Seriously weird attractions to startle even the most jaded

By JIM EAGLES, travel editor

Why do people travel? Lots of reasons, of course, but I've always thought one of the main drivers was a desire to amaze the folk back home. Unfortunately, that's getting a lot harder. Cheap air fares mean almost anyone can tell tales of lazing on golden sands or playing golf under the palm trees.

Displaying Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton handbags from Paris is rather less impressive when you can buy the same things in Queen St. And talking nonchalantly about seeing lions in Kenya or Buddhist monks in Tibet doesn't have quite the same effect when the stay-at-home neighbours were watching them on television the night before.

As a result travel agents find more people are looking for really weird tourist attractions able to excite even the most jaded friends and relations.

Shane Parlato, marketing manager for Flight Centre, the country's biggest travel retailer, says there is definitely heightened interest in offbeat destinations. "People love to be surprised and learn something new when they travel," he says. "They also love to have a great story to tell their friends when they get home."

I think the strangest tourist attraction I have seen is the preserved, 1000-year-old, right hand of King Stephen I, warrior founder of Hungary, which is kept in a chapel at the rear of the magnificent Basilica of St Stephen in Budapest.

I think what heightened the strangeness was the fact that you have to put 100 florint into a slot to turn on a light so you can briefly see the miraculous hand in its golden casket. I was also acutely aware that while I was there to gawk I was surrounded by Hungarians who were venerating an important relic of their national history.

But, strange though it seemed to me, the saint's hand doesn't make it on a list of Top 10 Strangest Tourist Attractions selected by Flight Centre travel agents from places they have visited over the years.

Top of their list is a tour of San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia, where visitors are led through the prison by the inmates, a collection of some of the country's dodgiest crims, including drug dealers, terrorists and rapists (rather begging the question: do you pay to get in or to get out?).

Second is Carhenge, in Nebraska, US, a collection of rusty old cars in the middle of a cornfield, forming a sort of car wreckers' Stonehenge.

Third spot, according to Flight Centre's travel agents, goes to the Museo de las Momias, in Guanajuato, Mexico, which contains 122 mummies.

Fourth place goes to the 800-year-old Potosi Silver Mines, in Bolivia, where the special attraction is that tourists can buy dynamite and blow up the side of a hill.

Others on the list are:

* The Hair Museum, in Avanos, Turkey, with its collection of 16,000 samples of hair from women around the world.

* Frankfurt's Red Light Towers, 20 so-called Eros Towers situated near the city's central station, each a five-storey brothel filled with hookers.

* A tour of the historic sewers of Paris.

* Kutna Hora's Ossuary (or Bone Church) in the Czech Republic. It is located in a graveyard of the Church of All Saints and decorated with the bones of 40,000 people, many of whom died from the plague, and features a chandelier made with every bone of the human body.

* The Vegetarian Festival, in the tourist town of Phuket, Thailand, where every September and October devout Buddhist Chinese undertake a strict vegetarian diet and perform a number of amazing feats, such as climbing ladders made from knives and piercing their faces with hooks, skewers and various other sharp objects.

* Finally the travel agents list all the Big Things in Australia - the Big Pineapple, the Big Shrimp, the Big Banana, the Big Merino, and so on - to which we could perhaps add our own giant L&P bottle, carrot, trout, sheep dog, kiwifruit, etc.

It is easy to imagine the relations getting satisfyingly big-eyed as you tell how a mass murderer showed you round his prison. Or how you planted the dynamite, pushed the plunger and blew up the silver mine.

But is that really as amazing as it gets?

If there are bucks to be made out of the bizarre I'm sure there are plenty of entrepreneurs around the world coming up with even stranger stuff with which to astound the tourists and impress their neighbours.

I'd be interested to hear from readers of any weird tourist attractions you've come across that aren't on the Flight Centre the list. Just send the details to travel@nzherald.co.nz and we'll really astound those armchair travellers.