The Travel & Leisure magazine yearly polls American travelers to discover the world’s top 10 destinations. Two were from Thailand. The criteria are good hotels, restaurants, sites, and people. Here are the 2006 results.
1. Florence - Honeymoon city for the middle-aged bus tourist.
2. Rome - Pretend you’re in a gladiator movie and search for the perfect pasta
3. Bangkok – Drink cheap beer with go-go girls. Does it get any better than that. Who cares about temples and shopping?
4. Sydney - beer and barbie
5. Chiang Mai – Let’s smoke opium
6. Cape Town – Great beaches exciting crime scene.
7. Buenes Aires – Tango? Is that all there is?
8. New York - See the hole where the World Trade Towers were
9. Beirut - Watch the Israelis strategically bomb innocent civilians with surgical precision and go to Hezbollah strip clubs. The girls take off their face veils.
10. San Francisco – Where every woman thinks a single male is gay.
Destinations change from time to time
In the 60s hippies went to Kabul, Kathmandu, and Kuta.
War has stopped travel to the first two and the third has been overrun with Aussies.
My new list has been complied from a different set of parameters from Travel and Leisure.
1. Pattaya – The last babylon on the Costa del Crime
2. Phnom Penh – 1960 atmosphere with seedy bars.
3. Paris – French women are so classy
4. Palm Beach – Nice being the youngest man on the beach and there’s nothing wrong with being a gigolo with an 80 year-old heiress, if she only has a month to live.
5. Butte Montana – great bars, great stories from miners, cowboys, and derelicts with the world’s largest toxic pool getting ready to overflow into the Missouri River.
6. LA – the 21st Century’s New York as long as you don’t have to drive on a freeway.
7. Portland Maine – It’s my hometown and has great lobstah.
8. Luang Prabang – Jungle Shangril-lah with black opium and good French food.
9. Marraskesh – If you smoke enough hash you won’t notice the creeps hassling your girlfriend.
10. Antigua, Guatemala – Hey, this old colonial city was made for drinking tequila and remaking a real life version of UNDER THE VOLCANO.