Tourist Attractions

The Great Barrier Reef is a tourist attraction. So is the Great Wall of China.  Suborbital flight courtesy of Mr Branson is something I'll save my whole life for and, if someone comes up with a way to give my wife and I a romantic weekend on the moon, we might consider selling off one of the kids. A tourist attraction is something that you'll go out of your way and potentially mortgage a relative to experience.  Put a few attractions together and you've got a tourist destination.

Now let's talk about what is not a tourist attraction.

Your bizarre hobby or lifetime obsession. Sure, if it does something for you, spend your life putting together the world's largest collection of historical spy cameras or novelty gear stick nobs but you're not getting $40 out of me to see them. You wanted them, you pay for them.  I'm not helping you get out of trouble with your wife.

What your town used to be.  Museums stuffed full of rusting mining equipment,  old photographs of long dead sporting teams or the one fossil ever found locally, padded out with piss-poor reconstructions of the dig and generic information about prehistoric animals generally are not tourist attractions.  If the only adjective you can find to put on your town signs is 'historic' then the place has had it and the only money coming in is the pension,  then it's time to shut up shop and let the tumbleweeds take over. The tourists aren't going to save you.

Arts and crafts markets. Everyone has one of those. They are all supposed to be faint echoes of imaginary kasbahs ( or something like that) on the Silk Road at which rare and unique cultural artifacts were discovered. In reality they are all exactly the same.  People who've taken four pottery lessons trying to foist their mugs on eponymoys customers, drifting around in a fog of market-hippiedom, local gardeners flogging highly suspicious tomato plants, craft stalls selling car key hooks in the shape of "Welcome", those bizarre crocheted tea-towel things that button over and are never in the right place when you need them because you wash your hands at the sink, not next to the oven and bloody dream-catchers, and, increasingly, packed stalls full of clothing that seems genuinely rasta until you look up close, read the label and realise it was indeed handmade - by slave labour in Bangladesh.

Streets full of olde worlde shoppes selling hand made lollies, over priced woodwork and 'collectibles' - which is another way of saying "any old rubbish - usually stuff that's been rejected by real antique dealers'. We all love the fantasy of village life - living in some perfect little place in the mountains where the air is clear, the vicar is friendly and the lovely old spinster lady with the rose garden is a part time expert in solving gruesome murders while she knits. And we all know that it's about as economically feasible as  Shyamalan's "The Village". I loved the Brigadoon feeling I got from the first one of those I visited but now the countryside is littered with these middle class communes and they only hold appeal for the terminally bored. And could someone please tell the local artist that three shades of blue inexpertly daubed on canvas and framed is not worth $300, no matter how Bohemian they felt while doing it.

In the end you need a wow factor if you want people to make a pilgrimage to your door otherwise it's just flies to ...

Goodness me,  is that the time?

Note: 'mug' is an Australian slang term for a fool or a gullible person.