Partner and I argue over places to vacation and places to retire. Partner likes warmth and comfort (Key West, Palm Springs, the south of France); I like oddball places (Timbuktu, Nouakchott, Ouagadougou).
Where will we end up? I’m sure we’ll compromise. But in the meantime, here (from the Huffington Post’s travel section) is a list of the worst places to go. And how to get there. (I’m sort of relieved that my three destinations of choice above aren’t among them.)
Goodbye, Harare, Kinshasa, Port Moresby, Mogadishu.
But I have been to places like El Jadida, and Sliema, and Sfax. None sounded very promising. All of them were very nice. Cheap, too, actually.
Sometimes you want a vacation a la Disney, with no problems and everything taken care of, nicey-nice.
Sometimes you want something interesting.
I still want to see Nouakchott and Timbuktu. A friend of mine in Tunisia said Nouakchott was the worst place she’d ever been. Someone else said the same of Timbuktu.
Listen: I spent a couple of days in Settat, Morocco, back in the 1980s, during my Peace Corps training. They sent me there just to see if I could handle it. I handled it just fine. The hotel doors didn’t have locks, so I just piled a bunch of stuff against the door. And the café down the street had something called “ckae” on the menu; it was supposed to be “cake,” but evidently no one noticed the error.
And I still had a good time.
Of course, you have to worry about cholera and typhus and things like that.
But at least I was seeing the world.
And it was glorious.
So let’s go to Timbuktu! I can handle it.
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