Comparisons Of What Famous Travel Locations Actually Look Like

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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This list of photos can save someone a lot of time and money.

I already knew the Mona Lisa was tiny and not that impressive unless you’re very close.

Remember that the Tourist Industry’s priority is drawing visitors that spend money. :moneybag: Sometimes that means staging a photo without the hundreds of visitors in frame. Or selectively zooming in on a geographic feature to make it more impressive.

Let’s hear your stories? How far did you travel to get disappointed with a attraction that didn’t quite live up to the hype? Was it the crowds that ruined it for you? Or was the place just blah?

What tourist attraction have you visited that was really great and worth the trip?

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“Overtourism” in this type of article means “You’re in my way” and never “I’m in your way.”

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#5 Hard-To-Obtain Permits For A 10-Mile Hike To See Havasupai Falls

First, it’s Havasu Falls, “Havasupai” is the name of the Tribe. Second, the water is brown because that’s the way it looks any time there’s more than a little rain in the canyon. (They’re lucky they weren’t caught in a flash flood after a monsoonal storm and got washed away) And third, I’ve been down there 3 times and it looked like the first picture every time… :smirk:.

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  1. I can confirm from personal experience the Trevi Fountain and the Mona Lisa.

  2. In a lot of these pictures, the tourist is just the victim of poor timing, e.g., the weather was bad.

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I went to see Stonehenge in 1978. I expected to be able to walk into the circle and touch the stones. I found that it was cordoned off and the closest I could get to the stones was about 100 feet away.

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Every time you or someone else shares one of these clickbait articles, you just encourage the bastards to create more clickbait articles. So please avoid the temptation.

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Bored Panda is a popular web site with User Ratings for comments. I think of it as similar to a Reddit community.

It’s not a site that farms clicks by showing three or four images and requires a click for the next page.

You can easily scroll through the entire article.

I have seen Bored Panda republished on Tabloid sites. Sometimes rewritten and with altered headlines. Appropriating other web sites publishing is lazy publishing.

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I only like the animal ones on Bored Panda, but it’s so clogged with ads…even with my ad blocker. It’s definitely a form of click-bait.

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This site won’t even let me view it unless I whitelist it in Adblock. No thank you.

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My Tourist disappointment has to be Plymouth Rock. It’s literally a fenced off area with a rock. :smile: Fortunately my parents didn’t travel far. My dad was stationed at Otis AFB on Cape Cod. The best attraction in that area is The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. My parents took me several times in the 1960’s. Cape Cod is gorgeous. I got my Red Cross swimming lessons on those beaches in 1966. But, the traffic was heavy even then.

The most awesome place I visited is Carlsbad Caverns in 1975. It was setup very nice with a guide, paved walkways, and handrails. The Visitor Center is in the center of the cave complex with elevators to the surface. I’ve always wanted to go back while I’m healthy enough for the hour plus hike down into the cave. It’s steep and those handrails are needed for safety.

One warning. The guide leaves when the group reaches the Visitor Center. We were told another cave area could be seen by ourselves. It a circular paved walk that I remember being fairly level. We weren’t warned that extra room took about 2 hours. My middle-aged parents were very sore the next day. We were very thankful for the elevator back to the top.

Best vacation of my life.

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I went there in 76 and it was crawling with people, which ruined the experience for me. When I went there in the late 90s, they had moved the restricted area even farther away than your experience, and I liked it better because, yeah, I couldn’t get near it but no one else could either.

Also, Stonehenge is in the middle of what looked mowed grass to the horizon. Being 14 years old at the time, I wanted Drama. On my second trip, I did the research and found Castlerigg in the Lake District, so surrounded by what Brits call mountains. We got there fairly early and were getting lovely cumulus clouds. About as dramatic as English landscape gets!

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When we visited New York City for the only time in my life, in 1984, I really wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. Alas, that was when it was surrounded by scaffolding, being repaired in time for its 100th anniversary in 1986. Sensing my disappointment, my wife said you get to see something (the ongoing repairs) that will be there for only a short period of time, and you got to see it! That totally changed my frame of mind and my appreciation for seeing what was in front of me.

I do feel sorry for people who made huge investments in time and money for a major trip, only to have the view obscured by fog or bad weather. Fortunately, all of my trips to see solar eclipses had clear weather, but I can see why people get disappointed.

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We flew to London Gatwick in 1993. On the train to London, we were talking about going to Stonehenge and someone recommended Avebury. It was almost unreal, as we knew very little about it and the area was really empty.

But it’s possible to walk among the stones and even touch them.

I live in central Switzerland. I really feel sorry for the tourists who come here and the weather doesn’t cooperate. They get lots of pictures of gray skies.

But when the weather cooperates? Yes, I’m lucky to live here.

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I am a scaffolding magnet. I will make the lo-o-o-o-ng trip halfway across the world to see a ‘wonder’, only to find it covered by scaffolding or under repair.

