Catherine Price Read online

  101

  PLACES

  NOT

  TO SEE

  before you die

  Catherine Price

  For my grandmother

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - The Testicle Festival

  Chapter 2 - An Underpass in Connaught Circle, New Delhi, at the Moment When Someone Puts a Turd on Your Shoe

  Chapter 3 - Euro Disney

  Chapter 4 - Ibiza on a Family Vacation

  Chapter 5 - The Beijing Museum of Tap Water

  Chapter 6 - A Bathtub Filled with Beer

  Chapter 7 - An Overnight Train in China on the First Day of Your First Period

  Chapter 8 - Grandpa and Grandma, Koh Samui, Thailand

  Chapter 9 - The Winchester Mystery House

  GUEST ENTRY: The Worst Places in the Encyclopedia—A. J. Jacobs

  Chapter 10 - Hell

  Chapter 11 - A Buzkashi Match

  Chapter 12 - Your Boss’s Bedroom

  Chapter 13 - An Overnight Stay at a Korean Temple

  Chapter 14 - Pamplona, from the Perspective of a Bull

  Chapter 15 - The Gloucester Cheese Rolling Competition

  GUEST ENTRY: The Worst Meal in Barcelona—Michael and Isaac Pollan

  Chapter 16 - Wall Drug

  Chapter 17 - Bart

  Chapter 18 - A Stop on Carry Nation’s Hatchetation Tour

  Chapter 19 - The Third Infiltration Tunnel at the DMZ

  Chapter 20 - Rush Hour on a Samoan Bus

  GUEST ENTRY: The Tupperware Museum—Mary Roach

  Chapter 21 - An Outdoor Wedding During the 2021 Emergence of the Great Eastern Cicada Brood

  Chapter 22 - (Tr)Action Park

  Chapter 23 - A Giant Room Filled with Human Crap

  Chapter 24 - Kingman Reef

  Chapter 25 - Naked Sushi

  Chapter 26 - Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

  Chapter 27 - Times Square on New Year’s Eve

  Chapter 28 - The Double Black Diamond Run at Powderhouse Hill

  Chapter 29 - The Double Black Diamond Run at Corbet’s Couloir

  Chapter 30 - The Beast

  Chapter 31 - The Grover Cleveland Service Area

  Chapter 32 - The Room Where Spam Subject Lines Are Created

  Chapter 33 - Anywhere Written About by Nick Kristof

  GUEST ENTRY: Experiences That Nick Kristof Does Not Think Are Worth Having Before You Die—Nick Kristof

  Chapter 34 - The Tokyo Summerland Wave Pool, August 14, 2007, 3 P.M.

  Chapter 35 - Mid-January in Whittier, Alaska

  Chapter 36 - Onondaga Lake

  Chapter 37 - Mount Rushmore

  Chapter 38 - Amateur Night at a Shooting Range

  Chapter 39 - Ciudad Juárez

  Chapter 40 - The World’s Skinniest Buildings

  Chapter 41 - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

  GUEST ENTRY: The Customs Office at the Buenos Aires Airport—Rebecca Solnit

  Chapter 42 - Any Hotel That Used to Be a Prison

  Chapter 43 - The Top of Mount Washington in a Snowstorm

  Chapter 44 - The Bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole

  Chapter 45 - The Inside of a dB Drag Racer During Competition

  Chapter 46 - Shangri-La

  Chapter 47 - Body Farms

  Chapter 48 - An AA Meeting When You’re Drunk

  Chapter 49 - Jupiter’s Worst Moon

  GUEST ENTRY: Splitting the Czech—J. Maarten Troost

  Chapter 50 - Picher, Oklahoma

  Chapter 51 - Tierra Santa Theme Park

  Chapter 52 - A Vomitorium

  Chapter 53 - Medinat al-Fayoum, Egypt, Accompanied by Your Own Security Detail

  Chapter 54 - The Steam Room at the Russian & Turkish Baths

  Chapter 55 - The Blarney Stone

  GUEST ENTRY: Mexico City on the First Day of the Swine Flu Outbreak—Michael Baldwin

