Colors 49: Tours

Next to sex and drugs, tourism is the biggest industry in the world. So for COLORS 49 we decided to by-pass the travel agencies and guide books and send out our correspondents to come up with some of the oddest, funniest, saddest, most tasteless, sexiest, rudest, most poignant, ridiculous, politically correct and incorrect tours and tourist destinations in their own countries.

They followed the footsteps of the late Princess Diana around London and learn how she was mistreated by the British Royal Family, queued for hours for a view of ground zero (the post September 11th site of the World Trade Center) in New York and hunted sharks in Dangerous Passage off the coast of South Australia. Unsurprisingly, the other two biggest industries feature heavily in the off-beat world tourism agenda: from the only museum dedicated to male genitalia in Iceland and package deals to find a female soul mate in Russia to learning the tricks of the trade of heroin smuggling at the Police Museum in Hong Kong.

Along the way we meet some people who make their living off the curiosity of others. Carlos Roquette - a former history teacher and lawyer has devised no less than 5,927 personalized tours around Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. His knowledge is staggering and ranges from the cultural (Rio Architecture of the second half of the Getulio Vargas Era Carlos Roquette) to the more practical: Flirting in Rio Movie Theaters with Carlos Roquette and Dating Someone Who is a Drag Queen in Rio (also with Carlos Roquette).

As world tourism becomes increasingly more generic (there are now health resorts in Austria offering traditional Indian medicine and you can take a gondola ride in Japan), we offer the jaded traveler a unique view of the world that most tour operators leave out.

COLORS 49. Tours. On Sale March 30th, 2002

 

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