Product Description

Around the World, continent by continent, here is the best the world has to offer: 1,000 places guaranteed to give travelers the shivers. Sacred ruins, grand hotels, wildlife preserves, hilltop villages, snack shacks, castles, festivals, reefs, restaurants, cathedrals, hidden islands, opera houses, museums, and more. Each entry tells exactly why it's essential to visit. Then come the nuts and bolts: addresses, websites, phone and fax numbers, best times to visit. Stop dreaming and get going.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1310 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 972 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This hefty volume reminds vacationers that hot tourist spots are small percentage of what's worth seeing out there. A quick sampling: Venice's Cipriani Hotel; California's Monterey Peninsula; the Lewis and Clark Trail in Oregon; the Great Wall of China; Robert Louis Stevenson's home in Western Samoa; and the Alhambra in Andalusia, Spain. Veteran travel guide writer Schultz divides the book geographically, presenting a little less than a page on each location. Each entry lists exactly where to find the spot (e.g. Moorea is located "12 miles/19 km northwest of Tahiti; 10 minutes by air, 1 hour by boat") and when to go (e.g., if you want to check out The Complete Fly Fisher hotel in Montana, "May and Sept.-Oct. offer productive angling in a solitary setting"). This is an excellent resource for the intrepid traveler.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"At last, a book that tells you what's beautiful, what's fun and what's just unforgettableeverywhere on earth." Newsweek (Newsweek )

"At last, a book that tells you what's beautiful, what's fun and what's just unforgettable—everywhere on earth."
—Newsweek (Newsweek )

From the Back Cover
Around the World, continent by continent, here is the best the world has to offer: 1,000 places guaranteed to give travelers the shivers. Sacred ruins, grand hotels, wildlife preserves, hilltop villages, snack shacks, castles, festivals, reefs, restaurants, cathedrals, hidden islands, opera houses, museums, and more. Each entry tells exactly why it's essential to visit. Then come the nuts and bolts: addresses, websites, phone and fax numbers, best times to visit. Stop dreaming and get going.

Customer Reviews

1000 places that PAID to be listed?!?!?!
Expensive hotels and spas...and more hotels! Did high end hotels pay to be included in this book? I certainly find it hard to believe that with all the amazing things to see in the world, the author thinks the lobbys of non-historic hotels and other expensive (but otherwise boring) retail businesses should be on anyone's Top 1000 list. I guess the author would suggest I skip the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids in Egypt (or in the Americas) and, instead, sit in some expensive hotel room in the middle of nowhere? Can you imagine the thrilling vacation pictures I could take of the mint on the pillow or the new tile in a hotel hallway? Ooo..sooo exciting!

I think this book was designed to make money, not be useful. Perhaps it could come in handy for wealthy travelers whose idea of seeing a foreign country is to stay at a fancy Americanized hotel and only venture outside long enough to take a limo ride to the local Starbucks and/or McDonalds outlets.

I'll be returning this book.

A Marvelous Resource
What a wonderful way to discover travel possibilities! Patricia Schultz has gifted us with the opportunity to find unique experiences throughout the world. She does seem to cite an awful lot of high priced hotels as travel destination in themselves, and very few (not surprisingly) are in the third world, but if you don't like some of her selections, just skip them. With 1000 entries that still leaves enough natural wonders and "real" experiences to keep most people busy for a lifetime of travel.
For the most part I greatly enjoyed her selections, as well as her lively writing style. Of course, I may be biased because she included my town in her list of "must sees." Some call Roswell the world's number one crackpot travel destination, but Ms Schultz has rightly recognized The UFO Capital of the World, in all its tacky splendor, as one of the 1000 places to see before you die!
-Lynn Michelsohn, author of Roswell, Your Travel Guide to the UFO Capital of the World!

Lots of Fun!

The spirit of this book is well exemplified by a quotation from Mark Twain (Page xv): "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the tide winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." So, the author advances a listing of places throughout the world worth discovering. This is a companion piece to another volume of hers, in which she explores 1,000 places to see within the United States.

The world is divided into eight regions, for the purposes of organizing discussion: Europe; Africa; the Middle East; Asia; Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands; the United States and Canada; Latin America; the Caribbean, Bahamas, and Bermuda.

In a brief review here, it would be impossible to illustrate each region in any depth. Maybe some samples from a few of the regions. Needless to say, any selection like this is apt to engender discussion--Why were some places left out? Why were others included? But that's part of the fun of a book like this!

Europe: Some of the usual suspects like Windsor Castle, Winchester Cathedral, London, the Salzburg Festival, Vienna, Paris, Versailles, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Sistine Chapel. But there are other treasures as well: Bellagio, Rhodes, Ile de Re, Kinsale, and Ludlow.

Africa: The Great Pyramids, Abu Simbel, Jack's Camp in the Kalahari Desert, the Cape Winelands, and so on.

United States and Canada: Kenai Peninsula, Monterey Peninsula, Telluride, South Beach, Art Institute of Chicago (one of my favorite art museums), Art Gallery of Ontario, Nimmo Bay Resort, Polar Bear Safari, and the like.

This is fun simply to browse. Choose a page at random and fantasize a trip there. . . . Again, lots of fun!