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ArmchairTourist Travel Video 4+

Where in the world‪‬, armchairtourist.

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Test your travel knowledge and guess Where in the World! ArmchairTourist specializes in static, long play, experiential videos that allow viewers to vicariously enjoy the sights and sounds of fascinating locations around the world. Enjoy our beach scenes, Asian markets, European cafes, fountains, skylines and train stations – from around the planet. 4,000 pristine slow-television travel videos.

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Watch ArmchairTourist: Where in the World?

ArmchairTourist: Where in the World? is an exciting travel show that takes viewers on fascinating journeys across various countries and cities of the world. Produced by ArmchairTourist Video Incorporated, the show offers a unique perspective on tourism, exploring the best and most interesting destinations on the planet from the comfort of your home. The show aims to take travelers on a virtual tour of different places, offering insights into their history, culture, and natural beauty.

ArmchairTourist: Where in the World? features an informative and entertaining host who guides viewers through each episode. The series is shot in stunning high-definition, giving viewers a vivid look at the feature locations. The show raises the bar for travel guides, offering an immersive experience that captures the very essence of the locations it showcases.

Each episode of ArmchairTourist: Where in the World? focuses on a particular destination, city, or country. The show takes viewers to iconic landmarks, pristine beaches, natural wonders, and bustling cities. The host offers insights and commentary on the history, culture, art, and architecture of each location visited, painting a vivid picture of the place and its people.

One of the unique aspects of the show is the way it presents different parts of the world. The series highlights popular travel destinations while also taking viewers off the beaten path to lesser-known destinations that are equally fascinating. For instance, viewers get a chance to explore the major cities of Europe like Paris and Rome, as well as the hidden gems of the continent, such as the picturesque towns of the Netherlands and the idyllic Croatian coastline.

Another impressive feature of the show is its cinematography. The ArmchairTourist team uses drones and other advanced filming techniques to capture breathtaking footage of the world's most scenic locations. The show takes viewers on a cinematic journey across deserts, oceans, forests, and mountains, showcasing the natural beauty of each region.

ArmchairTourist: Where in the World? is more than just a travelogue. It's an educational show that offers insights into the history, culture, and traditions of different places. Viewers will learn about the staggering diversity of the world's cultures, from the vibrant music and dance of Africa to the colorful customs of Asia. The show also delves into the history of different countries and regions, exploring the conflicts, triumphs, and achievements of different peoples.

Additionally, the show has a keen eye for detail. The ArmchairTourist team takes time to explore the nooks and crannies of each location, highlighting the smaller things that contribute to the overall character of a place. Viewers will learn about the food, music, art, and crafts of different regions, getting a deep understanding of the people and their way of life.

In conclusion, ArmchairTourist: Where in the World? is a must-watch show for anyone who loves travel and adventure. The program's immersive experience, stunning visuals, and insightful commentary make it an excellent resource for armchair travelers who may not have the ability to travel physically. The show will take you on an unforgettable journey across various parts of the world, broaden your horizons and introduce you to new cultures and traditions. Whether you want to learn about history, immerse yourself in natural beauty or see bustling cities, ArmchairTourist: Where in the World? has got you covered.

• Channel ArmchairTourist Video Incorporated
• Premiere Date August 1, 2017

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The rise of armchair tourism.

April 8, 2020

It was Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin who once said: “There are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen.” And there can be little doubt that these past few weeks have felt like several decades for the travel and tourism industry as a landscape nobody could have imagined is now a reality.

Across the globe, destinations and countries are closed to overseas visitors; airlines have grounded either all or the vast majority of their aircraft, cruise lines have confined their fleets to port and hotels and resorts have placed their properties on pause.

Arguably, no market sector has been hit as hard by the Covid-19 pandemic as the tourism and hospitality industries. In the United States, 701,000 jobs were lost last week because of the virus and it is estimated that 50% of those jobs were from the tourism and hospitality sector. In the United Kingdom, the Foreign and Commonwealth office extended its advice against travelling overseas for an “indefinite period.”

The challenge for the sector is a horribly simple one. How do you keep the idea and desire to travel alive when travel is prohibited in such an unimaginable way?