Amongst my highlights:

Trevi fountain - dry
Chartres cathedral - scaffolding inside (inside is the whole point of Chartres!!!)
Budapest Opera House - sorry, main auditorium is under repair
Versailles - fountain of Apollo - dry (I have since seen it in it’s proper form)

In 2018 I went to London and had a problem that I could not orient myself properly - on day 2, I realised that Big Ben (the tower, to be exact) was under scaffolding and that was what I used to work out my position from.

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A lot of this has to do with expectations. Four of my international trips have been to countries that I had no especial desire to visit - Ireland, Germany, Iceland, and France; I had an opportunity and took it. Those were some of the best trips of my life.

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I appreciated that in Venice they put printed vinyl covers - of the specific underlying building - over scaffolding when working on buildings on the Grand Canal. Not to fool anyone, but at least wide shots don’t have visible works in them.

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When we went to the Big Island of Hawaii, we flew into Hilo. (In case you don’t know, Hilo - east coast, tends cloudy/rainy, and Kona - west coast, sunny.) Hilo was great, even tho there was something like a 14’ rainfall as we hiked down to some remote beach. But after a couple ofdays we were in a gift shop and happened to see some postcards taken on a sunny day. All of us said, “Wait! There are mountains?” We seriously saw nothing other than a bank of clouds behind the city.

Then we went to Volcanos. At one point, there was a sign saying something like, “You are looking at the largest mountain on earth” (Mauna Loa, measured all the way to the sea floor.) Of course, behind the sign was a featureless grey wall of fog.

I’m somewhat trepidatious about a planned trip to Kenya this Sept. I have these hopes of our small group all alone on the vastness of the savannah. But I fear “traffic jams” of the sort you can encounter in US National Parks, where everyone wants to see the wildebeest crossing the river, the elephant herd, the recent lion kill… No reason to expect we are the only tourists who will be there…

I’m hesitant about all manner of travel, not wishing to shuffle along among hordes.

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And the Trevi Fountain does look exactly like the pictures. It’s just that the famous photos were probably taken at 6 am or something like that when nobody else was there.

As far as the fountain being kind of crammed into its square, that’s a general Europe thing to have stuff like that just there without any sort of surrounding plaza, etc. especially in Rome/Italy. I was shocked to go into the Louvre, and see the Venus de Milo just out in the middle of a hallway among the rest of the artworks. I had sort of expected a more American treatment, where it would have its own little room, etc… Same thing for a lot of the Renaissance masters’ works that I saw in Italy- they might be in a museum, but they might also just be on the wall of some unremarkable church where they were originally put in 1599.

We visited Avebury on my graduate school study-abroad summer, and it was fantastic. It’s roughly the same age as Stonehenge, but is a LOT larger- the outer circle is hundreds of meters in diameter, and the dikes/ditches are still quite prominent. I highly recommend it.

In a larger sense, I don’t really understand the mentality of going somewhere, and just wanting to get your own version of the famous picture. You’ve already got that; you’re going wherever it is to actually explore it and see it firsthand, not just get a touristy shot of something that’s been photographed from that angle a few million times already.

And griping about weather is just silly. That’s out of anyone’s control, and it’s unreasonable to have expectations about it, other than in the broadest strokes (i.e. if you’re going to Alaska in the winter, you can expect it to be cold)

For me (and I realize I may be different than most), a huge part of the fun of travel is the discovery of the unexpected- that may be bad weather, strange settings for famous things, or whatever. It’s not about checking off things on a card or getting pretty selfies for the 'Gram or whatever.

That said, I do understand the idea of not wanting to be among the tourist hordes. I’ve had great luck going in the off-season (winter). In some cases it’s better weather, in others it’s fewer tourists. Death Valley in February is quite pleasant, for example. Rome in December is not packed to the gills with tourists, nor is it uncomfortable. (oddly Prague has a LOT of tourists around NYE).

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I got to spend three months in Germany for my work, several years ago. I took the opportunity to travel to some amazing places. One of them was Paris. I took an overnight train that arrived a little before dawn. I dropped my bag at the hotel and it was a short walk to the Arc de Triomphe. It was November, so the day was starting cold and overcast. For maybe a minute, the low sun was shinging under the clouds with an amazing red light. In that moment, I suddenly understood why artists have been going there for centuries. I got my camera out to try and capture the scene. This is the best picture I could get:

Guess why.

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Serendipity also plays a part. My father-in-law is a Lutheran, and he signed up himself, his wife, and his brother for a coach tour around areas in Germany associated with Martin Luther. His brother and wife ended up having to back out, so he took my wife and I.

Turned out that Luther spent most of his life in the eastern part of the country, in what was the DDR. So we visited a lot of towns that weren’t necessarily tourist destinations, towns like Eisleben and Erfurt and Torgau. They were wonderful, and not clogged with a lot of Americans and Chinese wandering around mindlessly, getting in people’s way. So we had plenty of scope to wander around mindlessly, getting in people’s way. As well, our tour guide pointed out that due to the German government’s massive investment in East Germany after the wall fell, the areas we were traveling in, like Saxony and Anhalt, had newer infrastructure - hotels, roads, etc.