Frommer's 500 Places to See Before They Disappear

The best thing about this book is that it has places for everybody. No matter if you want adventure, natural landscapes, or art and architecture in a big city, you will find your perfect destination here. And apart of an accurate description and wonderful pictures, every place has information for travelling, hotels, telephone numbers, internet links... I'd highly recommend this book, it has a wonderful combination between places you will know (or you will have heard about) and more obscure places you'll wish you had known about before!

This is the perfect holiday gift for yourself or anyone you care about who travels or just dreams of traveling. The selected destinations will whet the appetites of globetrotters and arm-chair travelers alike. The author, Ms. Holly Hughes, offers us great reasons to visit these 500 endangered places while raising our awareness of what we can all do to help prevent their demise. Everything is indexed & 'how-to' guidelines for visiting are especially helpful. From kitsch to petroglyphs, this book is a must-have addition to anyone's travel library.Frommers 500 Places to See Before They Disappear (500 Places)

I only picked up this book a little while ago and have just browsed through it but even with just doing that, all my future travel plans that I thought were firmly cemented in my mind have been uprooted or at least now in question. The author has a done an excellent and in depth job of uncovering places to see that most of us would never have been able to find let alone just think of. I think once I read this book cover to cover I will replanning the rest of my life.

I found this book to be really insightful regarding some of the places we should try to see before they are gone. The author does a great job recommending some of the places to get to. Really interesting. Highly recommend for those looking for ideas to make the list of things to do.

As an editor at Frommer's travel guides, I have one big regret: that Hurricane Katrina beat me to New Orleans. It's sad and even a little embarrassing that I canceled plans to go not once but twice before it was too late. I'll always have the zydeco and jazz records that made me want to visit so badly, but the city as it was will remain a void in my experience. It's irreplaceable. 500 Places to See Before They Disappear is, like the jacket says, a "celebration of the world's most fragile wonders." It's also an inspiring memorial to treasures like New Orleans, sunken so suddenly and unpredictably that a book probably couldn't have saved it. But imagine knowing that outsiders and ordinary citizens could have done more to keep the levees from breaking: Would we have stayed home? Or would more of us have visited sooner rather than later, fallen in love, and rallied to do all we could to preserve a city unlike any other in the world? In its memory, will we let other singular places go? This book will leave you asking these questions not just about New Orleans--championed in the "Cityscapes in Peril" section--but also about Venice, the old Jewish ghetto in Budapest, the hutong neighborhoods of Beijing, the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the wild white horses of the Camargue, and hundreds of other rare towns, landscapes, monuments, and habitats with uncertain futures in the face of environmental and human threats. We read of imperiled species, wilderness areas, and cultural relics every day in the news, we see them on the Travel Channel, or we live near them and lobby for their protection. This book gathers a worldwide range of the neediest or most extraordinary sites under one cover. The reviews are richly evocative but pithy; you can savor them piecemeal, allowing them to sink into your daily awareness, making the news stories about each one a little more resonant--not as good as being there, but good enough to inspire a trip and maybe even a commitment to help keep a special place out of harm's way. --Maureen Clarke, senior editor, Frommer's