SIDELINES //

Top 8 Geek Travel Destinations: Are You A High IQ Traveler?

by Mike Richard

Wired has released The Best Geek Vacations – eight top places where the “smartest of the smartest” prefer to trek, including:

Akihabara Tokyo
Chernobyl, Ukraine
Palo Alto, California
CERN
Mauna Kea Observatory
Sidi Driss Hotel
New Zealand
The South Pole

For my RTW trip, I’m personally psyched about Antarctica and Tokyo, and … (why not?) Chernobyl. Does that mean I’m kind of smart and kind of geeky or both?

How much of a geeky high IQ traveler are you?

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About the Author

Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.

Travel Minx
July 26th, 2007

Hehe, ‘Geekotourism’!

I have been to number one as a tourist and that’s it. I’ve lived 25 years of my life in NZ so am pretty familiar with LOTR scenery. Although I’ve heard the Hobbiton tour is crap – $100 (NZ$ so = US$81 now) there isn’t much of the ‘original’ Hobbit village there now.

None of the others excite me except the last one, so maybe I’m not as big a geek as I thought.

Mike
July 27th, 2007

Yeah, I wouldn’t take that as too much of an insult. The idea that someone would travel somewhere just because some movie was filmed there is more than a bit bizarre to me.

Travel Gear Blog
July 28th, 2007

You know, I just can’t see the person going to visit Chernobyl being too smart… I mean, I’d like to go see it too, but the environmental impacts probably aren’t under control yet, no matter what they tell us.

Chris
August 1st, 2007

Except New Zealand – I’m really happy not being a Geek Traveler then. What’s interesting about those places? But maybe I’m just too narrow-minded – as usual. Let me lean back and try again – ooohhhhhhmmmmmm! Ah yes, give me the North Pole anytime to cool my nerve endings…

Mike
August 2nd, 2007

Yeah, Chernobyl’s probably not the safest of destinations, unless you’re cool with growing a third arm out of your forehead, etc. I wonder if the Ministry of Tourism there hands out complimentary haz-mat/biohazard suits? Like the kind the folks at the CDC use before they start playing with ebola and small pox in their labs.