This was published 8 years ago
Travel tips: 22 of the world's biggest, highest, fastest and smallest attractions
Ben Groundwater takes a look at the new bucket list for travellers with an urge to visit the world-beaters.
Travel shouldn't be a competitive experience. We're all winners in this great game of global exploration.
And yet, there's still an urge to secure bragging rights. There's still satisfaction to be had in knowing that you've seen the world's biggest, or its oldest, or its tallest – of anything, really. We travellers might not set records ourselves, but the thrill of seeing the sights and attractions that have is hard to deny.
THE FASTEST ROLLER-COASTER
WHAT Formula Rossa, Abu Dhabi
WHY GO? Here's the deal with the Ferrari World theme park's "Formula Rossa": it accelerates faster than the supercar after which it was named. In fact, as it reaches 100km/h in two seconds, it's faster than any supercar on the market. The Formula Rossa takes all of five seconds to reach its top speed of 240km/h, whipping passengers through the 2km track in one minute and 32 seconds. Fun.
SIMILAR The world's highest roller-coaster is the "Kingda Ka" (139 metres) at Six Flags, New Jersey, while the oldest is the 113-year-old "Leap-The-Dips" in Pennsylvania.
MORE ferrariworldabudhabi.com; sixflags.com
MOST REMOTE INHABITED ISLAND
WHAT Tristan da Cunha
WHY GO? If you want to get away from it all there's no other place like this on Earth. Tristan de Cunha is a tiny island with fewer than 300 residents, set deep in the South Atlantic 2400 kilometres from Africa, 3360 kilometres from South America, and 2000 kilometres from the nearest inhabited island. If you do decide to visit, you'll have to go by ship from South Africa, and commit to a three-week stay.
SIMILAR Want to visit the most remote capital city in the world? You've probably already been there. It's a tie between Wellington and Canberra.
MORE tristandc.com
LARGEST FERRIS WHEEL
WHAT High Roller Las Vegas, United States
WHY GO? Best way to see the Vegas Strip at night? By helicopter. But not all of us have scooped the pool on the poker table, which makes the High Roller – a 168 metre Ferris wheel – the next best option. From high up in the sky in one of the 28 passenger pods you can see just about everything in Vegas, from the Luxor pyramid to Trump Tower and beyond.
SIMILAR It doesn't provide quite the same level of comfort, but the Wiener Riesenrad at Prater Park in Vienna, built in 1897, is the world's oldest Ferris wheel.
MORE caesars.com/linq/high-roller; prater.at
View of the High Roller, the world's tallest observation wheel #linqlife #insidelinq
LOWEST POINT ON LAND
WHAT Dead Sea, Israel/Jordan
WHY GO? Accessible from both Israel and Jordan, the Dead Sea is a freak of nature, an inland body of water whose banks sit 429 metres below sea level. The main attraction here is the incredibly salty water – so salty that it's almost impossible to sink – and the mud on the banks, which is chock full of minerals and popular as a makeshift beauty treatment.
SIMILAR Tired of the low life? Then check out Tibet, where Semo La is home to the world's highest road (5565 metres), and Tanggula hosts the world's highest train station (5068m).
MORE goisrael.com
TALLEST BUILDING
WHAT Burj Khalifa, Dubai
WHY GO? The view from the observation deck of this colossal tower, 555 metres above the ground, is truly bizarre – everything below you ceases to look real. It's too far away. The sprawl of Dubai just looks like a plastic model from up there, a kids' play set stuck in the middle of the desert. Imagine, then, what it would be like from the top of the Burj Khalifa spire, another 270 metres up.
SIMILAR Where's the world's tallest hotel? Just next door to the Burj. Literally: next door. The JM Marriott Marquis Dubai has 76 usable storeys, and is 355m high.
MORE burjkhalifa.ae; marriott.com
OLDEST NATIONAL PARK
WHAT Bogd Khan Uul, Mongolia
WHY GO? You might think – and reasonably, too – that the world's oldest national park is Yellowstone in the United States, established as it was in 1872. But stop the presses; hold the phone. There's an older one. Bogd Khan Uul, a 41,000 hectare wilderness area in central Mongolia, has been protected since 1778. And still is. Does this make it a national park? There's still some debate. But what's not up for argument is that this is one spectacular part of the world.
SIMILAR The majestic, beautiful Yellowstone National Park is, in many people's minds, the original and the best when it comes to protected wilderness areas.
HIGHEST BRIDGE
WHAT Sidu River Bridge, China
WHY GO? There's little reason to find yourself crossing this 1.2-kilometre suspension bridge in central China other than to know you've done it. There isn't much else around. What brings record-hunters to the area is the fact that, at a dizzying height of 496 metres above the ground (more than 10 times the clearance of Sydney Harbour Bridge), this bridge is the highest in the world. The next closest – that you can drive over, at least – is the Baluarte Bridge in Mexico, which has a clearance of 393 metres.
