New York

New York sits on the northeast coast of the USA, spread across five boroughs, though most first-time visitors spend their time in Manhattan. It's a walking city in patches and a subway city everywhere else. The grid layout above 14th Street makes Manhattan easy to navigate: streets run east-west and numbered avenues run north-south, so once you know your cross-street and avenue you rarely get truly lost. The subway runs around the clock, which is unusual for a big city, and a tap-to-pay contactless card or phone works at the turnstiles now, so you don't need to hunt down a paper ticket.

The city packs a lot of history into a small footprint. The New York Historical, near Central Park on the Upper West Side, is the oldest museum in the city and a good place to make sense of how everything else came to be. Down in the harbor, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are reached by ferry from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan; the two are usually visited together on the same trip since the boats stop at both. Book the ferry ahead in summer, when the queues at the dock get long, and note that going up inside the Statue of Liberty requires a separate, limited ticket you have to reserve well in advance.

Weather swings hard by season. Summers are hot and humid, winters can bring snow and biting wind off the water, and spring and autumn are the more comfortable stretches for walking around. Tipping is expected in restaurants and bars, and sales tax is added at the register rather than shown on the shelf price, so the total is always a little higher than the sticker. For travellers coming from Turkiye, most nationalities need either a visa or an approved ESTA travel authorization before flying, so sort that out early. The three main airports, JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia, all connect to the city by train, bus, or taxi, with JFK and Newark linked to the rail network.