Top Ten Places You Didn't Know You Wanted to Go

Igreja Peniche, Ilha de Peniche, Portugal
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One of the best parts of traveling (besides, of course, playing the “let's compare passport stamps” game) is getting to clue people into great places around the world that they've never heard of. It's nice to tell people, “Yeah, London's great,” or “Yup, the Eiffel Tower sure is tall,” but it's not as satisfying as being able to suggest new, original, and exciting places that someone may want to go to. It's cool to be able to introduce someone to an unheard-of and potentially rewarding destination.

Bomas at Sol y Luna Resort, Urubamba Valley, Peru
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So when the good people at RealTravel asked me to come up with another Top Ten list, I thought to myself that I should write the ten best places I had never heard of, in hopes of rewarding everyone who slogged through my travel log for the last twelve months. Incidentally, if you've made it through all 120 entries, I owe you a drink, and don't be ashamed to call me out on it. Thanks a lot. The following is a compilation of the best places whose existence—or at least whose wonders—were wholly unknown to me until I actually got there.

Sunset in Shark Bay, Western Australia
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Honorable Mention:

Bocas del Toro, Panama

San Martin de los Andes, Argentina

Swakopmund, Namibia

The Furkapass, Andermatt, Switzerland
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Tortuguero, Costa Rica

Stavros tis Psokas, Cyprus

10) Ilha de Peniche, Portugal

Ilha de Peniche (“Island of Peniche,” apparently) sits off the coast of Peniche, Portugal in the Berlengas Archipelago, mostly uninhabited, mostly pristine, and mostly very, very pleasant. When I went there, I had no expectations at all. What I got were windswept rocks, sea gulls, small cottages on hills, tiny bed-and-breakfasts, and a feeling of Scotland-meets-Cape Cod. Walking around the island took all of five minutes, but in that time, I saw weatherbeaten boats captained by weatherbeaten men, a little white church that belonged on a Greek isle, and oddly-shaped, jagged, angular rocks sticking out of the sea like giant pieces of pool table slate. After feeling a bit church- and museum-weary, Ilha de Peniche—like the rocks that surround it—jutted out prominently and captured my attention.

Chefchaouen, Morocco
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9)  Urubamba Valley, Peru

I'm not going to lie: Peru—or at least the parts of it I saw—is comparatively well-traveled. There's decent sushi in Lima, there are tour buses at every rest stop and architectural site, and there are westernized buffets and bottles of water available at nearly every turn. So when I include the Urubamba Valley in this list of places you should be attuned to, it is by no means my most carefully guarded hideaway destination.

The thing about the Urubamba Valley, however, is that as it stretches towards Machu Picchu and the McArchaeology that it invites, it is in itself overlooked. My mother and I stayed at the Sol y Luna resort there, which sits considerably lower in elevation than Cusco or Machu Picchu, and thus offers fresh and thick oxygenated air. Perhaps there were caravans of tour buses in the town of Urubamba and the markets of Ullantaytambo, but looking out at the valley from Sol y Luna, you could really feel like you had the place to yourself. I suppose there are two types of valleys; the kind that swallows you up and makes you feel snug and the kind that stretches for miles and makes you feel small. Urubamba is very clearly the latter, and the crisp air and the blue of the late sunset makes you acutely aware that the sky is much, much bigger than you are.

Bridal Veil Falls, Treetops Resort, Rotorua, New Zealand
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8)  Shark Bay, Western Australia

There are few things simpler in this world than Shark Bay, Western Australia. Vanilla yogurt, for example, is many times more complicated. So is kindergarten math, Hop on Pop, and Jessica Simpson. Shark Bay is nothing but unspoiled beach, warm water, and friendly, friendly people. There are six hundred residents of Denham, the most westerly town in all of Australia, and each one of them will wave to you as you walk down the only real street for miles. The local fish n' chip shop has a menu that features three items: fish, chips, or Fish n' Chips. The waters of Shark Bay, pacified by the gently scalloped coastline, will reflect boats, the setting sun, and just about anything else almost perfectly on a clear day, and as a result, I got the best picture of my entire Watson Fellowship out of it.

