Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die

Having trouble choosing your next exciting destination? This book makes it simple with detailed photographs, helpful visa and immunization information, as well as a "best time to visit" section on each destination. My new favorite travel book.

I bought this book to get travel ideas. I was not disappointed. It includes several terrific places I've already planned to go to such as Guilin, China, Ngorongoro Crater, and Bangkok, Thailand as well as many beautiful places I had never known about before. Only three of the places are from the United States so it does a good job of depicting places from every continent except the south pole. The photos, for the most part, are good but not great. The author's explanation for that was that he wanted to use photographs that would accurately show how you would see the place if you go as a tourist, rather than show amazing photographs with beautiful sunsets that only happen once in a while. On the plus side it has multiple photos of each place as well as a six to eight page description of each place. Another very good book is "Heaven on Earth: 100 Places to See in Your Lifetime." The descriptions in that book are very short, but the photos are better. There's not that much overlap since only about 15 places are in both books.

I liked this layout. Great photos with 3 or 4 pages on each site. Just enough information to see if you really want to travel there. The best news was I have visted 8 of the 40 sites the author lists. This is good bet if you ever wanted a list to mark off of great places to go see, this is starting point.