What are the best places you’ve been to that are actually worth exploring?
Not looking for the obvious tourist checklist, more curious about places that surprised you, felt different from what you expected, or just stuck with you long after the trip ended.
Could be a country, a random small town nobody talks about, a trek, a street you wandered into by accident, anything.
A few things I’d love to know if you’re up for sharing:
Where was it, and what made it stand out for you?
Was it planned, or did you just stumble into it?
Would you actually go back, or was it a one-time kind of place?
Roughly how much did it end up costing you, and did it feel worth that amount looking back?
I’m building a list for future trips, and honestly the best recommendations I’ve gotten have always come from real people’s experiences rather than “top 10 places to visit” articles that all say the same five cities.
Drop your favorite spot, I’m genuinely taking notes.
Rail vacations are amazing for exploring. Here are my favorites:
- Kyushu region in Japan is incredible on rail. In particular the Aso volcano area and anything south-east of it. Almost no one is there - you can get the front car and see in front of the train almost every trip. Incredible, super cheap, super underrated.
- Taiwan has entire rail looping around it that you can do scenic 3 day journey and it’s incredible especially during autumn or spring.
- China has amazing routes but rail experience is pretty bad if you aren’t alone with noise canceling headphones (people are really loud on Chinese trains). Chengdu to Kunming is my favorite route
- Switzerland rail is still incredible despite being a bit packed and expensive but if you can afford it and find good timing it’s incredible though Swiss towns are kinda boring once wow factor wears of - once you’ve seen one you’ve seen all.
In general rail tourism is incredible. Really cheap and accessible these days!
The California Pacific Coast highway offers a ton of scenery. Half of it is the ocean, the other half is constantly changing terrain. I’ve gone south from San Francisco and would like to try north sometime. I’m a stargazer, so heading into Big Sur at night was a treat with such low light pollution, though winding cliffaide roads aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, especially at night. Still, it provides a wide array of cliffside features.
Acadia in Maine, USA is gorgeous, but hard to reach if having to fly there. Just something unique about the pines and topography.
If you have a day near Denver, Colorado, USA, then Pike’s Peak is an action-packed mountain experience. If you have a few days, I’d say Rocky Mountain National Park
Banff Canada is another wild mountainous area.
Influenced by Fairly Odd Parents, I saw no real reason to see the “big hole in the ground” called the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA. I was quite wrong as it’s tremendous. I even tried hiking down. I compared our wall color to what I could see across the valleys and realized we didn’t even make a dent in the descent. Hours were spent. Remember to plan to spend twice as much time ascending. It’s also a dark sky certified park and offers great stargazing from near the visitor center. The park doesn’t close, which makes sense, as it takes 12-24 hours to cross.
I’d revisit any of these if I was in the area. I mostly seek out new places though. Edit: these are all free/“low cost” at under $100 per visit for entry. I mean, it’s not like resort pricing. Obviously travel to the nearest city and potentially renting a car adds to the cost, but that’s variable to the visitor.
I gotta say, north from San Francisco is pretty amazing. I did a road trip years ago, we were in a hurry for this section, so took the I-5 rather than the coast road. That was a shame for the LA to SF section of the trip, but my god when we got north of SF… Driving through Shasta National Park was perhaps the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever witnessed.
At some point we passed a lake beach that was truly unreal, the vibrant greens of the pines, the red clay of the shore, and rich blue of the water, the color was so intense, so saturated, it was like an alien world in the best possible way.
When you look to the east, you can see Mount Shasta. Now, being from New England, up in the Appalachians, I thought I knew what a mountain was, I was wrong. Shasta loomed over the terrain, a solitary giant, with a perfect cone shaped lenticular cloud overhead. The scale was truly awe inspiring.
Note: I didn’t have to search for “lenticular cloud” to find that image, I just searched for “Mount Shasta”.
Should you make this drive, up toward Portland, don’t forget to stop in weed CA. It’s an old logging town, probably not a lot to see, but there’s a lovely, kitschy little diner, a great place to stop for lunch. The food was good, and you get the opportunity to pick up some merch like a shirt that says “I got high in weed CA”.
thank you bro ! adding all of these to my list, Curious though, how’s ur experience been as a stargazer in general, do you travel specifically for dark sky spots ??
I don’t actually do trips for astro. I take advantage of darker skies where and when I can, as weather and the moon can spoil a night. But when travel takes me somewhere with darker skies, I go out of my way to see them if conditions permit.
No idea how to assess my experience as a stargazer. I like it. I keep doing it. Few things are as surreal as seeing the milky way band stretch from horizon to horizon. It feels tangible. The sky feels like a solid dome when the skies are clear. Nothing is moving, there’s no frame of reference, and your eyes have no depth perception as they’re focused and parallaxed to infinity. The uncertainty about whether that’s a tiny cloud or a distant nebula fades as it just stays there, unmoving, unchanging, with an astronomical conclusion sinking in: that cloud is shifting faster than any human-made object, is larger than the sphere of human influence, is far older than the human species, and is further than we can ever travel by a factor of 10,000. And then it’s possible to find the Andromeda galaxy by eye. A distinct, fuzzy ghost hanging in the sky, always at exactly the same reference to nearby stars.