If history has taught us one thing, it is that humans are incredibly innovative when times are at their toughest. And, with the Covid-19 crisis and all its challenges for the travel and hospitality sector, we are seeing travel professionals and travel brands showing incredible, innovative initiatives to keep the travel dream alive for many.  It is known as armchair travel and it is surprisingly successful.

Many travel brands and destinations are working on the premise that if the travel consumer can’t come to us we will come to the travel consumer. This week Viking Cruises launched a digital platform in a bid to “bring the world to its guests” at home while the Coronavirus pandemic continues to grip the globe.

The cruise line said Viking.TV would “provide enriching cultural content and livestreaming video experiences from around the world”, with live content from “experts, cultural partners and notable individuals.” Elsewhere, Visit Scotland’s content team, working from their own homes, created a short film inviting previous visitors from near and far to share their favourite memories of Scotland. The heart-warming film asks people to dream about visiting now, but to travel later.

Switzerland’s tourist board decided to keep their destination front of mind by giving users on social media a slice of “Switzerland from afar,” stunning pictures and videos of the destination accompanied by hashtags like #neverstopdreaming and #staystrong to bolster morale.

The evidence now is that many tourist boards that have any experiences or attractions that can be viewed virtually, or if there is the ability to create content that could create this illusion, are using this approach to encourage future visits.

A great example of this is the Vienna Tourist Board who have a dedicated page on their website promoting virtual experiences in the city.  The page states that: “You don’t have to leave home to experience the sparkling magnificence of Vienna’s museums and sights. Come with us on a virtual voyage of discovery through the collections and rooms of world-famous Viennese institutions like the Albertina, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Schönbrunn Palace and many other extraordinary places”.

South African Tourism released a video showcasing the destination with the message, “Don’t travel now so you can travel later” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urnp9YJeDN4 which amplifies what they are saying on social media #MeetSouthAfricaLater in a bid to inspire visits at a later date.

Travel writers are playing their part too in this bid to keep the desire to travel alive in the hearts and minds of the travelling public currently in lockdown. Travel editor and commentator Simon Calder now does regular Twitter polls called “Travel Icons” asking people to vote on everything from best waterfall, to best rail journey, best island and best bridge.

Meanwhile, Conde Nast Traveller have launched Little Black Book which is an initiative to “shine a light on all the places we can’t get to right now, but which are truly special and globally gorgeous.” As part of the initiative, readers are invited to send in their best travel insights and most extraordinary experiences.

No one knows how long the Coronavirus pandemic will last or, indeed, what the post pandemic world will look like. But one thing is certain, destinations and travel brands can keep the magic and inspiration of travel alive for now – even if it is virtually, from the armchair.

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Gardens of Stone, Moss, Sand: 4 Moments of Zen in Kyoto

The city’s dry gardens seem timeless, but as these relatively new versions show, their design is still evolving. They offer spots for quiet contemplation in an increasingly overtouristed city.

Kyoto’s dry gardens forgo plants and flowers and instead use elements like gravel, rocks and moss to create contemplative environments. Credit... Andrew Faulk for The New York Times

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By Paula Deitz

• March 26, 2024

Once, when the Buddha was asked to preach about a flower he was presented, he instead “gazed at it in silence,” according to the British garden designer Sophie Walker in her book “The Japanese Garden.” In this spiritual moment Zen Buddhism was born, inspiring the serene and eternal dry or rock gardens called karesansui.

Unlike a garden designed for strolling, which directs visitors along a defined path to take in scenic views and teahouses, a dry garden is viewed while seated on a veranda above, offering the heightened experience of traveling through it in the imagination, revealing its essence in meditation.

With rocks artfully placed along expanses of fine gravel raked by monks into ripples representing water, they are sources for contemplation, whether they refer to a specific landscape or are serenely abstract. Ryoan-ji, which dates to about 1500, is the supreme example of the latter among Kyoto temples, with its 15 low rocks in five clusters set in pools of moss within an enclosed rectangle of raked gravel. The puzzle is that only 14 are visible at any one time, no matter where you sit to view it.

Change in Kyoto, Japan’s major city of temple gardens, is a quiet evolution. But a tour of several dry gardens designed within the last century — and even within the last few years — demonstrates that the Zen tradition is timeless when it comes to landscape design, and that moments of contemplation are still possible, even as the crowds grow bigger.

