Must-see Sights of the 21st Century
Eiffel Tower? Check. Colosseum? Done that. The old standbys are still great. But here are 25 surprising new destinations to put on your bucket list
SOME HUMANS ARE CONTENT WITH A life well lived. Most of us, however, want hard evidence: the vacation photos, the souvenirs, the Hall of Fame plaque with the lifetime stats. Phoebe Snetsinger had her life list. That’s what birders call the summation of their years of devotion. Snetsinger had long been an enthusiastic birder, but when a doctor gave her a diagnosis of terminal cancer near her 50th birthday, she began traveling to ever more distant and daunting environments to see rarae aves. Meanwhile, her disease went into remission. By the time she died, in 1999, at age 68, she had spotted a then-record 8,400 species, nearly 85 percent of the world’s known winged creatures. Her achievement is an admittedly extreme example of what the life list has become in the broader culture: things to experience while you still have time. Others, less delicately, prefer “bucket list,” a term from the 2007 film in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play stricken men who set out to do all the things they’ve wanted to do before kicking the bucket. The phrase is so handy it seems as if it has been around forever, but the screenwriter, Justin Zackham, says it just happened to be what he called an epic to-do list pinned to his bulletin board. Life list, bucket list—the basic idea has been around ever since the fifth century B.C., when Herodotus’ History sent Greeks eagerly across the Mediterranean to see Luxor and the pyramids. Nothing against those spectacles, mind you, but just since the dawn of this century, a whole roster of amazing sights has emerged, ready for the seeing. So get going: Phoebe Snetsinger didn’t eyeball 8,400 bird species while sitting on the couch.