The 11 Best Natural Features in Asia

Japan's cherry blossom season, or sakura, transforms the country for a brief two-week window each spring when thousands of trees burst into pale pink and white flowers.

The most famous displays occur in Tokyo's Ueno Park, Kyoto's Maruyama Park, and along the Philosopher's Path, where petals fall like pink snow.

The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove on the outskirts of Kyoto is one of Japan's most ethereal landscapes, where towering stalks of bamboo create a cathedral-like green canopy above the winding path.

When the wind blows through the grove, the sound is so distinctive it has been designated one of the 100 Soundscapes of Japan.

Jebel Fihrayn, known as the Edge of the World, is a sheer escarpment roughly 1,100 metres above the desert floor, part of the Tuwaiq Mountains that once formed the shoreline of an ancient sea.

A rough 4x4 track and a short walk lead to a cliff edge with no barriers, looking out over a flat desert plain stretching to the horizon, and it has become one of the most visited natural landmarks near Riyadh since the country opened to tourism.

The Yuanyang rice terraces cascade down mountainsides across thousands of stepped fields, shaped over centuries by the Hani people using a water-management system fed by cloud forest above.

Once flooded ahead of spring planting, each terrace mirrors the sky like shattered glass, especially at sunrise and sunset.

Villages of traditional mushroom-shaped thatched houses sit among the terraces, still lived in rather than preserved as a display.

In the Khasi Hills near Cherrapunji, one of the wettest places on Earth, generations of the Khasi people have trained rubber fig tree roots across rivers to form living bridges, some over a century old and still growing.

The most famous, the Double Decker bridge, is reached by descending roughly 3,500 stone steps through jungle.

It's as much an engineering marvel as a natural one, since nothing about it was built so much as grown.

Carved into the Cordillera mountains some 2,000 years ago by the Ifugao people using only hand tools, these terraces climb the hillsides in contour lines that follow the land, still irrigated by an ancient engineered system fed from the forests above.

Locals still farm rice here, so the terraces are a living agricultural landscape rather than a preserved relic — often called the 'eighth wonder of the world.

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Seongsan Ilchulbong, or Sunrise Peak, is a tuff cone that erupted from the seabed off Jeju Island roughly 5,000 years ago, its crater rim forming a dramatic natural amphitheatre above the coast.

A well-maintained stairway climbs to the crater's edge in around 30 minutes, and the peak's name comes from its long-standing popularity as a sunrise viewpoint.

It's part of a UNESCO World Natural Heritage listing covering Jeju's volcanic features.

Over 1,200 near-perfectly conical grass-covered hills spread across Bohol island, turning chocolate-brown in the dry season.

A geological oddity of uncertain origin, best appreciated from the Chocolate Hills Complex viewing deck at sunrise or sunset.

Sapa's mountainsides are carved into thousands of stepped rice terraces, farmed for generations by H'mong, Dao, and Tay communities in the Muong Hoa Valley below Fansipan, Indochina's highest peak.

The fields turn brilliant green after May planting and gold at the September-October harvest.

Most visitors trek between hilltop villages, though a cable car now reaches Fansipan's summit in minutes for those who'd rather skip the climb.

The Cedars of God is one of the last remnants of the vast forests that once covered Mount Lebanon, a small UNESCO-listed grove where some trees are reputedly over a thousand years old.

The cedar has been Lebanon's national symbol for millennia, referenced in the Bible and used for ancient Phoenician ships and temples, and this reserve is among the few places its oldest survivors still stand.

A short, flat trail loops through the grove beneath the peaks.

Tanah Lot's Hindu sea temple sits on a small rock outcrop just offshore, cut off from the mainland at high tide and reachable on foot when the water recedes.

Built around a natural spring the Balinese consider sacred, it's one of several coastal temples protecting Bali from sea spirits, and among the most photographed silhouettes on the island at sunset.

The temple interior is closed to non-worshippers, so the visit is really about the setting and the ritual crowds gathering for dusk.