  Chapter 56 - The Wiener’s Circle

  Chapter 57 - The Top of Mount Everest

  Chapter 58 - Garbage City

  Chapter 59 - Stonehenge

  Chapter 60 - The Khewra Salt Mines Mosque

  Chapter 61 - Anywhere on a Yamaha Rhino

  Chapter 62 - Chacabuco, Chile

  Chapter 63 - The New South China Mall

  GUEST ENTRY: Sumqayit, Azerbaijan—Lisa Margonelli

  Chapter 64 - An Island off Germany’s East Coast, January 16, 1362

  Chapter 65 - Fucking, Austria

  Chapter 66 - The White Shark Café While Dressed as an Elephant Seal

  Chapter 67 - The Sidewalk Outside the Roman Coliseum During the Crazy Gladiator’s Shift

  Chapter 68 - Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiberglass Thing

  Chapter 69 - The Path of an Advancing Column of Driver Ants

  Chapter 70 - The Road of Death

  GUEST ENTRY: Adventure of the Beagle, the Musical—Eric Simons

  Chapter 71 - Cusco, If You Are Albino

  Chapter 72 - Manneken Pis

  Chapter 73 - An Old Firm Derby While Wearing the Wrong Color T-Shirt

  Chapter 74 - The Annual Poison Oak Show

  Chapter 75 - The Inside of a Chinese Coal Mine

  Chapter 76 - The Seattle Gum Wall

  Chapter 77 - Varrigan City

  Chapter 78 - The Inner Workings of a Rendering Plant

  Chapter 79 - An Airplane After It Has Been Stranded on the Runway for Eight Hours

  Chapter 80 - The Amsterdam Sexmuseum

  Chapter 81 - The Next Eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano

  Chapter 82 - The Shores of Burundi’s Lake Tanganyika When Gustave Is Hungry

  Chapter 83 - Ancient Rome on or Around the Night of July 18, 64 A.D.

  Chapter 84 - Nevada

  GUEST ENTRY: Fan Hours at the Las Vegas Porn Convention—Brendan Buhler

  Chapter 85 - The World Bog Snorkelling Championships

  Chapter 86 - Your College Campus Four Months After You Graduate

  Chapter 87 - A North Korean Gulag

  Chapter 88 - Disaster City

  Chapter 89 - The Inside of a Spotted Hyena’s Birth Canal

  Chapter 90 - Gropers’ Night on the Tokyo Subway

  Chapter 91 - The Yucatán Peninsula When a Giant Asteroid Hit the Earth

  Chapter 92 - Monday Morning at the DMV

  Chapter 93 - Black Rock City

  GUEST ENTRY: Burning Man—Jennifer Kahn

  Chapter 94 - The Bottom of a Pig Lagoon

  Chapter 95 - Sohra, India, 10 A.M., During Rainy Season

  Chapter 96 - The Thing

  Chapter 97 - Four Corners

  Chapter 98 - Russia’s Prison OE-256/5

  Chapter 99 - A Bikram Yoga Studio

  Chapter 100 - The Traveling Mummies of Guanajuato

  Chapter 101 - The Top of the Stari Grad Bell Tower

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  There are a lot of things I need to do before I die.

  Or at least that’s what my local bookstore is telling me. Every time I visit, I’m faced with a shelf’s worth of guides listing things to accomplish, from 100 Places to See in Your Lifetime to 101 Things to Do Before You’re Old and Boring. I appreciate the idea behind Patricia Schultz’s 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, the inspiration for this genre of books, but its offspring stresses me out.

  There are lists of jazz albums I need to listen to, foods I must taste, paintings I have to see, walks I’m required to take—my own father has a book of 1,001 gardens I can’t die without visiting. How am I supposed to conquer 1
,001 movies while simultaneously reading 1,001 books and traveling to 1,001 historic sites—not to mention making it to the 500 places I must see before they disappear? By the time I found a copy of 101 Places to Have Sex Before You Die, I was tempted to swear off travel books, grab a selection of the 1,001 beers I have to drink, and head to one of the 1,001 spots where I’m supposed to escape.

  I am a person who routinely writes lists of things I’ve already done, just to make myself feel more accomplished. Like many people, I already spend too much time coming up with arbitrary things I “should” be doing, keeping myself so busy that it’s hard to separate one moment from the next. The last thing I need to read is a book that pits my desire for adventure against the time pressure of mortality—especially in the form of 1,001 places I’m supposed to play golf.

