture inspired by the famous Lost Gardens of Heligan.

The Cathedral of Salamanca has a number of unusual carvings but none so surprising as a modern astronaut.

An enormous dragon scales the walls of this 17-story temple.

An Aztec snake god has taken the material form of an apartment complex.

This Costa Rican topiary park is a surreal garden of unearthly delights.

In a 345-million-year-old cave that's 200 feet underground, dinner awaits.

The field of tiny caves that mark this Chinese cliffside are each their own historic Buddhist temple.

This stunning 15th-century royal hill fort preserves the age of chivalry in Rajasthan.