I had a friend in the Peace Corps who had occasion about 40 years ago to visit Timbuctoo. He said it was the most disappointing experience he had ever had. It was once a great city, but there was nothing there then except a few dirt streets and mud buildings. “The answer”, he said, “to ‘What do they do on Saturday night in Timbuctoo?’ is 'nothing.”
My own most disappointing exerience was my visit some years ago to Casablanca. I guess I’ve seen the movie too many times, but I expected a truly exotic city. It turned out it could have passed for Houston or Vancouver or any one of dozens of modern American cities.
What was your most disappointing experience in visiting a fabled city or famous site?
Timbuktu is a great place to visit! Drifts of sand pile up in the streets (which are empty for most of the hot day), which are lined with gorgeous medieval sandstone houses unlike anything you find elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. Peek inside the heavy, ornamented doors and you might be surprised by a courtyard full of colorful tilework or old, forgotten fountains. Even more delightfully, you still stand a good chance of being asked inside to join the family for some cool yogurt or a shared meal as you marvel at their mix of modern and antique hand made furnishings. They may only speak Songhai (a language of a great medieval empire) but the laughter is universal.
Likewise, students of one of the world’s oldest universities may try to practice their English with you in cafes, and the men who work to preserve rare manuscripts (written during the time of the crusades, and now used by Tauregs who write their family secrets in them before burying them in the vast desert that only they can traverse with reliable safety- even today) may invite you to see back rooms full of their dustiest tomes. It’s a quiet city, but it’s very much a living city. To go to Timbuktu is not really to see history, as to experience how that history lives.
Timbuktu doesn’t happen at it’s sparse tourist sites, but over cups of strong tea with men in flowing robes who will tell you as much about the ancient trade as they will the modern “Al Qaeda of the desert” and the CIA agents who “appear and disappear like ghosts” around the city, in the recessed doorsteps where veiled women beckon you to admire their babies (with khol around the eyes and heavy leather amulets at the neck), and in the precocious patter of Aladin-style street kids-turned-tour-guide.
Along the outskirts of the city, nomad tents huddle. While during the day the mysterious and fabled Tauregs (whose militant independence still rankles many governments) may hustle to take tourists on desert tours. But they also still engage in camel-caravan salt trade across the Sahara. Indeed, you can still buy blocks of salt at the local market, the sort of thing that would have pleased a medieval king. And beyond the city…nothing. You are on the edge of civilization. Black Africa, in it’s diversity and glory, ends here. A few steps past the city and there is nothing else, just a desert you can’t get across, and the fabled lands of Arabs and the Europeans beyond that.
Oh yeah, and I think Shanghai is a snore. A modern city like any other city, with an overpriced dumpling shop in a tourist trap? Give me Beijing any day!
The terra cotta warriors of Xi’an. All the pictures make it seem like there are a ton, and the descriptions of the army talk about thousands of warriors. In reality, the peasants hated the emperor and smashed the army to bits a couple years after it was made. All of the warriors you see have been put together like a puzzle, and there are only a hundred or so of them. It’s still pretty cool, but quite a bit less impressive than seeing thousands of clay warriors like I was expecting.
Hollywood/Beverly Hills. Yeah, I was only 23 when I first visited, but I figured it would be filled with movie stars and glitz. It was fun to drive on the streets that I’d heard about all my life from movies and songs and to see the names of some of the bars and restaurants.
Cancun. I went there when I was fifteen and not exactly a sophisticated traveler and I still found it unbelievably boring. What I discovered from some pamphlet in the hotel was that in 1972, the Mexican government fed a bunch of data into a computer to figure out the best place to built a tourist resort and it spit out CANCUN. So they built this ginormous tourist area on what had previous been a tiny fishing village.
And that’s all Cancun is. Hotels. There’s nothing to see, nothing to do. The beach is very nice, but I’m not really a beach person and can only lie around on the beach for a couple hours before I get bored. I can lie around at home! I just don’t get going to another country to do it. The restaurants are a bunch of fast food chains, there’s no interesting cityscape, there aren’t any museums or anything actually worth seeing. The best thing about it is that is relatively NEAR interesting things (like Tulum and Chichen Itza) but you can stay in other places in the area and see them as well.
I spent a fabulous month in St Malo once. Tiny walled port, no vehicles allowed in the city center at all. You can walk across the entire thing in 10 minutes.
In the city center you find cafes, small shops for sausages, cheeses, baked goods, pastries, greengrocers, fishmongers. People are friendly and you can sit and people watch. It is a slower, more peaceful vacation. You can eat excellent food, talk to random people, walk the city walls and look out over the harbor…
Most people would consider it amazingly boring. You can keep Paris or Monaco. I’ll take St Malo, thanks.
It’s not really a party. It’s more like hiking half-dome at Yosemite, only instead of being rewarded with a sense of accomplishment and one of the most dramatic views the Earth can offer, you get barfed and peed on by drunk douchenozzles. You get there about 10 hours early (any later and you’ll never get anywhere near times square by midnight) carrying everything you need for the world’s most boring 2 mile hike. It’s row after row of police barricades, many of which have lines of pissed riot cops behind them, surrounded by people who are in good spirits when they get there but become increasingly zombie hordeish as the day goes on and they realize that perhaps they should have brought something other than jello shots and everclear to eat and drink.
Then the sun sets and the CHUDS come out from the sewers. That usually livens things up for a bit, but CHUDS smell even worse than people who’ve been standing in puddles of their own everclear and lime jello tainted urine for six hours.
Then the ball drops, everyone sings off key for a bit and then the pissed riot cops shove everyone out of the square by hitting them on the head with heavy wood batons. You file onto subway cars like cattle and hope the station at the other end of your journey isn’t closed for the night, in which case you can either get off on an open stop close to where you need to go and walk the rest of the way (all the while chanting 'Warriors, come out and playy-eeee-aaaayy") or you can just ride the train to some random stop on Long Island and move into the first available rental you find, because you ain’t ever getting back to Brooklyn at that point, man.
I’d say the Alamo. I’m a huge history nerd and love even the most empty of battlefield, the most stale of museum, the most blah of site. . . but goddamn, the Alamo sucked.
That’s not fair: the Alamo itself doesn’t necessarily suck, but the city of San Antonio being right up against the walls of the Alamo definitely take something away from the whole experience. I mean, the shitty tourist shops selling ugly tshirts are literally butted up right against the Alamo on every side. Perhaps I’m spoiled by the Missions in California-- sure, some are right in the middle of cities, but most of them at least have a little space preserved on all sides.
I dunno, maybe I’m being too harsh, but the whole city sprawl right around the Alamo completely ruined it for me.