  So I decided to create an antidote: a list of places and experiences that you don’t need to worry about missing out on. I called upon travel-loving friends, family members, and, in some cases, complete strangers to tell me about overhyped tourist sites, boring museums, stupid historical attractions, and circumstances that can make even worthwhile destinations miserable.

  Some entries on the list are unquestionably unappealing, like a field strewn with decomposing bodies or fan hours at the Las Vegas porn convention. Some depend on context—Pamplona’s a very different city from the perspective of a bull. Some are just good stories, albeit ones that are more fun to read about than to experience firsthand.

  As I gathered suggestions, I came across a characteristic common among frequent travelers: a reluctance to define anything as bad. “I have a soft spot for underdog places and a perverse need to find even the worse stuff a source of delight and titillation,” wrote one friend about her inability to hate on Uzbekistan or, for that matter, Detroit. She’s right, of course—the worse something is in the moment, the better the story when you get home. So for those people who look at a warehouse full of rotting human sewage and see an interesting way to spend an afternoon, I also included some places that would be impossible to visit even if you were intent on finding the bright side in everything, like the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-five million years ago or the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It might seem pointless to say that you shouldn’t go to a place like Io, Jupiter’s least hospitable moon, but look at it this way: when someone publishes 1,001 Places in Space to See Before You Die, the pressure will be off.

  No matter what type of traveler you are, I invite you to take a break from your other to-do lists and spend a moment being grateful for some of the things you’re not doing. Then, when you’re ready to hit the road, leave behind your list of 1,001 Places You Must Pee* and give yourself a chance to come up with some experiences of your own. Travel should be an adventure, not an assignment, and if you spend your vacations armed with too many checklists, you’re missing the point of leaving home.

  Chapter 1

  The Testicle Festival

  Forget apple pie. Few foods are as uniquely American as the Rocky Mountain oyster, a euphemism that refers not to a high-altitude mollusk but to the testicles of a bull. Also known as cowboy caviar and Montana tendergroin, these balls can be boiled, sautéed, or even eaten raw, but they’re usually treated more like chicken—breaded and deep-fried.

  There are also few things more American than eating competitions, so it should come as no surprise that each summer offers opportunities to prove your manhood by stuffing your face with gonads. I appreciate the pun of the Nuts About Rocky Mountain Oysters competition that occurs annually in Loveland, Colorado. But the award for Best in Show goes to the Testicle Festival, held each year at the Rock Creek Lodge near Missoula, Montana. Started in 1982, it is America’s premier venue to chow down on balls.

  When the festival first began, it drew about three hundred people. But these days the crowd has grown to fifteen thousand, and the debauchery has expanded to a weekend full of wet T-shirts, impromptu nudity, and an Indy 500–inspired race called the “Undie 500”—all natural evolutions of an event whose tagline is “Come Have a Ball.” Try your hand at Bullshit Bingo, a larger-than-life—and quite literal—game of chance where every time a bull defacates on a giant bingo card, someone wins $100. Or support the event’s alternate title—the Breasticle Festival—by signing up for the Biker Ball-Biting Competition, where girls riding on the backs of Harleys race to snag a Rocky Mountain oyster off a string without using their hands. There are belly shots. There’s No Panty Wednesday. And, of course, there are the Rocky Mountain oysters themselves—more than fifty thousand pounds of them—greasy, salted, and USDA-approved.

  Jim Kleeman

  Chapter 2

  An Underpass in Connaught Circle, New Delhi, at the Moment When Someone Puts a Turd on Your Shoe

  Imagine this scene: you’re walking through an underpass in Connaught Circle, a mess of traffic where twelve of New Delhi’s roads converge, and all of a sudden a voice calls out of the crowd.

  “Excuse me, friend,” it says. “You’ve got feces on your shoe.”

  Several weeks in India have made you realize that when people yell at you on the street, it’s usually best to ignore them. So at first you pay no attention. But something in this man’s voice is different, believable. He repeats himself, and you slowly lower your eyes.

  And there it is: a flattened turd sitting on the top of your shoe.

  Your first reaction is disbelief—you’ve had shit on the bottom of your shoe, sure. But the top? How can this be? There aren’t any birds around, or monkeys. Disgusted, you lean down to inspect it. Still moist and glistening, it gives off a familiar fecal smell.

