Hanove

Oxford, England  - People visit places for all sorts of reasons.

Not everyone in Washington is there to snap the White House and the Capitol. Some visitors to Beijing skip the Forbidden City and turn down trips to the Great Wall of China.

It's the same with Oxford, an English city renowned for its university and bookshops. Some visitors are drawn there not by the dreaming spires of its colleges, but by its connections with the 13 Inspector Morse detective novels written by Colin Dexter.

Yellowknife, Canada  - Miyu, a petite lady from Tokyo, could not get over her astonishment. Darkness had fallen many hours earlier in Canada's Northwest Territories, and the temperature stood at minus 40 degrees centigrade. But something gradually appeared in the night sky that more than compensated Miyu for braving the cold: the northern lights.

Sao Paulo  - In the streets of Sao Paulo, traffic barely moves in rush hour. The endless stream of cars moves at a snail's pace on 10-lane avenues.

Some 6 million cars, buses, motorcycles and trucks daily plough through the city of 20 million people, and an estimated 800 new vehicles join the frenzy every day. On bad days, officials estimate traffic jams reach lengths of more than 220 kilometres. The few underground lines and the 15,000 buses are full. No wonder people with the necessary cash evade the streets by taking to the air.

Sao Paulo is a city with the most helicopter taxis in the world and the highest concentration of helipads.

Managua  - In Nicaragua, tourists can be found strolling through Parque Central in the colonial city of Granada, driving to the crater of the Masaya volcano or swimming in the surf of the Pacific Ocean.

Twenty years after the end of the civil war, tourism has become an every day feature in this Central American country.

Many tourists often return to Nicaragua in search of new adventures, not least of all the "Caribbean Feeling" the country provides on its quiet eastern coastline.

Bandiagara, Mali  - Beads of sweat broke out on the tour guide's brow, and not because of the heat. A tourist's rucksack had just struck one of the sandstones loosely stacked in the wall of an enclosure, causing it to wobble.

"For God's sake!" the guide cried. "If that stone had fallen, we'd have a discussion here lasting for hours. It would have been a serious breach of taboo."

Behind the wall lived the hogon of the Dogon village of Djigibombo, a kind of high priest. And the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa, believe that a fallen stone from the wall will bring misfortune on the village.