Petra, Jordan
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But Shark Bay is also exciting, if for no other reason than there is nothing else for miles around. Things like midnight trips to a hot springs (whose location is top-secret, according to the owner of the local backpackers) are cause for celebration, as are fishing trips down the coast, the building of a barbecue, or even an impromptu kangaroo-hunting expedition ('roos are overpopulated in Western Australia, and locals are encouraged to hunt them). Shark Bay is at once extremely wild and yet quite tame, a place where dolphins will eat out of the palm of your hand and sharks can almost always be sighted off the coast. And it's about a ten-hour drive from Perth, the most remote city in the world, so you should have the place to yourself.

The Great Wall of China at Huanghua
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7)  The Furkapass, Andermatt, Switzerland

The Furkapass was an accident, at least for me and my father. In Switzerland, because of the switchbacks, steep cliffs, and huge mountain range, many mountains have trains that carry cars and people through mountains. Leave it to the Swiss to design trains you can drive on, and leave it to me and my dad to miss the signs for those trains and take the road up the mountain instead.

It was about 75 degrees and sunny at the base of the mountain in the quaint, pollution-free, neurotically-pristine Swiss town of Andermatt, and by the time we negotiated the hundreds of curves and climbed the thousands of feet to the summit of the mountain, we had literally driven into a snowcloud. It was to the point where my father was gripping his armrest, and I could barely see the hood ornament of our rental car. This was a perfect example of “it's a whole lot funnier in hindsight.”

Overlooking Brasov, Transylvania, Romania
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But somehow we got back down, and our car-train misstep only ended up costing us an hour or so. The Furkapass, however, will always be a cherished instance where the journey was better than the destination (in this case, Zurich) and the road less traveled—while potentially deadly—was infinitely more fun than “the way.”

6)  Chefchaouen, Morocco

Chefchaouen is a funny place, nestled in the Rif Mountains between Spanish northern Morocco and French-speaking southern. In a land that shuns bars, hostels, and virtually anywhere else that might be socially inspiring for travelers, backpackers seem to just meet one another in this town. Whether it's sitting and having tea in the main square (2 dirhams, or about 30 cents), or bumping into Watson applicants at couscous huts, or scarfing delicious and unreasonably cheap sandwiches, travelers seem to find one another in Chefchaouen.

Granted, many of them are there for the hashish, which has created a high-pressure and rather annoying drug dealing market in town, but even that makes one feel like Ali Baba. Without the hash, without the touts, and without the crowded, uneven streets, Chefchaouen wouldn't feel nearly as exotic and otherworldly as it is. It would be like Africa without wild animals, or Antarctica without the cold. Part of Morocco is the sales pitch, and sometimes it really is nice to walk down a street and have old women shouting about spices or swarthy men offering you clock radios with Australian flag stickers on them from underneath their jacket. Chefchaouen felt like the kind of place I could go back to in twenty years and be disappointed at how modernized it had become. I got there before that happened, rather than after, and as a result, I feel I got the full experience.

5)  Znojmo, Moravia, Czech Republic

The Czech Republic is a land that has retained its beauty—both natural and man-made—in the face of a long and difficult political history. Znojmo (pronounced ZNOY-mo), which rests on Moravia's southern border with Austria, features the rolling hills and wineries of Napa or Stellenbosch, centuries-old cellars handed down through generations like Italy, and the Eastern European Old World exoticism that makes things just a touch more authentic.

In Znojmo, my study abroad group was taken on a tour of the winery, given a tasting by a vineyard owner, and served an incredible dinner in a cavernous, six hundred year-old cellar with dusty bottles, bare light bulbs, and live ethnic music all crowded fifty feet below the fertile soil. The friendliness and the commitment to our enjoyment that our Znojmo winery host showed us was, I would say, almost unparalleled anywhere else in the world. And it wasn't because he wanted to tap into the global market—the bottle of red that I bought from him didn't even have a label on it, just a sheet metal tag with a date and batch number—but because hospitality in the Czech countryside, apparently, comes before all else.

4)  Bridal Veil Falls, Rotorua, New Zealand

Treetops (www.treetops.co.nz) should be among the Seven Man-Made Wonders of the World. It is not a hotel but an experience, a lodge and villas atop a hill overlooking 2,000 acres of untouched Kiwi wilderness, with the finest of everything (and the most pressurized of showers) available in conjunction with complete unspoiled nature. When the owner of Treetops bought the tract of land outside Rotorua, he had no idea that it included a series of waterfalls. Neither did the people who sold him the land, incidentally. It was only after the buyer had been hiking his property for years that he stumbled upon this cascade, and a bit after that, a trail was set up for guests to make the same discovery.

