South-East Asia's World Heritage Wonders

Halong Bay
Cat Ba Island, Vietnam
Lying prostrate aboard an old wooden junker, peering out across the emerald waters as jungle-covered precipices rear out of nowhere isn’t the only way to experience Cat Ba Island’s Halong Bay – it remains among the best, though. These limestone karst pillars aren’t unique to Vietnam, but nowhere on Earth is their scale so dramatic, sprouting some 1,600 spines from the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, birthing towering islands and islets out of bounds to all but the native seabirds that have made them home.




Singapore Botanic Gardens
Botanic Gardens Cluny Road, Singapore
Despite its reputation as a ‘Garden City’, urban Singapore isn’t the first place that springs to mind when you think rare flora. Which makes swapping its hotbox streets and hawker malls for the cool, bucolic quiet of its 157-year-old Singapore Botanic Gardens one of the city’s great pleasures.





Luang Prabang
Luang Prabang Province, Laos
Pitched snug in a valley at the confluence of the Nam Khan and Mekong rivers and enfolded by lush mountains, Laos’ UNESCO-listed city of Luang Prabang has a setting to melt any cynic. It was once the country’s capital, long before its monarchy drifted into obsolescence and was forced to accept French protection in the late 19th century. The legacy of that deal is the crumbling colonial architecture that plugs the gaps between red-and-gold-roofed temples and lends the city much of its fin-de-siècle charm.





Gunung Mulu National Park
Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia
There isn’t exactly a shortage of national parks on Borneo, but the 528 sq km of old-growth rainforest trails, bottomless caverns and towering karst peaks that scatter Gunung Mulu makes this South-East Asia’s most diverse.





Sukhothai and Associated Historic Towns
Sukhothai Province, Thailand
As the capital of the original Kingdom of Siam, it was Sukhothai that kickstarted Thailand’s Golden Age 750 years ago, when Theravada Buddhism first swept the land. It shone just a few centuries, though, before the rival Kingdom of Ayutthaya chipped away its power; jungle claimed the rest.





Pyu Ancient Cities
Sagaing Region, Burma (Myanmar)
In 1996, Burma nominated eight sites for UNESCO inscription, and for nearly two decades struck out. Bagan is a prime example: popular with visitors, but accusations of temples being rebuilt dogged its reputation. Today, the political landscape is very different. UNESCO are now working in-country to help preserve sites like Bagan, and in 2014 the partly excavated cities of the ancient Pyu people became the first area of Burma to achieve World Heritage status.





Hoi An
Quang Nam Province, Vietnam
Far removed from the fogs of exhaust that envelop many a visit to South-East Asia, UNESCO-listed Hoi An is a quiet, sculpted riposte to the pace of modern Vietnamese life. It wasn’t always the case, though. The city was once a thriving port town and home to merchants from across Asia until the Thu Bon River silted up some 200 years ago and the traders moved on elsewhere.






Temple of Preah Vihear
Preah Vihear Province, Cambodia
High up in the Dangrek Mountains, perched on a cliff-edge that drops some 500m to the unforgiving jungle below lies the notorious Temple of Preah Vihear. Getting there usually requires a bumpy road trip from Siem Reap, but few dared until recently, thanks to a century long border dispute.





Komodo National Park
Off Sumbawa Island, Indonesia
There’s something unmistakably primordial about the way a Komodo dragon moves: haunches low, skin concertinaed about its limbs, bacteria-ridden saliva pouring from its mouth – enough to fell a beast three times its size. It all adds to the fearsome reputation of a creature found on only five Indonesian islands, two of which (Komodo and Rinca) lie within the idyllic UNESCO site of Komodo National Park.





Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park
Quang Binh Province, Vietnam
Despite boasting 885 sq km of untamed evergreen jungle and some of the oldest karst peaks in Asia, neither is surprisingly the main draw at Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. That privilege goes to the stunning caves and underground rivers that vein the land beneath.





Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park
Palawan, Philippines
Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park is easily overlooked, even by those who should know better – the US Navy and Greenpeace have both grounded ships here in the past. Its reefs lie far off the coast of Puerto Princesa in the Sulu Sea, and visits are limited to between March and June. Even then, the only way to reach the park is via a ‘liveaboard’ – multi-day boat hires that depart in the evening, arriving as the dawn sun blossoms across the reef’s limpid waters.






Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras
Ifugao Province, Philippines
There are few better symbols of patience than the rice terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras. For over 2,000 years farmers have sculpted the paddies of Ifugao Province to the lee of the mountains, contouring them cloudwards (at a height of over 1,000m in places) and carving each shelf by hand in history’s greatest ever feat of slow-engineering.





Kinabalu National Park
Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia
Kinabalu is that rare thing in Borneo: a national park better known for its flora than its fauna. You’d be hard-pressed to spot its elusive resident orangutans or tarsiers; much easier to see are the park’s 5,000 varieties of vascular plant, from the gigantic, insect-devouring nepenthes rajah to the ultra-rare Rothschild slipper orchid – best seen in bloom around late April.





Tropical rainforest heritage of Sumatra
Sumatra, Indonesia
The 25,000 sq km of dense rainforest blanketing the island of Sumatra is the only UNESCO site in South-East Asia to make the endangered list. Encroaching loggers and poachers threaten an eco-system already hit hard, and many predict that, given its rate of decline, most of its rainforest will disappear over the next 20 years.


From: http://www.msn.com/