Bryce Canyon. I went with my BF-at-the-time and neither of us really knew anything about it. We were on a road trip and wanted to stop by a bunch of national parks. We expected it to be cool (it’s a national park!) but I don’t think either of us had ever seen a picture.
We were totally blown away. It was AMAZING. We loved it.
Bosnia. I wanted to go because I was interested in the history, but I was surprised by how beautiful it is and how friendly the people were. I was also surprised to see how completely blown to shit it still is. (This was in 2007.)
One of the best road trips I’ve ever been on was a tour of Eastern California that myself and a friend of mine made. The first place we visited was Death Valley, which I expected to be spectacular (I was taken aback at just how desolate the country between the main north-south highway and the Valley itself was). But we also visited many sites that not a whole lot of people ever bother to go to, including the old Manzanar Internment Camp; Mono Lake; and Bodie, which is a Gold Rush-era ghost town. Also in the same part of the state are the Great Basin bristlecone pines, the oldest individual trees in the world. All in all it’s a very interesting, unique part of the state.
The Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick, CA. I actually hadn’t heard of them before the trip, but someone I was with insisted we go. We arrived at high tide.. Now, I grew up on the water and was used to tides, but nothing like the Bay of Fundy tides. This is low tide. We were able to walk around near the rocks and you could actually see the tide moving. At one point we were just able to squeeze around one of the to get a a dry area. We stood there for about five minutes and there was three feet of dry sand where there was less than six inches on the way over.
Similarly, I thought that Natural Stone Bridge and Caves would be some underwhelming tourist trap, but the caves were surprisingly impressive.
I wish I’d done that. My wife and I spent part of our honeymoon on Isla Mujeres, and we spent it drinking cocktails, lying on the beach, eating yummy food and doing honeymoony type stuff. Which was lovely, of course.
We did go to Tulum for the second half and see a bit more culture, though!
And on topic, the most surprising place I’ve been to recently was Sarajevo, in Bosnia. I knew the Winter Olympics were once held there so I shouldn’t have been surprised that it’s in a beautiful setting surrounded by mountains, but I was. I knew it had a strong Ottoman influence in its history, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that parts of it felt like a Turkish bazaar, but I was. And I knew about the siege which only ended 15 years ago, but that didn’t prepare me for the museum which showed what life was really like during that time. Comparing that to the vibrant, forward-looking city outside (albeit one that still has scars in the pavement of its main shopping street from mortar shells) was pretty incredible.
Kauai, Hawaii. All of you who said the Grand Canyon - you have to see Waimea Canyon. It’s the Grand Canyon with trees, brighter colours, perfect weather and some of the best beaches in the world a couple of hours away. The other end of the island is The Na Pali Coast which is similarly stunning. I knew I was going to have a great time in Hawaii but it’s been 5 years and I still want to go back every single day.
Pictures don’t do them justice at all, but a couple of spots in Turkmenistan were the first thing that jumped to mind. They sounded good beforehand, but in person they were just incredible:
Darvaza gas crater - incredibly cool. Basically a giant pit (a result of Soviet gas exploration) near the middle of Turkmenistan that’s been on fire non-stop for decades. We were the only ones there (apparently sometimes there’ll be two groups, but here it was just myself, my wife and a guide). Hard to get photos to show how amazing it is in person; you’ll be standing right on the edge and there’s just this wave of heat like when you first open an oven. It’s not nicknamed ‘the gates of Hell’ (or some variant) for nothing…it was seriously amazing.
Yangykala Canyon - was just breathtaking, hard to capture in photos how beautiful it was. And again, you’re almost guaranteed to be the only ones there. We were camped overnight in a tent metres from the cliff edge, and overnight the sky was filled with the most stars I have ever seen.
A big group of friends organised a trip to Thailand before a couple in the group were heading on to the UK to live. I wasn’t expecting much as we were staying the most touristy part of Patong Beach which is rife with sunburnt, drunk and horny Westerners.
In the lead up it was mentioned that we would be doing a day trip to another popular tourist stop call Phi Phi Island, I looked it up and it was mentioned that it was used as a set for ‘The Beach’ and a Bond film. I thought it was going to be very disappointing, all camera angles and lighting making it look great and most likely overcrowded and polluted.
My word I was wrong! It was 100 times better that anything I had seen online! Pristine, breath taking scenery, incredible snorkelling in water so clear I thought I was flying surrounded by wild reef sharks, sea snakes and every imaginable type of fish. I would return just to spend another day in that area.
New Zealand, pretty much all of it was awesome, in the very real sense of the word.
Too many things to mention them all, a wonder around every corner but one thing I will take to my grave is kayaking in a mirror smooth Milford sound with my wife.
Dolphins, penguins, waterfalls and seals hither and thither. Paddling up to the base of a cliff and looking straight up a thousand feet.
The North Woods: I absolutely loved northern Michigan (including da U.P.), northern Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota. Water, trees, birds, and not very many other people. Being from the east, even MI seemed like “big sky country” with no hills to block the view and endless trees. I also underestimated how much I liked being near the Great Lakes; no, it’s not the same as the ocean, but I had some spectacular sunsets at the boundary between woods and water. Plus, it makes for some interesting weather patterns, with storms rolling across the lake while you are dry on shore.
I really didn’t expect to fall in love with the Great Plains, either, but there were some absolutely beautiful spots in south-central NoDak and north-central SoDak. I sort of assumed that it would be flat and dull, but there is quite a bit of rangeland that is full of rivers carving curves into the sides of bluffs, gently rolling hills, etc. I actually liked that area better than the badlands in western NoDak.
I was also surprised by the Central Valley, which I pictured as hot and dry. It is, during the summer, but if you go to where the water is, you can find scenes that look like they should be in National Geographic. Maybe it’s not everyone’s idea of a vacation spot, and it’s not exactly touristy, but the reverse delta that feeds into SF Bay is positively teeming with life, especially bird life.
I guess you could say I’m an off-the-beaten-path sort of traveler, but if you are into watching nature that’s the best way to be.
The Johnson Space Center in Houston, mostly because of its exhibit of the Saturn V rocket. Like a lot of guys my age, I was bit of an astronaut junkie, but standing dwarfed next to the rocket brought home the sheer national will that the Apollo program required. I’m sure I’ll never see its like again in my lifetime.
I’d have to say the same thing. I remember the first time I was out there on my motorcycle all by myself and thought I had awhile to go. Then I went around a corner and there it was. The roads in the area are great bike roads as well.
Unless you go to the Kennedy Space Center, which was absolutely amazing. You really can’t appreciate the scale of the rockets unless you go in person. We had a tour of the various facilities and grounds, and the size of everything is staggering.
The best part was walking into the Saturn V room, looking up at the engines and thinking “Holy Crap, this thing is HUGE” then realizing that we were looking at Stage 2… the big engines were off to our right.
Ravenna easily has the best monuments that I’ve seen so far in Italy. The churches there put Venice’s St. Mark’s duomo in the shade, especially the Basillica of San Vitale (built 548 AD).
You really get little idea of how huge that chunk of rock is from most photographs. I was able to sort of capture it because there was a climber rapelling down the side. The guy looks like a gnat compared to the monolith.
TV really screws with your perceptions. Mission Control looks tiny in person compared to what you think it looks like. On the flip side, the Saturn V is incredibly huge and surprising at just how big if you have only seen it on TV footage.
