101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [1]
Chapter 75 - The Inside of a Chinese Coal Mine
Chapter 76 - The Seattle Gum Wall
Chapter 77 - Varrigan City
Chapter 78 - The Inner Workings of a Rendering Plant
Chapter 79 - An Airplane After It Has Been Stranded on the Runway for Eight Hours
Chapter 80 - The Amsterdam Sexmuseum
Chapter 81 - The Next Eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano
Chapter 82 - The Shores of Burundi’s Lake Tanganyika When Gustave Is Hungry
Chapter 83 - Ancient Rome on or Around the Night of July 18, 64 A.D.
Chapter 84 - Nevada
GUEST ENTRY: Fan Hours at the Las Vegas Porn Convention—Brendan Buhler
Chapter 85 - The World Bog Snorkelling Championships
Chapter 86 - Your College Campus Four Months After You Graduate
Chapter 87 - A North Korean Gulag
Chapter 88 - Disaster City
Chapter 89 - The Inside of a Spotted Hyena’s Birth Canal
Chapter 90 - Gropers’ Night on the Tokyo Subway
Chapter 91 - The Yucatán Peninsula When a Giant Asteroid Hit the Earth
Chapter 92 - Monday Morning at the DMV
Chapter 93 - Black Rock City
GUEST ENTRY: Burning Man—Jennifer Kahn
Chapter 94 - The Bottom of a Pig Lagoon
Chapter 95 - Sohra, India, 10 A.M., During Rainy Season
Chapter 96 - The Thing
Chapter 97 - Four Corners
Chapter 98 - Russia’s Prison OE-256/5
Chapter 99 - A Bikram Yoga Studio
Chapter 100 - The Traveling Mummies of Guanajuato
Chapter 101 - The Top of the Stari Grad Bell Tower
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
There are a lot of things I need to do before I die.
Or at least that’s what my local bookstore is telling me. Every time I visit, I’m faced with a shelf’s worth of guides listing things to accomplish, from 100 Places to See in Your Lifetime to 101 Things to Do Before You’re Old and Boring. I appreciate the idea behind Patricia Schultz’s 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, the inspiration for this genre of books, but its offspring stresses me out.
There are lists of jazz albums I need to listen to, foods I must taste, paintings I have to see, walks I’m required to take—my own father has a book of 1,001 gardens I can’t die without visiting. How am I supposed to conquer 1,001 movies while simultaneously reading 1,001 books and traveling to 1,001 historic sites—not to mention making it to the 500 places I must see before they disappear? By the time I found a copy of 101 Places to Have Sex Before You Die, I was tempted to swear off travel books, grab a selection of the 1,001 beers I have to drink, and head to one of the 1,001 spots where I’m supposed to escape.
I am a person who routinely writes lists of things I’ve already done, just to make myself feel more accomplished. Like many people, I already spend too much time coming up with arbitrary things I “should” be doing, keeping myself so busy that it’s hard to separate one moment from the next. The last thing I need to read is a book that pits my desire for adventure against the time pressure of mortality—especially in the form of 1,001 places I’m supposed to play golf.
So I decided to create an antidote: a list of places and experiences that you don’t need to worry about missing out on. I called upon travel-loving friends, family members, and, in some cases, complete strangers to tell me about overhyped tourist sites, boring museums, stupid historical attractions, and circumstances that can make even worthwhile destinations miserable.
Some entries on the list are unquestionably unappealing, like a field strewn with decomposing bodies or fan hours at the Las Vegas porn convention. Some depend on context—Pamplona’s a very different city from the perspective of a bull. Some are just good stories, albeit ones that are more fun to read about than to experience firsthand.
As I gathered suggestions, I came across a characteristic common among frequent travelers: a reluctance to define anything as bad. “I have a soft spot for underdog places and a perverse need to find even the worse stuff a source of delight and titillation,” wrote one friend about her inability to hate on Uzbekistan or, for that matter, Detroit.