Earth is home to too many wondrous sights to experience in a single lifetime. Of course, our awesome planet is also home to some really crap destinations, too. Even some of those sights and places that have been built in the cultural zeitgeist to be show-stopping are well and truly disappointing. The Mona Lisa is underwhelming, the Sistine Chapel is too dark, and Mount Rushmore is tiny. Also, all but like three rooms of the Tate Modern are totally missable. For those of us with limited travel time and even more limited travel resources, it’s important to know which of these destinations is truly worth visiting, and which can be missed. Thankfully, a legion of honest redditors have done their homework and reported in. Here, for your consideration, are some of reddit’s most hated destinations.
1. Singapore’s Sentosa Beach Is Like a Bad Sci-Fi Novel
magnora4: “Sentosa beach in Singapore. So messed up. It’s all fancy and hyper-developed and connected to one of the largest malls on earth (Vivo Mall), but you get to the beach via monorail and you get to the little sand that’s not built up in to stores… and then you look out to the ocean and all you see is oil tankers and factories spewing smoke on the horizon. It was like some sort of futuristic dystopia.”
2. Daytona Beach Is for Crab Lovers
danecdote: Daytona Beach, Fl. Friends somehow convinced me to go a few years ago. Never again will I enter that city of my own free will. It looked like a diseased husk of its former tourist trap self; foreclosed and/or sh-tty buildings abound. There is literally nothing to do there, aside from going to the sh-tty, dilapidated beach and eating at Joe’s Crab Shack.
3. Belarus: For Travelers Who Want to Feel Like the Enemy Agent in a Foreign Land
“English guy here, Belarus. I’ve never felt so unwelcome. The police follow you everywhere, my Passport was being checked constantly. I just felt like I was being watched where ever I went.” The sentiment was echoed by several travelers.
4. Cairo Is a Hot, Chaotic Mess
Broes: Egypt, Cairo, the pyramids … Was on my bucket list and really wanted to see it. The city is extremely dirty, garbage everywhere, the smell… Traffic is chaos. The pyramids could be seen from the pizzahut, so close its impossible to imagine them away from the city. At the pyramids themself you are constantly harassed by Egyptians trying to sell you stuff up to the point where you feel the need to start hitting them to get away from you. If you make a picture at the pyramids with an egyptian on it, they directly demand money. Left after just 15-20 minutes, couldn’t stand it any longer.
5. Only Go to Jamaica if You’re Ready to Tip Big
aussydog: Jamaica. Most people are friendly but the vast majority expect exorbitant “tips” for doing next to nothing at all. If you denied them a tip they immediate treated you like sh-t. If you did tip a reasonable amount they treated you like sh-t. Often would look at the cash they were handed as if to say “that’s it?”
6. Dubai Is for Shoppers
vtron: Dubai. Overpriced, fake, completely lacking in culture. Took an open top buss tour to see the city (it’s sprawling) and every other sightseeing stop was a f-cking mall. I can go to some sh-tty mall at home.
7. Just Because Bogie Was Trapped in Casablanca Doesn’t Mean You Need to Be, As Well
Matthattan: Casablanca. The least-interesting place in a fascinating country. Really, Casablanca is just a dumpy business district on the coast. Other than one obscenely expensive mosque that the previous king had built, there’s really nothing to see. But the rest of Morocco? As beautiful a place as I’ve seen. Fez, the green highlands in the north, Essaouira, the High Atlas, Marrakesh … all gorgeous.
8. Gibraltar Really Is Just a Rock
Noneerror: Gibraltar. It really is just a big rock and not the country it technically claims to be. The hotel sucked. A car had washed up into the swimming pool. That was despite a very clear sign that you weren’t supposed to throw your car off a cliff into the ocean. The food was disgusting and I wasn’t the only one who refused to eat it. Everyone who decided to eat it anyway got sick. I also got peed on by a monkey … You can see everything Gibraltar has to offer in a few hours. We were stuck there for a week. Then we got stuck there after we were supposed to leave due to bad weather. Thick fog meant we spent 18 hours waiting in the airport while periodically watching our plane attempt to land and abort each time. Each time it almost crashing horribly in a new way that would have blocked the only road out of Gibraltar. The runway and the road are the same bit of asphalt.
9. Azerbaijan Means Fun With Crooked Cops
buckdiddy: Azerbaijan. Almost every step of the way we were met with crooked cops trying to get insane amounts of money out of us. They tried to hold our car documents hostage until we paid but I just decided to lay on my thickest Masshole until he got tired of me yelling. We finally met a good cop who drove us through all of the speed traps after we gave him some American cigarettes. The citizens of Azerbaijan are really nice though.
10. The Leaning Tower of Pisa Is Teeny
happypants69: No one has said the Leaning Tower of Pisa yet? It is so tiny compared to what you would have expected from pictures. The buildings around it, are a lot nicer. It is overall very lame.
11. Stonehenge Looks Cooler in the Pictures
“Stonehenge. I guess it’s alright, as far as Henges go. But it’s smaller than you think, you can’t get close to it and it’s f**kin hours from London (which wouldn’t matter if it was worth it).”
12. The Best of Pompeii Has Already Been Taken
Ecuadorable: “Pompeii is lame and very crowded with tourists. All of the great mosaics have been taken by museums. If you want to go somewhere much better preserved, much more interesting, and way less crowded, check out the nearby ruins of Herculaneum.”
13. Told You Mount Rushmore Sucked
ratbastid: Mount Rushmore. All your life as a young american you see these majestic pictures of it, you know? It’s this huge thing that symbolizes and represents so much. You drive up into the South Dakota mountains to see it, come to this enormous visitor’s center, then the “viewing deck” is outside, you look up, and way in the distance is this tiny set of heads. It’s hard to say if it’s much smaller than the photos make it seem, or if the viewing deck is an absurdly long distance away, but the impression is vastly underwhelming. Now, driving through the Black Hills later that day was really something. Gorgeous and desolate and amazing.
14. Come and Enjoy Papua New Guinea’s Scenic Barbed Wire
mashup: Papua New Guinea. The capital, Port Moresby was just not that nice of a city. There were barbed wire fences around nearly every building. Lots of poverty. I was told by my local guide that there were quite a few areas he wouldnt even venture to. And because of that, I didn’t get to experience much of the area at all (was a work trip anyways). Burning trash everywhere… Of course, to really be disappointed, you have to have expectations of something better. Which I guess I didn’t.
15. Thankfully There’s More to England Than Blackpool
MysticWrongFish: Blackpool, England. I went there for work, and it’s always been spoken of as a lovely seaside town, with the illuminations being an incredible spectacle. The town was sh-t, it was dirty, full of chavs binge drinking on the streets, I got shouted at several times because I had long hair and piercings. I went into a newsagents to buy a little bit of food, and it was, no word of a lie, 90% alcohol. Including test tube shots at the counter. 2/10 would not return to that hole. Ever.
