Top ten overrated international travel destinations

by Catherine Bodry on

Laurel brought us the US’s top ten overrated travel destinations, and we thought it was time to go global. Here are ten international sites, in no particular order, that just aren’t worth a two-hour wait in line, fighting the crowds, or covering long distances to get there:

1. Eiffel Tower, Paris
Seriously, your photos of Paris are going to look much better with the Eiffel Tower in them. If you feel like getting high, Notre Dame is a much cooler spot.

2. Oktoberfest, Munich
If getting drunk with a bunch of American college student is your idea of a good time, then be sure to hit up the Hofbrauhaus tent.

3. The Blarney Stone, Ireland
Don’t do it. Stay away from the nasty, germ-infested piece of rock. Surely no luck can come of kissing that stone cold sore, right?

4. Cancun, Mexico
Crammed with spring-breakers and holiday makers, Cancun is party-central and really no different than, say, any other beach city in the States.5. Niagara Falls, Ontario
The volume of water thundering over Niagara’s limestone cliffs is arguably amazing, but the neon lights under the falls and Vegas-like cacophony built up around them are over-the-top.

6. Stonehenge, United Kingdom
Crowds jostle for space not to get close to the monoliths, but to capture them on film from a distance. That’s right; you can’t even get up close anymore. And a major highway runs right by it, ruining any ambiance that might remain.

7. Hoi An, Vietnam
This little town popped up again and again among the Gadling crew as one that has shoved out any local culture in favor of coddling tourists – if “coddling” can also encompass aggressive selling.

8. The Atomium, Brussels
Another Gadling un-fave, the Atomium is, in the words of our esteemed editors, “boring.” There’s no real reason to visit it other than to take a couple of pics and say you’ve been there.

9. Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy
Here you’ll find a tower that is cabled up so it won’t lean any further, and tourist posing for photos where they pretend to hold it up. It’s not worth the journey.

10. Universal City Walk, Los Angeles
Not much more than an attempt to dazzle with bright lights and big screens, Universal City Walk is three blocks of cheese. There’s shopping for “memorabilia” and whatnot, and lots of families vacationing. Skip it and spend the day at Disneyland.

Did we miss any? What places do you think are overrated?

[Photo Credit: Flickr user Al Ianni]

Brits complete London to Cape Town drive in record time.

by Kraig Becker on

Awhile back we posted a story about three adventurous Brits who had set out to drive from London to Cape Town in the hopes of setting a new speed record for that route. Their road would take them across three continents and 20 countries, covering more than 10,000 miles in the process. Late last week they completed their mission, arriving at the finish line nearly two days ahead of the previous record.

Mac Mackenney, Chris Rawlings and Steve Mackenney drove their Land Rover Discovery into Cape Town last Thursday, arriving 11 days, 14 hours, and 11 minutes after they had set out. That time beat the old mark, which was set by Eric Jackson and Ken Chambers back in 1963, by 1 day, 18 hours, and 37 minutes. Perhaps even more impressive is that the trio had to average approximately 870 miles per day, in a wide variety of conditions, to arrive when they did.

The three men took turns driving, navigating, and resting, staying on the go nearly all the time. They did blog about their journey on the Max Adventure website, where they told tales of harrowing border crossings, interesting encounters with locals along the way, and the blur of countries they passed through as they sped toward the finish line.

While Mac, Chris, and Steve were certainly hoping to break the speed record, they were also hoping to raise some money and awareness for the Help The Heroes organization, a charitable foundation that helps wounded British soldiers to recover and get on with their lives. The team hoped to raise £10,000 through their adventure to donate to this very worthy cause. As of this writing they’ve raised about a third of that.

Personally, I applaud the boys for setting the new record, but this certainly isn’t the way that I would like to make that same journey. Give me that same Land Rover and I’ll take six months to explore the route. Seems like the ultimate road trip to me!

[Photo credit: Max Adventure]

Sun-loving world travelers seek endless summer

by Laurel Miller on

Call it a refusal to grow up, an inability to tolerate winter weather, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), but some travelers will do anything to prolong their summer vacation.

