Yesterday I visited Olympic National Park, the 99th World Heritage site since I began my travels in March, 2007. (click on the link for the entire list)
Since I began posting daily photos almost two years ago, I have tried to devote at least one day to each World Heritage site I have visited. I have gotten horribly behind. Of the 99 I have visited, only 72 have been featured on the site. To rectify this, I am devoting the entire month of October to World Heritage sites I have not yet featured. This should take me from Historic San Marino to wherever I am at the end of the month.
Each featured World Heritage site will have a bit more text than I usually have for a daily photo, including both a summary from the UNESCO website as well as my personal thoughts. The downside to this project is that there are some places I visited that I had a hard time getting a good photo to represent the site. Sometimes there isn’t much to see, I’m there at the wrong time of day, or the site is just not intrinsically interesting. You will see this on October 14 when I feature the Wadden Sea in the Netherlands. It is only interesting at low tide and I was there at high tide. It was just a bunch of water!
Here are links to few articles I wrote after I had visited my 50th World Heritage site in 2008:
- Top Natural World Heritage Sites
- Top Cultural World Heritage Sites
- Most Disappointing World Heritage Sites
thank you amanda
I prefer to visit places that in my mind should be world heritage sites. They are always less busy and without exception as good or if not better than the ones that UNESCO has been bribed into making world heritage sites.
We should all follow our own path instead of the well trodden and predictable ones, which get kinda boring at times!
Several of the rock star sites are in fact really busy. They were busy before the world heritage list was created, however.
The vast majority of these sites are places that would be otherwise unknown or known only to locals. The don’t get a lot of visitors and in some cases there isn’t even a particular “place” to visit.
There is a good reason why places which are popular with tourists are popular. I don’t like to treat destinations like indie rock bands and look down on them once they become popular. The Pyramids have drawn visitors for thousands of years for good reason. They haven’t become any less impressive now that more people can visit them.
My birthday month! First breasts, now this. Awesome.