I really enjoyed Niagara Falls (from the Canadian side if it makes any difference). Sure, there’s a lot of tourist stuff there, but when you’re looking at the actual falls - that place is beautiful. Also loved the nearby Niagara on the Lake, a lovely town, and you haven’t seen green until you see the vibrant colours of the plants/trees/grass there. Stunning!
Slightly nearer to home for me was Paris, right up until I got off the plane I was only really interested about my trip to Disneyland. However, my first proper view of Paris was in my taxi to my hotel which drove past the Eiffel Tower, on the hour, at night, when the whole tower sparkles from head to toe. Absolutely fantasic view Everything about that trip was perfect, the food, the location, the sites to visit - brilliant! Also for what it’s worth I found the Parisian people charming and helpful, completely the opposite of the reputation they seem to have. All they seem to ask is that you do them the decency to greet them in their own language even if you can’t carry out a whole conversation in French.
Indonesia. I’ve been fortunately able to visit a few areas of the vast archipelago (Jakarta, Bali, Sulawesi, Bandung, Yogyakarta and some of the small parts between). The nation may be dirt-poor in places, but the people are rich in friendliness and hospitality. And the landscape (outside of Jakarta) is lovely.
Want to mention that I was actually disappointed when i saw the Grand Canyon. However, that’s probably because I had spent the previous week in heaven… Zion Canyon.
Cuenca has been on my ‘want to go there’ list ever since we saw it while watching the Vuelta a España a few years ago. Glad to hear that it’s worth going to. Now we just have to get around to planning a trip to Spain.
Istanbul. And Cappadocia. I love Turkey, went there on a summer study abroad the first time, didn’t know what I was getting into, but there is so much beautiful architecture, the people are really, genuinely friendly. Even the carpet salesmen, I met one guy on my first day there, spent two hours trying to sell me a carpet, when that didn’t work, we just went out drinking together. Never had to buy a thing.
And the architecture. Sure, Aya Sofya has that horrible scaffolding in it, but to stand on the mezzanine (I guess you’d call it), looking a couple stories down, and several stories up (the interior of the dome is 180 or so feet) and realize that you’re in a building that has stood this way for over fourteen hundred years…And then to sit in Sultanahmet Park, looking at the way the light hits the building until you get eventually turn 180 degrees and see the Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Camii). I could die happy there.
Really? I thought Finland was awesome! Granted, it wasn’t like going to Paris or anything, but their winter was gorgeous and it was the cleanest, most well kept place I’ve ever been. I traveled about 600 miles through Finland from Helsinki to Vuokatti and back again by train and not only was the countryside very pretty but everything I saw was grime and graffiti free and wonderfully maintained. I’ve said before that Finland (and Helsinki in particular) seemed like they had little armies of house elves that came out at night and cleaned the place from top to bottom.
You’ll probably laugh, but Rome surprised me a lot.
After years of hearing how great Italy was, and the god-awful fawning over the place that so many people seem to do, I was fully prepared for it to be kind of a letdown. I was expecting dirty, polluted and generally run down. I was also (not sure why exactly) expecting far less in terms of density of stuff to see. I was thinking that it was pretty much the Forum, Colosseum and the Vatican, with maybe a quick side-trip to the Pantheon.
Boy was I wrong. The big 4 I mentioned above were much, much cooler than I’d ever imagined, and with quirks I didn’t expect. For example, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel isn’t where it’s at- it’s the wall with Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. That’s the really impressive painting. Or for example, the sheer size of St. Peters is another thing I wasn’t expecting. Or, for that matter, just how big the Colosseum is. I mean, it’s bigger than many (most?) college football stadiums!
Plus there’s stuff like San Giovanni in Laterano, San Luigi de la Francesi, all the squares and nifty joints to eat and do stuff in.
Paradoxically, to me, and relative to Rome, Florence was a massive letdown.
The place that really knocked my socks off was the Taj Mahal. Sure, everyone has seen pictures of it, and I thought I knew what to expect. But I found the experience of being there similar to the Grand Canyon - something you don’t really appreciate until you see it in person.
I think part of my reaction was that we were there on an absolutely perfect day. 70-something degrees, not a cloud in the sky. There’s an outer building you walk through before you get to the central grounds, so my eyes had adjusted to the darker environment. Then, you step outside, and there it is, practically glowing in the sun! Just like you’ve seen in pictures, but even more beautiful! I love the symmetry of the whole complex, and the amazing, beautiful, intricate inlay. It’s an amazing place.
I think you have to walk across it in order to understand.
You can do that at Grand Canyon. Of course, it does take a little work.
