More of The Most Overrated Destinations on the Planet!

Venice, just a gondola ride in Vegas

My recent blog about the most overrated travel sites on earth aroused scores of disgruntled globe trekkers to come forward with their own tales of cramped hotel rooms and bad inter-hemispheric sex. It also jogged my lil' mind to come up with some more stinky locales—ones that I had insanely forgotten to list in my last business-class rant. And so, here are some more of the world's lousiest places to elevate with your presence:

(1) Venice, Italy. I expected the place to be rich in culture, but in reality it totally exists as a throwback, a sort of glorified recreation of what once was, way back when the Renaissance wasn't just a fair in upstate New York. It turns out the only people who now live there happen to work in the Venice-as-Disneyland industry, selling it to the tourists as if it were more than just the gondola ride in Vegas. It isn't, and you know what? The stinky canal didn't bother me nearly as much as the ossified boredom.

(2) San Francisco. It's pretty, but that wears off after five seconds. But what really destroys any allure here is the political correctness that suffocates everything like a bi-curious strangler. I once MC'd an event at the Castro, and everything I said onstage was greeted with catcalls from the crowd because it wasn't p.c. enough. And they had come to see a campy movie about death, destruction, and child abuse! What's worse, afterwards I asked all the drag queens where people go at 11 PM. "Home," they all said! Good. I was safe to wander the streets without fear of seeing them again.

(3) Mexico City. I was told to brush with Pepsi because you'd die from the water. Well, to even buy a Pepsi in the bad part of town where we stayed, you had to stick a dollar through some dark hole (aka "the store") and hope a bottle came back out. I got sick anyway!

(4) Reykjavik, Iceland. The fjords in the vicinity are surreally beautiful and you can take a nice day trip to "the hot springs," which well up like Brigadoon, but there's nothing else to do! The natives are so bored that they drunkenly gather on the street on Saturday evenings and throw beer bottles into the air! I ran back to my room at the best hotel in town and it didn't have TV! No wonder people go crazy and wear swan dresses.