Funny things tourists pay to do in your country
 

I was looking around the lonely planet forums just for the hell of it, and stumbled upon a post where someone was asking if people thought it was worth it to pay $400 to go on a tour in alaska to see bears.

I told the poster to just go camping up there and leave some food out. They'll see bears up close for free!

It amuses me greatly that someone would pay $400 to see something that we just view as a normal part of any outdoor activity in western Canada. Go mountain biking, see a bear. go hiking, see a bear. hell even spring skiing in some areas overlap the time when hibernation ends and you'll run into some bears.

So what do tourists spend ridiculous amounts of money on in your country that you consider an utter waste?

I nominate Disney World. Now, I actually used to work there so I have kind of a soft spot for the place but it's really expensive. And if you're traveling to the US from far away surely you can think of more interesting places to spend your time than boring-ass Orlando.

Why is Disney in Orlando?

I feel a bunch of people come to Toronto to visit its malls, specially Yorkdale and The Eaton Center, and though Eaton is huge and scenic and nice and is at the heart of downtown, deserving its tourism and praise, Yorkdale is in "bleh" North York, and it's not that big to begin with.

Two words: cheap land.

Incidentally, I love Toronto and have never been to any malls there. :)

That does explain everything.

Coming to visit in the hopes of seeing the Queen, or at least viewing her palace. I discussed this with her while we partook of tiffin and she said she didn't understand it either.

In Tennessee they go down the Natchez Trace, which is a giant dirt road that traders have been traveling down for 200 years. They don't have to pay, but it's still a pretty lame thing to see.

Oh and Andrew Jackson's home. Hahaha

They don't go see Graceland?

I wasn't really thinking hard about it, but that's money well spent IMO.

Here (Indianapolis) you can pay to ride around the track a few times, kiss the bricks, or whatever tickles your fancy. I don't know of any other reason people would come here to visit, unless its for the Final Four or something.

^dude fest

Yet only a very very small percentage are attractive. :(

hehe

http://b6.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/0...60801906_l.jpg

I suck.
That venue is going to hell anyways.

I laugh at them too. I drive by there so often.
People seem to be so entralled by Broadway too with the Honkeytonks and such.

It boggles my mind how excited tourists get when they see wildlife around here. Whenever there's a big horned sheep or hell even a couple of deer on the side of the highway there's always cars parked on the side of the road snapping away with their cameras. makes me laugh.

the worst was on a kayaking trip in the states. we were driving up through glacier national park in montana, and if anyone's ever driven that road, you'll recall that most of it is a VERY narrow mountain pass full of blind corners a switchbacks. We came across a huge line of cars, all stopped in the middle of the right lane, for apparently no reason. we finally edged closer and saw that 6 cars had stopped, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE F*CKING ROAD* to look at a mountain goat. the kicker was there was a pull-over lane only about 50 metres down the highway. but no, the goat was so exciting they had to block traffic for hundreds of metres both ways rather than take the chance it would walk away in the 2 minutes it would have taken to pull over in a safe area. absolute retards. almost as bad as the tourists i've seen putting honey on their kids hands so the cute cuddly black bears will come up and lick them.

DEER?!?!?!

People don't really smother their kids in honey and send them off to meet bears do they? That's tantamount to tying a steak to their leg and dropping them in the lion enclosure.

i have seen it done. a few of us were driving back from kayaking one day, and one of the guys wanted to be a tourist and get a photo of the bear. we saw an asian woman (hate to stereotype but...) grab a bottle of honey and drizzle some on her son's hand. The bear kind of sniffed at it from a few metres away, and looked like it might be tempted so we started shouting to drive it off. bad for the bears to be in such close contact, and certainly bad for the kid if he'd been mauled.

We have alot of people come for the music scene here, the "Wham City" scene is becoming quite popular and most the music that's associated with it is fairly tolerable.

I luld.

Ive noticed a bunch of tourists in rental cars its seems and im not to sure why that they enjoy visiting gas stations.. I would say a good 25% of there vacation money is spent there..

