The New Seven Wonders of the World list shows more about the problems with democracy than the state of the World’s Wonderfulness. Why the Christ statue of Corcovado in Rio beat Angkor Wat to make it into the list I don’t know. Well I do know - my guess is that the list has been hijacked by Brazilians, or Christians, or Brazilian Christians! The one thing you can safely say is that it probably won’t be Christians with Brazilians!

We live in a World ordered by lists. We seem to be surrounded by them. They tell us where to go on holiday, what to do there and generally fill pages of magazines and newspapers with easy to produce copy. Probably the bizarrest example of list-obsession is the British hobby of trainspotting. Not, as you might think if you have seen the film, involving Glaswegians and Heroin, trainspotting is the hobby of collecting train numbers! Obvious figures of fun, you can see trainspotters hovering at the end of most British railway stations, in all weathers, ticking off the numbers of trains in specially printed books.

As the author of two different books which seek to list the most Unforgettable Places and Islands, I am probably somewhat on dodgy ground when criticising any type of lists, so here in no particular order is a selection of some of my favourites!

Any list which labels the Fench as the worst tourists in the world has to be on my favourite list. I can even get over the shame of British being fifth!

I can’t say that I agree to all of Road Junky’s list of Worst Cities to Travel To, but the inclusion of Manchester and Liverpool did make me laugh. Especially as my town, London, is on their best citites list. Their reasons should amuse (unless you are a scouser).

If food is one of your reasons for travelling then this list of Worst Food might make you reconsider. And they don’t even have the Thai, deep fried bugs on here. Yum yum!

Well, we can all dream! This list of Sexy Beaches does it for me. Now where did I put my Speedo?

It’s a strange world out there, and this list of Weird Festivals has some of the freakiest that the planet has to offer.

Words & pictures © Steve Davey 2007

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 5:21 am and is filed under Steve projects, bad trips, weirdness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.