The Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.
Words can’t actually do it justice.
When you go to the view points, it’s quiet; most folks just stare in stunned silence.
My best friend when I was a kid was Estonian. And did he mention this? noooooo…
(Of course, this was pre-fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall, so any idea of going to Estonia would have been as practical as going to the moon. Also, we were in grade 6. 
)
I spent a month in Little Rock, Arkansas for a vet school rotation. I had all the stereotypes of the bible belt and backwoods in mind, but it was actually a pleasant place, and the people there seemed to be as sophisticated as anywhere else you might go in the US.
I expected it to be beautiful. I didn’t expect it to be “Holy shit, would you look at THAT!” beautiful. Did you stay in the Ngorngoro Crater Lodge, where even your toilet looks out upon the 2,000 foot drop?
I thought the gardens of Versailles would be nice, but they were beautiful and ENORMOUS. I can’t believe I almost thought of skipping that side trip when my wife and I visited Paris; by the time we got around to planning a visit to Versailles, the palace was closed that day and we had to leave the next day.
Pittsburgh. At some point I must have read or seen something that gave me the impression that it was a hellhole, an abandoned, rust belt has-been. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I first went there a few years ago to discover what a nice city it was.
The Port Authority Bus Station (NYC).
It is indescribable-something out of Dante’s circles of hell.
Came in here to mention Grand Canyon and Meteor Crater. I see they’re already represented.
Lake Texoma, between Texas and Oklahoma. I expected a standard issue Texas lake with a state park. What I found were some suprising islands in the middle, which made for a wonderful secluded beach (at least on weekdays). We’ve made many trips there to enjoy the solitude and let the dogs roam while we grill dinner. I find it surprising that this exists just a couple of hours from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It’s busy on the weekends, but empty during the week. (Sorry about the pic quality; All I have at the moment is a scanned print from a few years ago).
I’d like to add a cheesy tourist attraction that surprised us. While in Hot Springs, Arkansas several years ago, we visited the alligator farm on a whim. For six bucks, I would’ve been content with a half-dozen alligators, but we were surprised. There were literally hundreds of the critters. We had the good fortune to arrive at feeding time, when one unfortunate worker had to wade in among all the beasts with a bucket of raw chicken. He frantically hurled chickens at an advancing tide of hungry gators until, backed up against a fence, he tossed the bucket and vaulted over to safety. I assume this is done for the tourists, as there must be a safer way of feeding them.
Disclaimer: My experience was almost a decade ago.
Tibet.
It cost a small fortune to go there, you are on rails the entire trip with next to no chances to explore, and every account says the place is rapidly becoming another white-tile and neon karaoke hellhole indistinguishable from any other of the often identical industrial places in China.
Nope. Going there is totally worth. It’s still a fairy tale kingdom in the sky, and it feels like you are another another planet all together. Amazing, amazing, amazing place.
Wow, this was hard for me, so many places and special spots!
Ladahk (Little Tibet)Kashmir, India. It was many years ago but it was truly awesome. It took 4 days on an Indian bus to get there, over truly perilous roads. You couldn’t go until June when the glaciers melt back, and even then we passed through a tunnel carved through one. It was spectacular, a tiny little pocket of Tibetan Culture, centuries old. Monasteries perched on peaks, open markets, like stepping back in time.
(Still, props to Machu Picchu, Taj Mahal,…argh, it’s too hard to pick one!!)
Carcassonne, France. We were told not to look it up before going there, and so we didn’t. It’s an astonishingly beautiful place, as are many of the local villages too. If ever in the south of France, Go There.
Also: Durham, England. A truly beautiful town. A local man saw my U of Toronto jacket, told me his daughter was a student there, and took it upon himself to show me around.
Over 20 years ago, I was on a trip to the UK with a bunch of friends. We had a very well-meant, very planned itinerary. Those of us in my little car decided that we didn’t want to spend the entire day on the motorway chasing down to the English Channel and then back up to London with everyone else so we broke from the group and just motored around. We watched a bit of cricket in Oxford (an Aussie in the group tried to enlighten me, but I was too thick to get it), bought strawberries at a roadside stand and then, in the Cotswolds, we saw a tiny faded sign saying “Roman Ruins 20 mi.” so off we went to find the Roman ruins.
It took some doing as some of the signs had fallen away but we did find the ruins. It was mind-blowing for us because it was not something we set out to see. As Yanks and Aussies, we do not think of the Cotswolds when someone says “Roman Ruins” even though we know the Romans did Britian the kindness of building some nice straight roads. To see the early sewer system, the heated tile floors, some of the building materials and other items just left us gobsmacked.
These days, I believe they have reburied the the tiles and ductwork just to preserve it. They weren’t getting enough visitor and gov’t. pennies to keep the place staffed and safe. In a country loaded with historical sites, it must be difficult to pick and choose which ones get the money.
Your mother’s drawers.
I found Fort Laramie (the historical Army fort, not the town), WY, to be fascinating in a way that outweighed its actual presentation. As you would expect from an underfunded, understaffed historical site, there really wasn’t a ton to do there apart from walk around the parade ground and look through plexi barriers into rooms set up as dioramas of real life. However, there’s significant family history there, and I found myself standing on the same spot where we know my ancestors sat for a portrait.
Maritime Canada. They say the people are friendly, but really, the people are so incredibly friendly it blows your mind.
I think I was 10 when we went to Cuenca on vacation, may have been 11.
I didn’t know much about the place, but my parents had mentioned something called “the hanging houses”; when I’d asked for more information, they’d said “oh, you’ll know why they’re called that when you see them!”
The name conjured images of drop-shaped homes hanging from fishing-pole-like structures (10 yr old imagination meets Nerds’R’Us in the 70s), but that didn’t seem to make sense.
Turns out that they are medieval buildings on the edge of the Júcar River canyon: their balconies have holes in their floors so you can look down… and it’s a long, long way down! I didn’t much care about the works on display in the Modern Art Museum (housed there) but the view is certainly spectacular and not for those afraid of heights. The canyon itself is a dark gash of vegetation and rock in what had up to that point in the trip been a flat (by Spanish standards) landscape of yellowish clay.
I loved the quiet, pretty, calm little city; I loved her people; the province has so many beautiful locations that we spent two weeks there and would have been able to find day trips for two months without cracking a guidebook open. Ibones, ciudad encantada (a karst area for which the most common picture is the “sundae glass”, la copa de helado; several hours of walking through a shadowed landscape of rocks in fancy forms, where it is easy to picture hadas, duendes and other denizens which might in a more-northern land live Underhill), springs of the Cuervo river…
It’s not a tourist spot, but it’s in one. After years of seeing pictures of Velázquez’ works, I thought I was familiar with them. My parents almost had to drag me away from La Forja de Vulcano and Las Hilanderas by force (they were side by side at the time). Las Meninas is the one that gets most of the mileage, but those two blew my mind seeing their colors and size and level of detail in their full size and glory. I couldn’t make up my mind which one to stare at.
Sagrada Familia. Yes, the usual order is “noun before adjective”, but it gets inverted for emphasis, for poetic reasons and in this particular case because “Sagrada” is equivalent to “Santa”: San Pedro, San Joaquín, Santa Marta, la Sagrada Familia.
There are many of the places mentioned (including Brussels) which I did enjoy a lot; the ones I picked were unexpectedly amazing, partially because I was so young. I don’t think it’s so much that I tend to be better prepared as that I’ve lost part of my capacity for amazement.
Same here. Went to visit friends who went to CM and ended up really liking the place. It reminded me of Oakland (and I say this as someone who actually goes to Oakland often enough to know what an awesome place it is, despite the reputation it has).