The places
18 places, with photographs and a hypothetical price for each. Open one to read more.
natural · Nepal/Tibet
Mount Everest Summit
The highest point on Earth, 8,849 meters up on the border of Nepal and Tibet. Ashes left at the summit would go wherever the jet stream sends them.
$35,000
cultural · Italy
Colosseum, Rome
The amphitheater Rome finished in AD 80, which held around 50,000 people for gladiator fights, animal hunts and public executions. It is now one of the most visited places in Italy.
$23,000
cultural · Japan
Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo
The scramble crossing outside Shibuya Station in Tokyo, where traffic stops in every direction at once and as many as 3,000 people cross together. The lights change every couple of minutes, all night.
$15,000
historical · Peru
Machu Picchu
An Inca estate built around 1450 on a ridge 2,430 meters up in the Peruvian Andes and left within about a century. The Spanish never recorded it, which is part of why so much of it survived.
$30,000
historical · Egypt
Pyramids of Giza
Three pyramids on the edge of Cairo, the largest built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2560 BC. They were built as tombs, so ashes left nearby would be in old company.
$28,000
natural · Iceland
Northern Lights, Iceland
Iceland sits under the band where auroras are most common, so on a clear, dark night between September and April there is a fair chance of seeing one. The light comes from particles thrown off by the sun striking the upper atmosphere.
$16,000
space
Low Earth Orbit
A small capsule of ashes launched on a rocket and left to circle the planet every 90 minutes or so, until it falls back and burns up.
$300,000
spiritual · Cambodia
Angkor Wat
A temple built in the early 12th century for the Khmer king Suryavarman II, dedicated first to Vishnu and later used by Buddhists, as it still is. Its five towers stand for the peaks of Mount Meru, the home of the gods.
$24,500
natural · USA
Grand Canyon
A canyon 446 kilometers long and more than a mile deep in places, cut by the Colorado River. The rock at the bottom is close to two billion years old.
$10,000
cultural · India
Taj Mahal
A white marble tomb in Agra that the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built for his wife Mumtaz Mahal after she died in 1631. He was buried beside her. Of every place here, it is the one built for exactly this.
$25,000
natural · Greece
Santorini Caldera
A ring of islands around a flooded volcanic crater in the Aegean. The eruption that made it, around 1600 BC, was one of the largest of the last ten thousand years, and the caldera cliffs still show its layers of ash.
$17,500
natural · Brazil
Amazon Rainforest
The largest tropical rainforest on Earth, most of it in Brazil, crossed by the river that carries more water than any other. About one in ten known species lives somewhere in it.
$21,000
spiritual · Australia
Uluru (Ayers Rock)
A sandstone monolith in the middle of Australia, 348 meters high, that turns deep red at sunrise and sunset. It belongs to the Anangu, who have lived around it for tens of thousands of years, and in 2019 the climb was closed at their request.
$24,000
natural · Zimbabwe/Zambia
Victoria Falls
The Zambezi River dropping about 108 meters into a gorge on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, along a front nearly 1.7 kilometers wide. Its local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means the smoke that thunders, after the spray that rises from it.
$21,000
natural · Japan
Kyoto Bamboo Grove
A path through tall bamboo in Arashiyama, on the western edge of Kyoto. The stalks creak and knock together when the wind moves them, and at dawn, before the crowds, that is most of what you hear.
$14,000
historical · Jordan
Petra
A city the Nabataeans cut into the sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan about 2,000 years ago. You reach it through the Siq, a narrow gorge more than a kilometer long that opens onto the carved front of the Treasury. Most of what they carved here were tombs.
$28,500
historical · UK
Stonehenge
A ring of standing stones on Salisbury Plain, begun around 3000 BC. Its main axis lines up with the summer solstice sunrise, and in its early centuries the cremated remains of dozens of people were buried there.
$18,500
natural · Ecuador
Galápagos Islands
Volcanic islands about 900 kilometers off Ecuador. Charles Darwin landed here in 1835 and noticed that the mockingbirds and tortoises differed from island to island. Many of the animals here live nowhere else.
$34,000