101
PLACES
NOT
TO SEE
before you die
Catherine Price
For my grandmother
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Testicle Festival
Chapter 2 - An Underpass in Connaught Circle, New Delhi, at the Moment When Someone Puts a Turd on Your Shoe
Chapter 3 - Euro Disney
Chapter 4 - Ibiza on a Family Vacation
Chapter 5 - The Beijing Museum of Tap Water
Chapter 6 - A Bathtub Filled with Beer
Chapter 7 - An Overnight Train in China on the First Day of Your First Period
Chapter 8 - Grandpa and Grandma, Koh Samui, Thailand
Chapter 9 - The Winchester Mystery House
GUEST ENTRY: The Worst Places in the Encyclopedia—A. J. Jacobs
Chapter 10 - Hell
Chapter 11 - A Buzkashi Match
Chapter 12 - Your Boss’s Bedroom
Chapter 13 - An Overnight Stay at a Korean Temple
Chapter 14 - Pamplona, from the Perspective of a Bull
Chapter 15 - The Gloucester Cheese Rolling Competition
GUEST ENTRY: The Worst Meal in Barcelona—Michael and Isaac Pollan
Chapter 16 - Wall Drug
Chapter 17 - Bart
Chapter 18 - A Stop on Carry Nation’s Hatchetation Tour
Chapter 19 - The Third Infiltration Tunnel at the DMZ
Chapter 20 - Rush Hour on a Samoan Bus
GUEST ENTRY: The Tupperware Museum—Mary Roach
Chapter 21 - An Outdoor Wedding During the 2021 Emergence of the Great Eastern Cicada Brood
Chapter 22 - (Tr)Action Park
Chapter 23 - A Giant Room Filled with Human Crap
Chapter 24 - Kingman Reef
Chapter 25 - Naked Sushi
Chapter 26 - Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
Chapter 27 - Times Square on New Year’s Eve
Chapter 28 - The Double Black Diamond Run at Powderhouse Hill
Chapter 29 - The Double Black Diamond Run at Corbet’s Couloir
Chapter 30 - The Beast
Chapter 31 - The Grover Cleveland Service Area
Chapter 32 - The Room Where Spam Subject Lines Are Created
Chapter 33 - Anywhere Written About by Nick Kristof
GUEST ENTRY: Experiences That Nick Kristof Does Not Think Are Worth Having Before You Die—Nick Kristof
Chapter 34 - The Tokyo Summerland Wave Pool, August 14, 2007, 3 P.M.
Chapter 35 - Mid-January in Whittier, Alaska
Chapter 36 - Onondaga Lake
Chapter 37 - Mount Rushmore
Chapter 38 - Amateur Night at a Shooting Range
Chapter 39 - Ciudad Juárez
Chapter 40 - The World’s Skinniest Buildings
Chapter 41 - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
GUEST ENTRY: The Customs Office at the Buenos Aires Airport—Rebecca Solnit
Chapter 42 - Any Hotel That Used to Be a Prison
Chapter 43 - The Top of Mount Washington in a Snowstorm
Chapter 44 - The Bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole
Chapter 45 - The Inside of a dB Drag Racer During Competition
Chapter 46 - Shangri-La
Chapter 47 - Body Farms
Chapter 48 - An AA Meeting When You’re Drunk
Chapter 49 - Jupiter’s Worst Moon
GUEST ENTRY: Splitting the Czech—J. Maarten Troost
Chapter 50 - Picher, Oklahoma
Chapter 51 - Tierra Santa Theme Park
Chapter 52 - A Vomitorium
Chapter 53 - Medinat al-Fayoum, Egypt, Accompanied by Your Own Security Detail
Chapter 54 - The Steam Room at the Russian & Turkish Baths
Chapter 55 - The Blarney Stone
GUEST ENTRY: Mexico City on the First Day of the Swine Flu Outbreak—Michael Baldwin
Chapter 56 - The Wiener’s Circle
Chapter 57 - The Top of Mount Everest
Chapter 58 - Garbage City
Chapter 59 - Stonehenge
Chapter 60 - The Khewra Salt Mines Mosque
Chapter 61 - Anywhere on a Yamaha Rhino
Chapter 62 - Chacabuco, Chile
Chapter 63 - The New South China Mall
GUEST ENTRY: Sumqayit, Azerbaijan—Lisa Margonelli
Chapter 64 - An Island off Germany’s East Coast, January 16, 1362
Chapter 65 - Fucking, Austria
Chapter 66 - The White Shark Café While Dressed as an Elephant Seal
Chapter 67 - The Sidewalk Outside the Roman Coliseum During the Crazy Gladiator’s Shift
Chapter 68 - Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiberglass Thing
Chapter 69 - The Path of an Advancing Column of Driver Ants
Chapter 70 - The Road of Death
GUEST ENTRY: Adventure of the Beagle, the Musical—Eric Simons
Chapter 71 - Cusco, If You Are Albino
Chapter 72 - Manneken Pis
Chapter 73 - An Old Firm Derby While Wearing the Wrong Color T-Shirt
Chapter 74 - The Annual Poison Oak Show