I can think of a few of my own. I went to the Caribbean a few years ago; more for the journey than the destination. I always thought it was a lay-around-on-the-beach place, and I’m not a lay-around-on-the-beach person. There’s more to do than I thought; great food, history, lots of very nice people. I spent some time on Nevis and Grenada and it was amazing.
I also liked the Ulmer Munster (protestant cathedral in Ulm, Germany). To me, gothic cathedrals always looked massive and substantial; I was surprised how open and airy it really was. Which is a bit scary in a way. It’s the tallest cathedral in the world, and you can pay a couple of Euros and climb the stairs to the top. What looks like solid stone from a distance feels like tinkertoys when you’re 400 feet in the air. The last part of the climb is a spiral staircase up the center with the steeply pitched roof coming in on all sides. Except it’s not a roof, it’s a lattice of gothic stonework on a scale I’d never seen before.
Also, LAV25, I agree with Istanbul, Turkey. I want to go back. It was such a shockingly wonderful place with GREAT food!
I wanted to add The Duomo in Florence. Take the hike up the stairs to get close to the maginificent frescoes… its unbelievable trying to wrap your mind around how they ever painted it. And then finally to the outside top of the Duomo itself… the view of Florence from up so high is breathtaking. sigh I miss it.
Mesa Verde. I think it was because I had never heard of it and didn’t know what it was before I rounded a turn and took in the entire sight. (I was a teenager traveling with my parents and I wasn’t paying that much attention to the agenda.) The idea that people could live that way was mind-jarring.
I’ve been to Garden of the Gods in Manitou Springs, Colo., a couple of times, and continue to count it among the most breathtaking places I have visited.
I agree with the poster who said Sedona is somehow grander than the Grand Canyon. Of course, I have only been to the rim of the GC in various spots – if I went down into the canyon it might be different.
This is not a destination buy something I have been able to view from my aircraft window when flying to the US from the UK. There is a perfect, perfect impact crater somewhere in Quebec or Labrador.
I have only seen it frozen from the air but it looks like a moonscape or imagined Mars scape of old. It may be the Pingualuit Crater but I am not sure. After seeing it the first time, I now get all worked up if I think my flight will be along that path but have only seen it twice. It leaves me breathless.
Paris was my dream city. Read the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables, Down and Out in London and Paris. I wanted to write and hang around cafes. Visited it with my daughter and it was everything that I dreamed it would be. It was old, charming, it was simply breathtaking and it had the Notre Dame Cathedral. I climbed the stairs to the top and stroked a gargoyle. Life does not get any better than that. Paris exceeded my expectations. We walked everywhere, it is a truly walkable city. I would sell my cats and possession to live there.
Grand Canyon it is. I’ve never seen it from the rim but we took a week long rafting trip and covered about 280 miles on the river. Absolutely unbelievable. Especially amazing was Havasu Canyon. Its this little Garden of Eden with warm turquoise waterfalls. I had dreams about the canyon walls for many weeks after the trip, as did many others in my group. Expensive but worth every penny.
On the subject of “surprise”, I was most surprised about how much I enjoyed travelling in Bangladesh. It’s not set up for tourism in any way, but the people were so charming and helpful it didn’t really matter. Nothing much to see, either, in the places we went, but just fascinating to be there in the crazy hubbub. And insanely cheap - three of us could eat for an hour, drink sodas and waters, have a rice dish, maybe some chicken, some parathas and chapattis, and a vegetable curry… for under $2. Total, that is, not each.
If you can find an old section of the Great Wall of China, please do so. The more you walk on it, the more you notice in the old stones that make it up. It’s more like a ladder at some points(stones have shifted), but it is amazing.
However, it’s probably not that surprising.
More surprising? The Detroit Institute of Art.
I mean, it’s an art museum in Detroit. How great can it be? Pretty great. They have paintings from just about all the major artists and they also have some very famous sculptures and other artwork.
It was renovated in the last few years, too, so it really is quite modern. A real gem in the middle of Detroit and another sign that Detroit is overly bashed sometimes. It has some great stuff.
Paris surprised me as well. I was surprised by how gritty it was. Granted, I took the metro out to metro Hoche (in the inner 'burbs?), where the hostel was, and didn’t spend much time there in total, but I think subconsciously I thought that it would be this idealized Disney storybook kind of place.
I didn’t have this kind of surprise with other places. I knew London was likely to be gritty; and most other places I stayed were blanks in terms of this expectation, so they didn’t surprise me that way.
Don’t let the cats hear that, or one day you’ll wake up in a box headed for Shenzhen.
Everything about that trip was perfect, the food, the location, the sites to visit - brilliant! Also for what it’s worth I found the Parisian people charming and helpful, completely the opposite of the reputation they seem to have. All they seem to ask is that you do them the decency to greet them in their own language even if you can’t carry out a whole conversation in French.