I live about twenty minutes outside of D.C. There were millions of tourists here for the inauguration. Now, while I understand why people wanted to see it (first black President, change, etc) the majority of them ended up standing in sub freezing weather on the mall for hours packed like sardines to watch on jumbo screen tvs. Seems kinda dumb to me... and people paid $1000's to rent rooms for a week or even a few days there.

^see I can totally see that. It's a very different experience being there in the crowd, experiencing that atmosphere, than just watching it at home on tv.

I went there.

You know, for a mansion, it sure is f*cking tiny.

Of course everybody was midgets back in the 50s.

I enjoyed it but theres better places in Memphis to see. There's a lot of great tourist spots. Beale Street has a lot of cool nightclubs, and there's the Pink Palace museum which is really awesome.

Ride on an open top bus looking at the craphole called London whilst it's invariably hammering it down with rain. The fools.

Beale St.! I went there on a guitar trip to Memphis back in my junior year of high school, it was pretty cool. It did feel kind of like a tourist trap at times, but I loved all of the musicians playing outside. There was some real blues talent there. We toured the Gibson factory too, that was awesome.
And I would love to visit London one day...

People pay thousands of dollars to hunt deer in Kansas around where I live...and the deer are fenced in so they are guaranteed a kill or 2...where is the sport in that...and people hit deer in cars around here by the dozen...they are really a pain in the ass...I feel sorry for these animals that are loosing their natural habitat....eventually they will have none and will have to be bred on industrial farms and kept in tiny stalls and slaughtered like cows...oh the humanity.

You can get parajumping lessons for a big difference depending where you are.

Tourists pay guides to take them up to this glacier which is actually quite safe. The meltwater rivers are easy to spot and fairly predictable, there are no crevasses, it's not far from town .. Needless to say, we just walk up there. Also, tourists rent rifles on Svalbard, but they know nothing of gun safety. Groups of tourists where everyone has a rifle, bolt usually in so you can't know if they've got a bullet in the chamber, is a fairly regular thing to see .. It's illegal to carry them like that in town, but the tourists are too stupid / ignorant to understand.

I've met tourists who have gone to the north pole by plane. What the hell is the point of going up there by plane? Then it's just a chunk of ice.

What do they need rifles for anyways?

We don't get many tourists here, unless you count the masses that pour in for football weekends.

Polar bears .. On Svalbard, you're not allowed to leave town without firearms.

The part of London where me and my flatmates live, Bow, has this church called the Mary-le-Bow, its a famous London landmark because of the old saying, "A true ****ney is he who is born within ear shot of the bow bells" - the bow bells are of course the Mary-le-Bow. In reality people pay to walk into a crumbling church surrounded by a one-way system

IN Australia all these tourists pay thousands to go out into the scorching hot desert to look at a big rock called Uluru/Ayres Rock, which is sacred to aborigines from a hundred years ago but which has no real significance to anyone anymore. Then, they try and climb it.

I have to point out, at least where I live, that deer need to be killed off. I don't know about Kansas though. The hunting thing is just wrong... fencing in deer and charging people to kill them. But here in VA, there are so many deer that if we weren't hitting them with our cars, a lot of them would starve. Still the fault of people though, as we killed off their natural predators by developing the land so much.

One thing you don't see on the brochure though is the high concentration of homeless black people begging tourists for money.

Haha yes, that is very true. In fact, I was rather surprised about the state of the city. I thought it would be much nicer than it was. Still thought Beale Street had some cool musicians though.

I thought Memphis was a little sad. The little Beale Street strip is really small and it seems like there's not much else besides abandoned buildings. When I was there the place definitely seemed like it had seen better days.

I'm amazed at all the people that come to the Mall of America.

Its full of stuff you can get anywhere else, just that its more expensive in our giant mall.

Camp Snoopy isn't even around anymore.

visit.

People visit Manchester to see Smiths hangouts and album pictures without been warned that if they don't hand out jaffa cakes and watzits they get their brains blown out by angry scallys