Thanks to an abundance of live-streaming travel cams all over the world, we can now enjoy the great outdoors from the comfort of our homes.
Watch pandas play or relax to waves rolling up on a serene beach. Want to see the Colosseum in Rome as if you were there? Now you can reach the four corners of the earth with our top 5 live cams.
Earth Cam
The Earthcam network virtually takes you all over the world, from small towns, USA to those exotic beaches you’ve always dreamed about hopping around. There’s something about watching this on a live cam that creates more of a connection between us and the places we’d love to visit.
Fave: Kaua’i Beach, Hawaii
Hawaii’s at the top of all of our lists of exotic places to visit and this cam has it all. A wind-blown palm tree? Check. Gentle waves rolling onto the beach? Check. Coastal view? Check.
Time to pull a lounge chair up to the screen and turn on some hula music. You’ll want to time this to catch those spectacular sunsets.

Explore.Org
This has an excellent collection of live nature cams so you can see animals in their natural habitat and explore spectacular secluded places where we can spy on nature as it carries on.
Fave: Tembe Elephant Park, Africa
The live cam pans across a watering hole at this African spot, on the hunt for wildlife. Even if no one shows up for your viewing pleasure, keep the volume on high. If you enjoyed the African safari lodges we talked about, you’ll love the wildlife here.
The park is a 300-square-kilometer reserve between Zululand and Mozambique. Tembe Elephant Park was established in 1983 to protect the ‘Great Tuskers,’ the last remaining herd of free-range elephants in South Africa.

The local wildlife is noisy and provides some great sounds. You’ll easily forget you’re cooped up inside as you enjoy the call of the wild.
On this live stream travel cam, you can spot elephants, lions, leopards, black and white rhinos, and buffalo. There is also the tiny Suni antelope and a spectacular variety of animals including over 340 bird species. You’ll hear a lot of birds!

World Cams TV
This live-streaming site has cams located in popular tourist places so you’ll have a great choice of relaxing beaches and city life around the world.
Fave: Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo, Japan
Shibuya Crossing is a shopping district in Tokyo with a population of approximately 208,000 people and sometimes it seems like the entire population crosses the street at once.
OK, hundreds of people – and at peak times upwards of 3000 people – cross at a time, coming from all directions at once.

This one is like watching a piece of artwork that poetically comes to life. If you’re lucky enough to catch this on a rainy day when everyone has an umbrella, it becomes very surreal and beautiful to watch.
Skyline Webcams
Skyline gives you lots of places to visit, both urban and off-the-beaten paths. You can search their categories and whisk yourself far far away.
Fave: Colosseum, Rome
It’s fascinating to look at this amazing architectural structure and symbol from ancient Rome. Especially with modern city life going about its business right in front of it.
It seems like only yesterday when powerful emperors ruled, and gladiators fought to the death right inside those very walls.

San Diego Zoo
The San Diego Zoo showcases the stories of some of the more than 3,700 animals that call the park home.
They have their live streaming cams trained on lots of species so you can do some serious hunting at their site.
Fave: Penguin Cam
This flock of African penguins can be seen in the big, new Cape Fynbos habitat at the San Diego Zoo’s Conrad Prebys Africa Rocks.

The spacious Penguin Beach features a cobblestone beach, nesting areas, and rockwork that mimics the granite boulders found at Boulders Beach in South Africa. These odd birds are pretty active so they’re more fun to watch than some of the other animals.