Upon arrival at the Zen monastery complex Daitoku-ji, in northern Kyoto, I headed to Zuiho-in, one of its 22 subtemples. The temple was founded in 1319, and then in 1546, the powerful feudal lord Sorin Otomo dedicated it to his family. This was during the period of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in Japan. Like others, Otomo converted to Christianity but remained inspired by Zen Buddhism.

I entered along angled walkways until I arrived at Zuiho-in’s temple veranda to view the main dry garden. Though the style may at first appear traditional, this garden was designed in the 1960s by Mirei Shigemori, a landscape architect whose training was in the Japanese cultural arts: conducting the tea ceremony, flower arranging, and landscape ink and wash painting. As the Western Modernist movement entered Japan, he adopted it in combination with traditional arts and became determined to revolutionize a garden aesthetic that had remained fixed for hundreds of years. He succeeded in designing more than 200 gardens in Japan and even worked with the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi on a UNESCO garden, collecting stones in Japan that Noguchi set in the garden at the organization’s Paris headquarters.

In the Zuiho-in garden, the gravel swirls are raked into high peaks as if far out at sea, with a chain of jagged pointed rocks like islands leading to a mossy peninsula crested by a massive stone representing Mount Horai, where, according to Taoist mythology, the heroes called the Eight Immortals, who fought for justice, reside. Referring to Otomo’s Christianity, rocks in a second garden define a cross, and three rows of squarish stones embedded in sand elsewhere in the garden could be seen as Shigemori’s Modernist signature.

Across town, in the Higashiyama district, the Philosopher’s Walk is a pedestrian path along the picturesque Lake Biwa Canal. First opened in 1890, it is believed to be named for a Kyoto University philosophy professor who strolled there while meditating. As you walk along it, depending on the season, the swift current below carries brilliant autumnal leaves or delicate cherry blossoms shed from trees lining the banks.

Honen-in, one of several Buddhist temples along the Philosopher’s Walk, is particularly popular in autumn, with its grand staircase and entry gate framed by vast canopies of fiery red Japanese maple trees. Two large, rectangular white-sand mounds along the central path are periodically raked by monks into new designs; last fall, a maple leaf was outlined on one and a ginkgo leaf on the other against backgrounds of ridges.

The high priest, Kajita Shinsho, who lives there with his family, had a private courtyard with a veranda that needed a garden, and last March he engaged Marc Peter Keane, an American landscape architect now living in Kyoto, to design it. A graduate of Cornell University, Mr. Keane has lived in Japan for almost 20 years and specializes in Japanese garden design. Like Shigemori, he has immersed himself in Japanese culture. His home and studio are now permanently in Kyoto.

Only three old, gnarled camellia trees remained on the rectangular site, with blossoms in season ranging from dark rose to pale pink and white. Mr. Keane’s idea was to represent the constant flux of nature, exemplified for him by the carbon cycle — the process by which carbon travels from the air into organisms and back into air. His garden, titled “Empty River,” creates what he described as “a physical expression of this invisible cycle through a river of pure carbon charcoal.”

He traced by foot a narrow serpentine “river” that winds around the roots and trunks of the camellias, and with the short charcoal sticks he placed in the long groove, it cuts a strong black line through a blend of fine brown and white gravel. There are no rocks, only small stones framing the courtyard and plantings, with Andromeda ferns in the corners. Its starkness is its beauty, softened only when camellia petals are strewed across the gravel in April.

Mr. Keane compares this distillation of design and materials to a haiku, the Japanese three-lined poem. But like the gardens of old, it also expresses the Buddhist concept of emptiness.

At Tofuku-ji , a temple, in the city’s southeastern district, Shigemori designed the garden of the Hojo, the Abbot’s Hall, as early as 1939, using materials found on site. His avant-garde vocabulary of straight lines and grids may have seemed sensational then, but it is beloved now for its harmonious vitality.

From the first veranda, you overlook the southern garden, with clusters of mostly jagged vertical rocks and ripples of raked gravel radiating out, terminating at the far end with five mossy mounds like sacred mountains in the sea. In the western garden, squarely trimmed azaleas alternate with square fields of white gravel, reflecting ancient land-division customs. Azaleas in Japan are closely clipped, so these bloom in gorgeous flat surfaces of deep pink.