Lightpollutionmap.info is the site I use to evaluate light pollution and travel options. I’ll travel over an hour at night to get to “blue” skies (bortle class 2) from a hotel home base. It’s hard to go further, as this is all at night when I should be sleeping. I usually spend 2 hours at the destination with good conditions.
Cleardarksky.com has been what I use for sky conditions. Your regular weather forecast icon tells you about thick clouds and the details give you predicted wind and humidity. This site gives block ratings by the hour to predict when the regular clouds, the hanging vapor, the humidity, the wind, and a bit of inference about convective heat flows will allow good “seeing”. The smoke map is broken, unfortunately. If you’ve seen bright stars, particularly Sirius in the winter, twinkling, flickering, changing color, or even blinking out for a moment, that’s part of what would be bad seeing. It doesn’t mean I’ll pass on the trip, but it can be the difference between the Andromeda Galaxy being naked eye or not.
I use a phone app Sky Safari. It’s been the best UI and representation I’ve tested across a few apps. Good indication of sunlight as well, with full darkness being an hour or two after sunset depending on season/latitude. It’s a good way to find objects.
I bring a camera to try to frame nightscapes. I bring 10x50 binoculars as they are relatively cheap (for astro), lightweight (enough), have minimals setup, and are bright. They don’t have the zoom of a telescope, but they make up for it in ease of use and two-eye viewing.
Is that indicative of my experience with stargazing? I clearly love it
Definitely thought we were talking about Actual Budget the budgeting software 🤣
🤓
I was one administrative hurdle away from relocating my life to New Orleans.
As soon as you are away from burbon street there is such a beautiful rich exuberant culture that felt immediately comforting to me.
Honestly, India.
It has just an insanity and intensity to it that you won’t find anywhere else. The drawbacks are real, the filth and trash is on another level, the poverty can be emotionally paralyzing to witness, the food just spectacular, but first and foremost the nature and the pure adventure that you can still find in spite of the social mediafication and digitalization of everything.
I was there 25 years ago so before the forced digital enema that took over the world, and it was a once in a lifetime experience I deeply cherish to this day.
I went there last year again and while much of the mystery is lost because of the above, India is simply so massive and diverse that it still gives that culture shock arriving from a Western country.
I’ve been to rural India. The culture shock is wild. The emotional toll of seeing some of that poverty is truly upsetting. It’s hard to gauge what’s distinct poverty, what’s just a culture norm, and what’s a norm due to the poverty. I know some people home that act like safety is for pussies, yet they’re still way safer day to day than the things I saw in India with traffic, crossings, vehicle repair, construction, farming, cooking, smoking, and just the air quality alone. Social media may have keyed me into expectations for Delhi, but the rural areas were well outside what I expected to see. Now I recognize it all the time in various manufacturing or tool hack videos on socials.
Anything involving a queue is downright infuriating. Apparently that’s a general Asian thing, or at least the places where western countries exploit low manufacturing cost. I don’t know the rules and don’t want to start a fight by accident so I just do my best to maintain progress through the “line”
Home.
Explore your home area as if you’re a tourist and you’d be surprised the things you find to do that you’d never thought of before.
Most of us don’t explore our homes anywhere near enough because we’re busy working and then pushed to “get away” for a holiday.
So true, home is really underrated>
Zombie @feddit.uk Home.
Explore your home area as if you’re a tourist and you’d be surprised the things you find to do that you’d never thought of before.
Most of us don’t explore our homes anywhere near enough because we’re busy working and then pushed to “get away” for a holiday.
Sopot Poland. Beautiful oceanfront, cheap, and so many pierogi.
Also, one of the best times I’ve ever had on vacation was at a cruise stop in Ensenada. The trick was walking far enough from the port they expected pesos then hanging out at a bar where the workers all had face tattoos. Very cool blokes and we might have found a local ski resort too; iykyk.
got me for a sec lmao. snow? in Mexico? huuuuh??? me gusta lavada tambien ;)
have you heard the new sublime song?
I didn’t even know existed. I dug it. What a trip down memory lane.
My local library. I hadn’t been to a library since I was in school, over 10 years ago now. Went recently with a friend to try 3D printing and was surprised how many services were offered entirely for free.
About 20 miles north of NYC there are cheap hotels, hilly county roads through small towns, nice hikes (paved or natural), bookstores, distilleries, old cemeteries, etc.
South Padre Island in Texas. During tourist season it’s packed, but much of the year you can have the beach mostly to yourself.
The beach, costs nothing for me to visit.
Some decent publicly accessible woodland closer to home could be nice.
Basically any of the trails in the Municipality of Anchorage, Chugach State Park, or Mat-Su valley in Alaska.
I really enjoyed caye caulker in Belize. Super chill island vibe, low cost, great food and scuba diving.