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. She’s right, of course—the worse something is in the moment, the better the story when you get home. So for those people who look at a warehouse full of rotting human sewage and see an interesting way to spend an afternoon, I also included some places that would be impossible to visit even if you were intent on finding the bright side in everything, like the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-five million years ago or the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It might seem pointless to say that you shouldn’t go to a place like Io, Jupiter’s least hospitable moon, but look at it this way: when someone publishes 1,001 Places in Space to See Before You Die, the pressure will be off.
No matter what type of traveler you are, I invite you to take a break from your other to-do lists and spend a moment being grateful for some of the things you’re not doing. Then, when you’re ready to hit the road, leave behind your list of 1,001 Places You Must Pee* and give yourself a chance to come up with some experiences of your own. Travel should be an adventure, not an assignment, and if you spend your vacations armed with too many checklists, you’re missing the point of leaving home.
Chapter 1
The Testicle Festival
Forget apple pie. Few foods are as uniquely American as the Rocky Mountain oyster, a euphemism that refers not to a high-altitude mollusk but to the testicles of a bull. Also known as cowboy caviar and Montana tendergroin, these balls can be boiled, sautéed, or even eaten raw, but they’re usually treated more like chicken—breaded and deep-fried.
There are also few things more American than eating competitions, so it should come as no surprise that each summer offers opportunities to prove your manhood by stuffing your face with gonads. I appreciate the pun of the Nuts About Rocky Mountain Oysters competition that occurs annually in Loveland, Colorado. But the award for Best in Show goes to the Testicle Festival, held each year at the Rock Creek Lodge near Missoula, Montana. Started in 1982, it is America’s premier venue to chow down on balls.
When the festival first began, it drew about three hundred people. But these days the crowd has grown to fifteen thousand, and the debauchery has expanded to a weekend full of wet T-shirts, impromptu nudity, and an Indy 500–inspired race called the “Undie 500”—all natural evolutions of an event whose tagline is “Come Have a Ball.” Try your hand at Bullshit Bingo, a larger-than-life—and quite literal—game of chance where every time a bull defacates on a giant bingo card, someone wins $100. Or support the event’s alternate title—the Breasticle Festival—by signing up for the Biker Ball-Biting Competition, where girls riding on the backs of Harleys race to snag a Rocky Mountain oyster off a string without using their hands. There are belly shots. There’s No Panty Wednesday. And, of course, there are the Rocky Mountain oysters themselves—more than fifty thousand pounds of them—greasy, salted, and USDA-approved.
Jim Kleeman
Chapter 2
An Underpass in Connaught Circle, New Delhi, at the Moment When Someone Puts a Turd on Your Shoe
Imagine this scene: you’re walking through an underpass in Connaught Circle, a mess of traffic where twelve of New Delhi’s roads converge, and all of a sudden a voice calls out of the crowd.
“Excuse me, friend,” it says. “You’ve got feces on your shoe.”
Several weeks in India have made you realize that when people yell at you on the street, it’s usually best to ignore them. So at first you pay no attention. But something in this man’s voice is different, believable. He repeats himself, and you slowly lower your eyes.
And there it is: a flattened turd sitting on the top of your shoe.
Your first reaction is disbelief—you’ve had shit on the bottom of your shoe, sure. But the top? How can this be? There aren’t any birds around, or monkeys. Disgusted, you lean down to inspect it. Still moist and glistening, it gives off a familiar fecal smell.
