Spam in your inbox is one thing you can do without. Forwarded e-mails are another source of annoyance, especially the preachy kind that ask you to ‘forward' the forward to 10 more people. All it takes is a click of the ‘delete' button to rid you of the contents before you can think twice.
Well, that's what my friends and siblings do, but not I. After the first exasperated sigh there is always that uneasy feeling that I may forever miss out on something wonderful. So no e-mail gets expunged unless I have read it and I have rarely regretted my curiosity getting the better of me.
How many countries have you visited? How many of the mandatory tourist sights have you seen? Have you ventured into lesser known places that give you a feel of the city or country or its people, only to return home and discover you've missed some extraordinary experience simply because you had neither heard nor read about it?
This is where my forwards come in — they give me an edge when I travel, the feeling of having gone where not many have been before.
In spite of having friends and relatives in the UAE I have only been here once, deferring a second visit to some vague time in the future. If you've been on the desert safari and shopped at the gold souqs and Dubai Duty Free, what else is there left? Or so I thought.
Then a forwarded e-mail introduced me to Al Ain Paradise, which holds the Guinness record for the largest number of hanging flower baskets and is a riot of unimaginable, amazing colour.
I asked a relative if she had heard of the place; she hadn't, but now plans to visit it soon. Similar is the case with Montreal Gardens with its unbelievable topiary of birds, animals and monuments, using variously coloured greenery and foliage for physical detail. A friend who's lived in Montreal for more than three decades thought it was probably a temporary annual outdoor garden called the ‘Floralies'. She had never been there but will this year.
Who has heard of a Venice in the Netherlands? A village without a single road where all transportation is only by boat? I had visited the Netherlands several times before this forward landed in my inbox, but never seen such a place. A niece living there did a search of this vividly picturesque village, Giethoorn, to the east of Amsterdan and The Hague. She feels it may be worth a visit now that she's heard of it.
If you are a dedicated foodie don't miss the Waldgeist Restaurant in Germany's Hofheim, 17 kilometres west of Frankfurt (to think I was in Frankfurt and unaware of this place!), where beer is served in half to two-litre steins, a steak or a sausage weighs 600 grams, and burgers are only 12 inches wide!
Wonderful experience
Last month, some friends toured China, but my itinerary must include a trip on the Beijing-Lhasa railway stretching 1,956 km mostly across permafrost, the world's highest rail track at 13,500 feet above sea level.
The train is pressurised like an aeroplane to insulate you against the average minus 45 degrees Celsius temperature; the elevated track, constructed on pillars so as not to affect the migratory lifestyle of the region's wildlife, offers breathtaking views of endangered animals, whitest mountains and glaciers and bluest lakes.
Rather belatedly, one realises there are not-to-be-missed places in one's own country. For instance, who says that the London and Paris wax museums are the ultimate in wax magic?
The Siddhagiri Museum outside Kolhapur in the Indian state of Maharashtra depicts wax scenes of bucolic life — farmers ploughing fields, women drawing water from the village well, grinding corn, and other vignettes of daily life such as the village market, stonecutters and weavers and goldsmiths at work, the village physician, the anxious mother having her child's horoscope read by the village priest — every scene so true to life in its costumes and expressiveness of feature.
North-eastern India is no stranger to me for my mother hails from the state of Meghalaya, where the town of Cherapunji holds the record for the world's wettest place. I have walked inside the many natural caves dotting the area, but nobody told me about the 500-year-old root bridges used daily by the locals. These are betelnut tree trunks hollowed out and spanned across rivers, which become living bridges within 10-15 years as they take root on the other side. Few have heard of Kodinhi, a village in Kerala, packed with 220 sets of twins born to just 2,000 families, almost six times the global average in twin births. The phenomenon, started three generations ago, has mystified doctors because despite the localised nature of the village, the twins, a majority of them identical, are mostly without genetic defects. Can there be an answer here to the prayers of infertile couples around the world?
Constraints of space prevent me from enumerating a few other places in America and Asia that I would love to see, of which you have probably not heard, because you have not conserved your forwarded e-mails as I have!
Vimala Madon is a freelance journalist based in Secunderabad, India.
