18 Things Not to Bother Doing Before You Die

Travel is a blast…
It broadens the mind, teases your taste buds and sharpens your life skills.
Except when it doesn’t.

For every on-the-road memory to slip in the mind vault marked “precious”, there’s one to chuck in the “let-down” bin.
Or maybe two.
Or maybe that’s just the view of a jaded travel writer.

1) “Detoxing” Retreats

The human body has a natural “detoxing” facility.
It’s called the liver.

Any spa treatment or retreat that promises to detox you is speaking gobbledegook while tweaking your guilty conscience with one hand and slipping the other into your back pocket.

Retoxing opportunities, on the other hand, abound in travel, with countless quirky and exciting local mind-bending slants.

Choose that instead.

2) “Experiencing” a Sunset

The sunset, like sunrise, happens every day.
It’s pretty unremarkable.

The letdown about seeing any of the “world’s best” sunsets at places such as Bagan, the ancient Myanmar city, Cambodia’s Angkor Wat or the cliff-top town of Oia, in Santorini, is not all the other people’s heads blocking your view of the golden orb.

No, it’s the inevitable failure of the sinking of the light to engender in you the expected feelings of the oneness of everything, romantic blossoming or assorted other epiphanies ripped from a cornflake packet.

Instead your stomach might rumble.
Have an early dinner instead.

3) Climbing the Eiffel Tower

The main drawback of the Eiffel Tower – aesthetic and engineering marvel and icon of modernity that it is – is that you can’t actually see the Eiffel Tower from it, which is the whole point of Paris.

See also the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa and London’s Shard.

4) Finding Yourself

You won’t.
Or you won’t find anything different.

As Alain de Botton put it in “The Art of Travel”, the problem with travelling is that you take yourself with you.

5) Kissing the Blarney Stone

It’s a rock so it probably doesn’t mind but tonguing this slab of bluestone built into the battlements of Blarney Castle, in Cork, Ireland, appears to be one of the greatest letdowns in the history of tourism.

Its rating as the most disappointing attraction in Europe by USA Today is only one low in a welter of scathing, flabbergasted and simply hurt online reviews.

Kissing the stone is supposed to lend you the gift of the gab – ”blarney” meaning witty and beguiling talk – but you don’t half have to pay for it.

First there’s the steep walk to the castle, then the long lines, and when it’s your turn you risk a hernia bending backwards gripping on to an iron rail.

And, as we’ve pointed out, kissing the thing does absolutely bugger all.

6) Seeking Out the World’s Biggest Anything

A simple piece of travel logic holds that the bigger an everyday object blown up and stuck by the side of the road to attract tourists, the more sadly inconsequential the responsible town, hamlet or other municipal entity proves to be.

Australian small towns are particularly dedicated to enlarging ordinary things, including a banana and a carp but also, inevitably, a koala and atop a Northern Territory service station, a boxing crocodile.

To put it another way, “big things” have the unintended effect of advertising from afar somewhere to be avoided.

7) Gawping at the “Mona Lisa”

Poor Mona, eyeballed more times than there are stars in the galaxy.

Poor eyeballers — in their smartphone-flashing multitude — each ruining for everyone else the experience of seeing the world’s most famous painting in the flesh.

The Louvre doesn’t help by encasing it in a kind of reinforced-glass coffin to guard against damage and theft.

It’s the latter, ironically enough, that explains most of the “Mona Lisa’s” fame.

When thieves lifted the picture from the Louvre in 1911, they created a media sensation, heavily spiced with stories of how the (in fact screamingly gay) Da Vinci was in love with his female sitter.

Anyway, let’s face it, what interests most people about this portrait of a 16th-century Florentine idle woman is how much it’s worth.

In which case, you might as well go and stare at a stack of gold bullion.

8) Camping

Camping: A form of cruelty passed down from generation to generation.

The fact that tents only get more sophisticated, more multi-roomed and mod con-bedecked, proves how misguidedly minimalist the enterprise is in the first place.

Cf. RVs: Voluntary homelessness.

9) Joining a Slum or Favela Tour

Organized tours of the slums of Mumbai or Nairobi, or favela tours in Rio – all of which exist – are supposed to be about bridging the gap between impoverished locals and tourists on a getaway that’s a little bit different.