You consider throwing up, but before your gag reflex can kick in, a voice pipes up. “Don’t worry, I will clean it for you.” It is your new friend, who now is standing next to you with a shoe-shining kit. Well, will you look at that! Here you are, caught in the one moment in your life where you need an emergency shoe cleaning, and this kind man pops out of nowhere to help you. What are the odds?
Before you have a moment to actually calculate the odds of this happening coincidentally, the man has escorted you off to the side of the passageway where, with a flourish, he rids your shoe of the offending turd. Then, as you reach into your wallet for a tip, he announces the price for a shit-shine special—and it’s more than most New Delhi residents earn in a week.
If you think about it, the scam is brilliant. The service has already been rendered, and besides, who wants to walk around with a turd perched on his shoe?
So you pay him—not his asking price, but still enough to make it worth his while to continue smearing poop on the footwear of passersby. If you’re a victim, feel free to get pissed off. But at least the shit scheme isn’t as bad as the loogie-on-your-shoulder trick. In that one, you don’t even have the chance to give a tip—someone smears a wad of spit on your jacket while a second guy steals your wallet.
Chapter 3
Euro Disney
I’ve never liked Disney World. As a child who was terrified of mimes, Santa Claus, and any larger-than-life stuffed animal, I hated the giant mice that roamed the streets of the Magic Kingdom, holding children hostage until their parents took a photograph. Huge, unblinking eyes; garish smiles; swollen, cartoon hands—this was the stuff of nightmares. When my parents brought me to a special event called “Breakfast with the Characters,” I took one look at Pinocchio and dove under the table.
So perhaps I was biased against Euro Disney from the start. But really, who wasn’t? Opened in 1992, it was an attempt to bring Mickey Mouse to Europeans—an audience that tends to be skeptical of American culture to begin with, especially when it tries to steal the hearts and minds of its children. Convinced that parental disapproval was no match for their offspring’s love of The Little Mermaid, Disney pushed forward with its plans and eventually settled on a spot in the rural town of Marne-la-Vallée. An easy train ride from Paris, the location was estimated to be less than a four-hour drive for sixty-eight million people.
C
ontroversy soon followed. Assuming that there must be a direct connection between Euro Disney and the U.S. government, French farmers blockaded its entrance with their tractors to protest European and American agricultural policies. A Parisian stage director named Ariane Mnouchkine called Euro Disney a “cultural Chernobyl,” and while she quickly moved on to making other exaggerated comparisons to nuclear disasters (“Television seems to me to be a much more menacing cultural Chernobyl,” she told the New York Times in July 1993), the classification stuck.
And then there were tactical errors: Euro Disney opened, for example, in the middle of a European recession. It offended would-be workers with a strict dress code forbidding long nails and requiring “appropriate undergarments” for women, which prompts the question of why a Disney employee would be showing her undergarments to begin with. As a primarily outdoor attraction, it didn’t take into account the fact that France, unlike Florida and Southern California, actually has a winter. The restaurants in the park also didn’t serve alcohol, a policy that didn’t go over well with Europeans used to enjoying a glass of wine with lunch. By July 1993—a little over a year after the park opened—Euro Disney had debts of about $3.7 billion.
Wikipedia Commons
But despite the challenges of translating Americana into every European language (in Italian, Cattleman’s Chili is Pepperoncino alla Cowboy) Euro Disney kept fighting. The park posted its first profits in 1995 and has done so intermittently since then. Scarred by the negative connotations of “Euro Disney,” it also changed its name to “Disneyland Paris.” Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner says this title was chosen to identify the park with “one of the most romantic and exciting cities in the world,” but this seems like an odd association—the place is so quintessentially American that it has an Aerosmith-themed roller coaster.
Chapter 4
Ibiza on a Family Vacation
First settled by the Phoenicians over twenty-five hundred years ago, the Spanish island of Ibiza wasn’t always a party town. Back in the day (and by “day,” I mean Carthaginian rule), the club capital of the world was best known for its exports of dye, salt, and wool. Sure, the islanders dabbled in garum, a pungent condiment made from fermented fish, but in those days, who didn’t? If people really wanted to party, they went to Rome.