With Ultimate Sights, Lonely Planet aims to inspire travelers to make a list, “hit the road and start exploring the world’s most breathtaking sights.” Well, there’s certainly quite a variety of sights in this compact volume, both natural and manmade, from “Greatest Wildlife Spectacles” to “Sights Most Featured in the Movies.” In fact, there’s such a dizzying, chaotic array of categories, it may make settling on just a handful difficult.
Many of the listed sights brook no argument about being “ultimate.” But others … well, much as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, whether or not something is ultimate can be subjective, particularly with a category like Best Sunrises & Sunsets. And other categories are so niche as to be of limited appeal — Ugliest Beasts, Saltiest Sites, Most Fascinating Corpses, Weirdest Plants, Most Interesting Subway Stations. There’s also a danger with categories like Tallest Structures that the info might be out of date by publication time (and indeed, it is, as the Tokyo Sky Tree, although incomplete, is now taller than 9 of the 10 buildings listed).
There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the organization in this book (natural phenomena and manmade constructs are mixed together willy-nilly), so it’s a good thing Lonely Planet has provided an index and a subindex of sights. There’s also a category grouping after the intro (Best of Britain, Only in America, etc.), but it’s not comprehensive. The intent seems to be for readers to flip through the book randomly, rather than tackle the contents in any systematic way, which is fine, if inspiration is the goal.
More troubling is that, for a book about sights, there is a distressing lack of photographs, with only one, very occasionally two, per category. The photos that are present are spectacular, detailed and colorful. But surely inspiration would be easier to come by for the other “sights” with more visuals. It also wouldn’t hurt to have more consistent travel tips for each item.
Does Ultimate Sights inspire? It can certainly invoke curiosity and even wanderlust, making it a decent starting place for planning an adventure, but travellers will need to look elsewhere for the actual trip planning, or photos of most of the events and locations listed within.
(Lonely Planet, 2011)
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