Travel pictures

Beginning on 13 April, the festival sees people douse each other in water, which symbolises spiritual cleansing in order to begin the new year free from impurities.

Subterranean places are being opened to the public as part of London Transport Museum's Hidden London festival.

The holiday rental site selected different sets of winners, who stayed one night each in the underwater bedroom.

Thais and foreigners armed with water pistols and buckets kick-started the annual festival of Songkran, also known as the water festival.

Prince William and Kate Middleton are on an official visit to India and Bhutan from 10 to 16 April 2016.

The theme of Gajan is satisfaction through pain, devotion and sacrifice, and winning the favour of Shiva.

IBTimes UK presents a gallery of Bhutan's phallic murals (they may be spiritual, but they're also probably NSFW).

Ivorians celebrate with colourful masks, miss pageants and traditional dances.

The Marathon des Sables needs 120,000 litres of mineral water, 300 tents, 57 medical staff, 6.5km of plasters, 6,000 painkillers ... and a touch of madness.

The Harry Hedgehog Café is home to between 20-30 hedgehogs, giving customers the chance to spend time with the prickly mammals

The cherry tree, or Sakura, is celebrated with outdoor parties known as Hanami.

An IBTimes UK picture gallery, looks at the 10 poorest countries in the world.

An IBTimes UK picture gallery, looking at the 10 richest countries in the world.

People visit ancestors' graves and leave them food and paper money to mark Qingming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day.

The tower opened on 31 March 1889, in time for the Exposition Universelle, of which the Eiffel Tower was the entrance.

Australia is the favourite destination for millionaires, with Sydney, Melbourne and Perth all seeing an inflow of the super-wealthy.

More than 100 people feared trapped after a flyover that was under construction collapsed on moving traffic.

Baifu Pet Cemetery holds over three thousand graves of pets including dogs, cats, chickens and even chinchillas

Organised by the Guinness World Records, the nine-mile race is held in the Gobi Desert.

In this gallery, IBTimesUK looks at Holy Week processions in several cities around Spain.

Getty photojournalist David Ramos takes a look at the daily life of British expats and pensioners living in Spain.

AFP photojournalist Olivier Morin spent 10 days photographing surfers in the freezing water off the Lofoten archipelago, and was rewarded with several sightings of the northern lights (aurora borealis).

Men and women in Uttar Pradesh state celebrate spring with the Hindu festival of Lathmar Holi.

Burundi has been rated the world's least happy country to live in, along with nine other sub-Saharan African countries and Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen.

If you want to be happy, move to a cold European country. That seems to be the message sent out by the 2016 World Happiness Report.

Farmers from the French-speaking region of Wallonia organised an awareness campaign on the sidelines of an EU agriculture meeting in Brussels.

Built with locally sourced wood and floating on hundreds of recycled plastic barrels, The Makoko Floating School offers free education to local children

In this IBTimes UK gallery, AFP photographer Fred Dufour peers behind the curtain into the shadowy world of Chinese politics.

Many families have filed lawsuits against Malaysian Airlines, with the search set to end in June 2016.

Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race 2016 features 85 mushers and teams each made up of 16 dogs