Plus they’re meant to aid slum dwellers financially, once the tour operators have taken their cut.

Both of those premises may be true but surely slum tours will only lose their voyeuristic taint when busloads of slum kids are taken to gawp at folks in LA gated communities.

Now, that would be a sight.

10) Bungee Jumping

A kind of skydiving lite (but see “skydiving”, below), bungee jumping has lost whatever “crazy” thrills it might once have afforded through sheer, monotonous repetition.

Everyone’s done it.

Which is not to say it can’t still be dangerous.

A much watched YouTube video shows an Australian tourist’s 111-meter jump from Victoria Falls Bridge over the crocodile-filled Zambezi River, on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia, on New Year’s Eve 2011.

Except it wasn’t over but into, when her cord snapped and she failed amusingly to bounce back up again and again.

She survived – but that doesn’t make bungee jumping any more acceptable.

11) Skydiving

Like bungee jumping (snapping cords aside), there’s something ersatz about the supposed daredevilry of this quasi-military pursuit, which is that its danger is predictable and contained and, not to mention, entirely unnecessary.

The British humorist and professional naysayer Richard Wilson argues against the pastime that, “I don’t want to pay [hundreds of pounds] to have someone push me off a 10-foot wall so I can practice falling safely.”

“I don’t want to feel my bowels turn to hot-and-sour soup in a rickety plane and then jump out of it.”

“I don’t want to smash into the ground at 124 miles an hour and have my leg bones driven up under my armpits.”

“And, assuming my chute does open, I don’t want to float helplessly into the propeller blades of a plane and be turned into a human smoothie.”

Quite.

12) Sleeping in an Ice Hotel

Like something dreamt up by vindictive hoteliers to prevent guests complaining of draughts, ice hotels should induce a shudder long before you check in.

They’re also now so ubiquitous the only space left for one may soon be in the desert.

Or Dubai. Actually, they’ve got a ski resort, so it may not be long.

13) Spotting, or Swimming with, Dolphins

Yet another activity that might be included under the metastasizing category of “new age travel”, encounters with our smiley finned friends seem often to disappoint.

To put it another way, just because they appear to be smiling doesn’t mean they are, and just because you want to see them, doesn’t mean they want to see you.

14) Staying in a Prison Hotel

Because if you end up in prison you’ll regret having done the extra time.

Aside from that, you’ll also recognize that prisons are places of suffering.

That’s supposed to be part of the ironic experience of staying in one of the prisons-turned-hotel that have sprung up everywhere from Oxford to Ottawa via (shades of “Midnight Express”) the Four Seasons Istanbul.

Others would say it’s in dubious taste.

If you must stay in one, pick somewhere like Karostas Cietums Military Prison, in Latvia, where you sleep on an iron bunk, eat prison food and take abuse from the “guards”.

There’s a special offer for children.

15) Studying Hydrology at the Beijing Tap Water Museum

Without wanting to pick unduly on the Tap Water Museum in the Beijing suburb of Dongcheng, it does seem to sum up peerlessly well a subject that may well be worthy of a museum but is sadly leagues away from being interesting enough to attract anyone through the doors other than the curator’s aunt.

Belgium’s Carrot Museum, the British Lawnmower Museum and the Mustard Museum, in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, admittedly provide quite stiff competition.

16) Touring a Red Light District

Ill-advised in Amsterdam, Bangkok, Paris or anywhere else, solo or on a guided tour, less for the risk of contracting an exotic venereal disease than for the general biliousness of observing the desperation of both those selling and buying.

Plus you might end up turning a trick by accident when drunk.

17) Visiting Stonehenge

Britain does bathos well when it comes to its ancient sites, building a roaring motorway next to Stonehenge, for example.

A costly visitor center for the 5,000-year-old stone circle has finally opened but it’s around 1.5 miles from the site itself, and the stones remain roped off from ordinary mortals.

The “druids” who descend upon the monument in their hundreds every summer and winter solstice are merely the fruit loops on the cake of a site deprived of its magic.

18) Ziplining

Possibly the zzzzzenith of pointless travel activities, ziplining combines absurdity and indignity with impressive force.

You want to get from tree A to tree B?
Walk.

Don’t climb up A, sling a rope across to B and then dangle between the two.

That’s not how we evolved.

And only children should wear harnesses.

For that matter, avoid making a bucket list!