A recent CNN article profiles a handful of travelers and entrepreneurs who have planned their lives around seeking sun rather than snow. Appropriately enough, folks like this are sometimes referred to as “summer chasers.”

If the pursuit of sunshine appeals to you, the article offers the following tips:

Plan ahead
Couple Jared Heyman and Lauren Goldstein saved their money to fulfill a longtime goal: to travel the world for a year, visiting every continent without a set itinerary. Their one requirement: to only visit places with warm climates. Says Heyman, “To us, summer means freedom. Since we’re taking a year to travel…without work or other responsibilities, summer seemed like the most appropriate season to chase. Our strategy is to always be wherever it’s summertime, even if that means switching continents and hemispheres when necessary.”

The couple is currently in Italy, but following stops in Greece and Croatia, they will head to the Southern Hemisphere, visiting Cape Town, South Africa, Mauritius and Zanzibar. Then on to South America for the holidays, followed by Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives (hopefully they won’t decide to get married there), and the Seychelles.

Find a job that lets you live in endless summer
If you don’t have the savings to quit your job so you can travel, why not find a career that keeps you in a warm climate, or on the beach?

Michael Turner Winning of British Columbia is a private chef on a Florida yacht. The job enables him to travel and experience summer nearly full-time. He works 11 months a year in balmy climes like Maui and West Palm Beach.

Take your professional aspirations where the sun shines
Thanks to technology, working remotely is easier than ever, even from a private island or multiple countries.

Twenty-two-year-old (!) Colin Pladmonton of Washington state co-founded Spreadsong, a company that develops mobile applications. His occupation is enabling him to travel the world indefinitely, staying in hostels and affordable rented bungalows in temperate parts of Argentina, as well as Montevideo, Uruguay, and Panama.

The Domesday project – or how we did computer mapping in 1986

by Scott Carmichael on

When Google launched its Street View map service in 2007, viewing maps as we knew it changed forever. The foundation for a lot of the thinking behind this handy tool was actually laid back in 1984 when the BBC, Acorn Computers, Logica and Philips teamed up to create the Domesday project.

The Domesday project was an ambitious idea, designed to create a computer based survey of the United Kingdom, using their 1981 census, maps, color photos and video – long before anyone had heard of the term “multimedia”.

In total, over one million people participated in creating the content. To browse the country, you accessed data off a Laserdisc, quite revolutionary for the time, especially since it stored a whopping 300MB – a lot of data when the average hard disk at the time was no larger than 20MB.

Controlling the Domesday system was done with a trackball, and users could select portions of the country, view photos and load video segments. The video even included some virtual reality features, another phrase nobody was using at the time, and long before virtual reality became a common term thanks to the 1992 movie “The Lawnmower Man”. Unlike current online mapping tools, the Domesday Project only displayed a couple of photos per mapped grid of the UK, but it was still more than anything anyone had ever done before.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the whole project is that it shows how vulnerable our data can be – in 2002, fears arose about the future of the Domesday Laserdiscs, and a project was started to transfer the content to a more reliable storage medium.

As fascinating overview of the technology and its challenges can be found here.

[Photo from Flickr/ljw]

Weekend travel media top five

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Among the best travel stories this last weekend of October: emerging Armenia, undervisited Northern Vietnam, a rail journey across China, top spots to celebrate Halloween (start your research for Halloween 2011 here!), and a wine-free tour of St. Helena, California.

1. In the Financial Times, Teresa Levonian Coles writes about the emergence of Armenia as a tourist destination. Her piece is inspiring and right on the curve. Armenia (along with neighbors Georgia and just possibly an apparently unwilling Azerbaijan) are moving into the tourist limelight.

2. In the New York Times, Jennifer Bleyer writes a piece on Northern Vietnam, providing an exciting window into an underexplored region of ethnic diversity and few tourists.

3. In the Globe and Mail, Mitch Moxley takes an entertaining ten-day journey across China by train, from Beijing to the southern tip of the country and then back again.

4. In the Los Angeles Times, Judy Mandell writes about top Halloween destinations.

5. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Spud Hilton attempts the near-impossible with a wine-free tour of St. Helena, Calfornia.

[Image: retlaw snellac / Flickr]