I think all it took was a hint that my mother and I might potentially want to go on a hike before the hotel manager had set us up with a backpack, a picnic lunch, a map, a flashlight, and an emergency radio. He ushered us out the door and along the two-hour trail almost before we had a chance to finish our perfectly scrambled eggs, and a few hours later, after negotiating the lush, verdant, and altogether unthreatening New Zealand wilderness, my mother and I were craning our necks upwards to see the whole waterfall. The notion that things like this could still be discovered in the modern era of property valuations and real estate fluctuation makes the Bridal Veil Falls all the more impressive. The shower and bottle of icy-cold spring water that follows the hike makes the whole thing more enjoyable.

3)  Petra, Jordan

Plenty of people have seen Petra. In fact, if you've ever watched “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you have too, you just don't know it. It's those immense temples carved into the red cliffs of a desert canyon that Indiana races through. What makes Petra special is that they could film it, put it on postcards all throughout Jordan, talk it up, and advertise tours, and most of the world still doesn't know that it's real. Walking through the canyons to the site itself is an otherwordly experience, and the first glimpse of the main palace through the rock faces fills you with an involuntary excitement, no matter how many other spectacular wonders you've seen in your life.

Petra itself, while catering to tourists, is still very much a local attraction. And by attraction I mean “home.” Bedouins actually live inside some of the more modest carvings, hudding around campfires and riding their donkeys and camels as they have for years. They seemed to regard me, with my fleece and my digital camera, as a rabbit or a pack mule, just another moving object to be aware of in the desert. There was very little of the usual “Buy postcard for send?” and “Coca? Coca light? Sprite?” that a lot of “exotic” destinations seem to have these days, and I was grateful for it. I gladly paid my qoffiyah-wearing camel guide for the dubious honor of riding around on his monstrous mucus-factory, and the part that I like best about the picture I have of myself there is that unlike Machu Picchu or the Great Wall of China at Badaling, I didn't have to crop out other people.

2)  Huanghua, China

The Great Wall of China, or at least the one most people go to, is a bust. Sorry, but it is. The main site outside of Beijing at Badaling is a well-paved, well-explored, well-maintained, and poorly-preserved piece of Chinese history designed to get hefty American businessmen to marvel at how well the wall has been maintained and at the same time, give them the opportunity to purchase “I Climbed the Great Wall” t-shirts.

Two hours outside of Beijing, however, in the tiny town of Huangua, the Great Wall lies in ruin, crumbling under the weight of thousands of years of history. It is overgrown with weeds, the turrets are shadows of their former majesty, and you're much more likely to run into some runaway chickens or the occasional donkey than you are to see another camera-toting tourist. To access the Huanghua section of the Great Wall involves a little bit of acrobatics by ducking under and around a gate, but we were assured that the section is in fact open and perfectly legal. Legality aside, it was about a thousand times better than Badaling, and having a picnic lunch inside a thousand year-old fortification and getting to explore one of the greatest sites on Earth without having to share it with another living soul was truly one of the highlights of my traveling life.

1)  Brasov, Romania

Much fuss is made about Dracula's castle, most of all that it actually exists and isn't a product of fiction. And to be fair, a lot of that fuss is warranted. Dracula's castle (or more accurately: Bran Castle of Vlad Tepes) really is a very cool thing to see, and a great afternoon if one happens to find oneself in Romania with not a lot to do. What really made that weekend special, though, was Brasov, Romania's second-largest city and a wonderfully preserved, under-the-radar location in the heart of Transylvania.

While only an hour and a half by train from the concrete and misery of Bucharest, Brasov is a world apart. The people are polite, friendly, and exceedingly helpful. I ate at the finest places that Brasov had to order and forked over about 250,000 Lei (about $8) for the experience. We're talking steaks, wine, salads, candles, and pianists here, on balconies and in courtyards, all for the price of a Starbucks mochachino and a muffin. It wasn't fair. I wanted to pay more. I couldn't possibly understand how places like Sirul Vami were turning a profit, but they were, and probably because of people like me who tipped like 75% out of guilt.

Accomodation in Brasov is pretty meager, and even the highest-end Hotel Aro leaves a lot to be desired. There isn't even really that much to do in Brasov except the Black Church, a hike to an overlook, and a little souvenir shopping (there's some Transylvanian pottery which is said to be among the best in the world, but my knowledge of comparative pottery isn't what it used to be), but the overall experience is one of amazement and general happiness. And with so few people knowing about it, it's my best unknown travel destination.