  You consider throwing up, but before your gag reflex can kick in, a voice pipes up. “Don’t worry, I will clean it for you.” It is your new friend, who now is standing next to you with a shoe-shining kit. Well, will you look at that! Here you are, caught in the one moment in your life where you need an emergency shoe cleaning, and this kind man pops out of nowhere to help you. What are the odds?

  Before you have a moment to actually calculate the odds of this happening coincidentally, the man has escorted you off to the side of the passageway where, with a flourish, he rids your shoe of the offending turd. Then, as you reach into your wallet for a tip, he announces the price for a shit-shine special—and it’s more than most New Delhi residents earn in a week.

  If you think about it, the scam is brilliant. The service has already been rendered, and besides, who wants to walk around with a turd perched on his shoe?

  So you pay him—not his asking price, but still enough to make it worth his while to continue smearing poop on the footwear of passersby. If you’re a victim, feel free to get pissed off. But at least the shit scheme isn’t as bad as the loogie-on-your-shoulder trick. In that one, you don’t even have the chance to give a tip—someone smears a wad of spit on your jacket while a second guy steals your wallet.

  Chapter 3

  Euro Disney

  I’ve never liked Disney World. As a child who was terrified of mimes, Santa Claus, and any larger-than-life stuffed animal, I hated the giant mice that roamed the streets of the Magic Kingdom, holding children hostage until their parents took a photograph. Huge, unblinking eyes; garish smiles; swollen, cartoon hands—this was the stuff of nightmares. When my parents brought me to a special event called “Breakfast with the Characters,” I took one look at Pinocchio and dove under the table.

  So perhaps I was biased against Euro Disney from the start. But really, who wasn’t? Opened in 1992, it was an attempt to bring Mickey Mouse to Europeans—an audience that tends to be skeptical of American culture to begin with, especially when it tries to steal the hearts and minds of its children. Convinced that parental disapproval was no match for their offspring’s love of The Little Mermaid, Disney pushed forward with its plans and eventually settled on a spot in the rural town of Marne-la-Vallée. An easy train ride from Paris, the location was estimated to be less than a four-hour drive for sixty-eight million people.

  C
ontroversy soon followed. Assuming that there must be a direct connection between Euro Disney and the U.S. government, French farmers blockaded its entrance with their tractors to protest European and American agricultural policies. A Parisian stage director named Ariane Mnouchkine called Euro Disney a “cultural Chernobyl,” and while she quickly moved on to making other exaggerated comparisons to nuclear disasters (“Television seems to me to be a much more menacing cultural Chernobyl,” she told the New York Times in July 1993), the classification stuck.

  And then there were tactical errors: Euro Disney opened, for example, in the middle of a European recession. It offended would-be workers with a strict dress code forbidding long nails and requiring “appropriate undergarments” for women, which prompts the question of why a Disney employee would be showing her undergarments to begin with. As a primarily outdoor attraction, it didn’t take into account the fact that France, unlike Florida and Southern California, actually has a winter. The restaurants in the park also didn’t serve alcohol, a policy that didn’t go over well with Europeans used to enjoying a glass of wine with lunch. By July 1993—a little over a year after the park opened—Euro Disney had debts of about $3.7 billion.

  Wikipedia Commons

  But despite the challenges of translating Americana into every European language (in Italian, Cattleman’s Chili is Pepperoncino alla Cowboy) Euro Disney kept fighting. The park posted its first profits in 1995 and has done so intermittently since then. Scarred by the negative connotations of “Euro Disney,” it also changed its name to “Disneyland Paris.” Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner says this title was chosen to identify the park with “one of the most romantic and exciting cities in the world,” but this seems like an odd association—the place is so quintessentially American that it has an Aerosmith-themed roller coaster.

  Chapter 4

  Ibiza on a Family Vacation

  First settled by the Phoenicians over twenty-five hundred years ago, the Spanish island of Ibiza wasn’t always a party town. Back in the day (and by “day,” I mean Carthaginian rule), the club capital of the world was best known for its exports of dye, salt, and wool. Sure, the islanders dabbled in garum, a pungent condiment made from fermented fish, but in those days, who didn’t? If people really wanted to party, they went to Rome.