Everybody wants to tell you where to go. Still staring out insistently from bookstore shelves are stacks of Patricia Schultz’s 2003 best-selling 1,000 Places to See Before You Die - a seductive title, with its compelling mix of entreaty and foreboding.
The wildly popular volume recently became the basis for a Travel Channel TV series. A network executive insists it’s not a travel list but “a life list.”
Do 1,000 sites sound like too many, maybe padded a bit to reach that nice round number? Lonely Planet has clocked in with its “Blue List,” initially subtitled “618 Things to Do and Places to Go.”
This list-flogging is slightly odd to the veteran journeyer. Surely travelers worth their typhoid boosters have at least a mental hierarchy of trips they want to take before that final cruise across the Styx.
This shouldn’t be a mundane rundown of weekend getaways or a note to stop by Aunt Mattie’s the next time you’re anywhere near Mexia.
No, this is the touristic thunderclap.
You know, the Taj Mahal under a full moon. The Pyramids at dawn. Although each of those by now is a little hackneyed. Maybe something more along the line suggested by the Australian gender-bending road movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Climb Uluru (Ayers Rock, to the geographically unyielding) in slingback pumps.
Is it odd in this global era that so many people seem to need so much help (much of which comes* hardbound in this Internet age) picking places to go? Odd, perhaps. But profitable, it would certainly seem. Schultz’s book was on the New York Times best-seller list for 145 weeks.
Lists suggesting where travelers of varying means, tastes and levels of adventure tolerance should roam are nothing new, but now they seem to be everywhere. It wasn’t that long ago that the magazine Condé Nast Traveler pressed on its readers “The Fabulous 50,” a drool-worthy list of luxe destinations - as well as a roll call of agents who, for a price, might be able to hook you up with each tempting treat.
Travel+Leisure, the American Express magazine for the potentially peripatetic, chimed in with urgent offerings under the just slightly more manageable rubric of “35+ trips that will change your life.”
As I browsed recently in Stanfords, the drop-dead London map and travel bookstore near Covent Garden, an entire display of volumes with where-to-go and what-to-do themes seemed to be shouting, “Me, me, me!”
Most alluring, perhaps because of the seemingly random 618 number in its early subtitle, was Lonely Planet’s Blue List.
Neighboring were: 1001 Natural Wonders You Must See in Your Lifetime, 50 Great Escapes, 50 Great Adventures, Unforgettable Things to Do Before You Die, Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die, 100 Marvels of the Modern World, 70 Great Journeys in History - and more.
Many travelers make their own lists. As a friend said of her husband after they returned from a looking-not-shooting safari in East Africa that included camping in the shadow of Kilimanjaro: “He can cross that off his list.”
This is the same friend who, in the midst of a glorious forced march through a handful of countries in Southeast Asia, laid down a time-tested theorem for the determined sightseer: “You can sleep when you’re dead.”
The result of that journey, like so many, was that instead of locales being crossed off a list, many more were added.
Some places never get crossed off, because seeing them even repeatedly is never enough. As Samuel Johnson, for instance, said of his hometown: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” I could say the same for London as well as for other repeatedly visited venues such as Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Cape Town.
Some people just don’t get it. It’s rare, in fact, that one of my trips - say, to the incomparable British capital - does not prompt a friend to ask: “Why are you going there again?” A better question is “Why not?” which is a fully sufficient explanation for my dozens of visits over the last 40 or 50 years.
Experienced travelers have a single, central question about Schultz’s book: Why didn’t I think of it first?
“People have been doing lists for a long, long time,” says Don George, former global travel editor of Lonely Planet and a dedicated international traveler. But Schultz’s 1,000 Places “really did strike a publishing nerve” and started “a new wave of people being interested in codifying a list of places you must see.”
Schultz had to substantially bulk up her entries to get to 1,000. I mean, I like Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach as much as the next person in its often interminable waiting line, but the Uffizi or Tretiakov it’s not.
And to my mind, only the certifiable would pick Venice in Carnival frenzy over a visit there on a crisp, sunny day in late November or early December when you can feel virtually alone in Piazza San Marco and stroll through the Accademia without the pre-Lenten (or, for that matter, high summer) hordes.
But Schultz’s 974 pages are a worthy jumping-off spot, as are some of her competitors’ entries. All you need is time and money, both in varying amounts depending on where and how you want to travel.
Some things you may not have stopped to think about in youth (say a private bath) have, in later years, become nonnegotiable.
At the same time, exoticism seems to be on the rise.
“More people are more well-traveled, horizons are expanded,” George says. But available time is also scrunched, so there’s a hunger for “some expert to say . . . this [place] is hot.”
Even the well-traveled George has a list, which like mine includes Bhutan (the largely Buddhist absolute monarchy in the Himalayas, which, even the official Web site notes, has adopted “a very cautious approach to the development of tourism”), the Amazon and Machu Picchu (the Inca ruin in Peru). In George’s do-over category are Paris, London and Japan (where he lived immediately after college).
I already have filed away online printouts from some relatively economical short-let apartments in Tokyo that I have my eye on, as well as some spas in the Japanese countryside that don’t seem to be freaked out by gargantuan Americans.
That’s definitely on my, uh, list.
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