Next, a vast checkerboard field of leftover square paving stones embedded in a carpet of moss seems to dwindle off to infinity in the northern garden. And finally, to the east, a pattern of stone pillar foundations recreates the Big Dipper constellation, with gravel raked in concentric circles around each pillar to emphasize its individuality.

Ukifune Garden

Mr. Keane’s 2022 Ukifune Garden (Drifting Boat Garden) is an allegorical interpretation of the chapter by the same name from “The Tale of Genji,” Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century novel about Prince Hikaru or “Shining” Genji, and his tempestuous romantic and political life at court.

Mr. Keane designed it as the Zen courtyard garden of the Genji Kyoto hotel, opened in April 2022, on the banks of the Kamo River, near where Genji builds his own grand estate and gardens in the book. Designed by the American architect Geoffrey P. Moussas, who also lives in Kyoto, the hotel’s plan incorporates the indoor-outdoor characteristics of Kyoto’s old merchant houses.

Mr. Keane was inspired by the “Genji” scene in which one of two powerful dignitaries vying for the favor of Ukifune, a woman of 22, travels through a snowstorm and absconds with her by boat on the Uji River. As they pass the Isle of Orange Trees, she recites a poem in which she likens herself to the drifting boat: “The enduring hue of the Isle of Orange Trees may well never change,/ yet there is no knowing now where the drifting boat is bound.”

Mr. Keane consulted with John Carpenter, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curator of Japanese art, who told him of the late-16th-century “Genji” screen painting by Tosa Mitsuyoshi in the museum’s collection illustrating this famous scene. A copy of the panel now hangs in Kyoto next to the garden.

Mr. Keane installed a swerving “river” with gray river stones set ingeniously on edge rather than flat, giving the flow a greater sense of direction. The garden is set between two wings of the hotel, and the “water” appears to tumble down like a waterfall from one building into the next with a wide, flat steel bridge above, a viewing platform bringing the design to life. The banks on either side are densely planted with maple trees, lady palms, ferns and ground-cover moss. And a boat-shaped stone carries a large patch of moss, which Mr. Keane interprets as Earth drifting through the galaxy.

The gardens at Zuiho-in and the Tofuku-ji Abbot’s Hall garden require tickets. The entrance fee at both is 400 Japanese yen for adults (about $2.65) and 300 yen for children (about $2).

General admission to Honen-in is free, except for during the spring and fall opening weeks, which usually fall during the first week of April and the third week of November and cost 500 yen for spring and 800 yen for fall. The Empty River garden can be visited during those weeks.

The Genji Kyoto hotel garden is free to visit.

If you get hungry while touring gardens, Izusen , a restaurant in the Daiji-in subtemple of the Daitoku-ji monastery complex, offers multiple local specialties in set menus beautifully presented in mostly lacquered red bowls, which nest when empty. Open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. by reservation; 4,370 to 8,050 yen. It is near Zuiho-in.

Also by reservation, Yudofu Kisaki, a restaurant between the entrance to Honen-in and the Philosopher’s Walk, has vegetarian and tofu specialties. Open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., last order at 6 p.m.; 4,370 to 8,050 yen.

For a companionable book to read on your tour, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s post-World War II novel “The Rainbow” is newly available in English. Several chapters take place in Kyoto, and it can feel as though you are traveling together, often in the same gardens. Kawabata’s knowledge of plants was formidable, and the simplicity of his descriptions both natural and direct: “On the lawn in front of the gate, in the shadows of the pine trees, dandelions and lotuses were in bloom. A double-flowered camellia had blossomed in front of the bamboo fence.”

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

Italy :  Spend 36 hours in Florence , seeking out its lesser-known pockets.

Southern California :  Skip the freeways to explore the back roads between Los Angeles and Los Olivos , a 100-mile route that meanders through mountains, canyons and star-studded enclaves.

Mongolia : Some young people, searching for less curated travel experiences, are flocking to the open spaces of this East Asian nation .

Romania :  Timisoara  may be the most noteworthy city you’ve probably never heard of , offering just enough for visitors to fill two or three days.

India: A writer fulfilled a lifelong dream of visiting Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills , taking in the tea gardens and riding a train through the hills.

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

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