SIMILAR There's a separate record for "tallest bridge", which goes to the Millau Viaduct in France. Its masts are 343 metres high. It's also a lot easier to get to than central China.
MORE cnto.org; leviaducdemillau.com
*MOST EXPENSIVE RESTAURANT
WHAT Sublimotion, Ibiza
WHY GO? Because you have far too much money, obviously. A meal at chef Paco Roncero's two-Michelin-star Ibiza eatery will cost you €1500 ($2260). To put that into perspective, you could eat at the world's best restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca, five times for that amount. Or, if you were so inclined, you could order 300 pepperoni pizzas from Dominos. But what you get at Sublimotion is more than a meal – it's a sometimes bizarre and always outlandish multi-sensory experience, a mix of sound, light, art, music, and cuisine.
Guests are chauffeur-driven to the restaurant, set below the Hard Rock Hotel in Playa d'en Bossa. They're then escorted to a 12-seat table that's surrounded by wrap-around LCD screens showing scenes that flash between hillside vineyards, aeroplane flights and underwater worlds as dishes in front of the diners change. The table itself is an LCD. Sounds and effects accompany each course, some of which arrive floating in the air suspended under balloons. At one point, virtual reality goggles are required.
The whole thing is either mind-blowingly revolutionary, or eye-wateringly pretentious. It probably depends on who's paying.
SIMILAR On the opposite end of the scale, in terms of pretention, is the world's oldest restaurant, Madrid's Sobrino de Botin. It was founded in 1725, and specialises in chicken soup. No virtual reality goggles required.
MORE sublimotionibiza.com; botin.es
HOTTEST PLACE
WHAT Death Valley, United States
WHY GO? Some like it hot, which means some would really enjoy hanging out in California's Death Valley during summer. This is where the world's highest air temperature was recorded: an ice-cream-and-also-face-melting 56.7 degrees at Furnace Creek in 1913. (There's a place in Libya that once recorded 57.7 degrees, but as the work experience kid was on that day it's not officially counted.) During winter Death Valley is surprisingly pleasant, and is a popular destination for freezing residents of the northern states.
SIMILAR While Antarctica regularly experiences the lowest air temperatures, the record holder for an inhabited part of the world goes to Sakha, Russia, where the mercury once dropped to -67.7 degrees.
MORE nps.gov/deva/
*MOST VISITED ATTRACTION
WHAT Grand Bazaar, Istanbul
WHY GO? This one's a surprise. You were probably thinking something like the Colosseum, right? Or the Eiffel Tower? Not even close. The Eiffel Tower receives about 7 million visitors a year – the Colosseum even less than that. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, by comparison, gets a whopping 91 million. Of course not all of those visitors are tourists – many are locals just doing the shopping. And if you call in on any given day to have a look around the Grand Bazaar you could easily be forgiven for thinking that all 91 million visitors had turned up at the same time. This is one bustling, heaving shrine to shopping, one in which buyers and sellers have been practising their art since 1455. There are more than 3000 shops sprawled across 61 covered streets. You're going to need plenty of time to see them all.
There's an argument though, that the Grand Bazaar has an unfair advantage in terms of visitor numbers, given its status as a working part of Istanbul life. If you were to count attractions that are only visited by tourists, the Las Vegas Strip, with 30.5 million visitors annually, is the world's most popular.
SIMILAR Pilgrimages are eternally popular. Many of the most visited attractions in the world are religious sites, including Tokyo's Meiji Jingu Temple (30 million visitors), and Sensoji Temple (30 million), as well as the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City (20 million).
MORE goturkey.com; jnto.org.au
LARGEST WATERPARK
WHAT Tropical Islands Resort, Germany
Why go? The scale of this is mind-boggling. Though the actual waterslides part of this German indoor resort isn't the biggest in the world, it sits inside what is the Earth's largest free-standing hall, a 5.5 million cubic metre former airship hangar. As well as a standard water park, Tropical Islands also hosts replica villages from South-East Asia, a rainforest with 50,000 plants, a replica coral sea, and a Balinese lagoon. And the whole thing is climate and humidity controlled.
SIMILAR If you want to visit the world's most popular water park, you'll have to go to Guangzhou, China, where the Chimelong Park receives 2.25 million visitors annually.
LONGEST COMMERCIAL FLIGHT
WHAT QF7/8
WHY GO? While the idea of spending more than 16 hours in a plane may not appeal to some, this is undeniably a record-setter. QF7 and QF8, the Qantas flights between Sydney and Dallas Fort Worth, travel 13,804 kilometres – more than one-third of the distance around the Earth. The flights are done in the shiny new Airbus A380-842, and allow passengers plenty of time to catch up on pretty much every movie in existence.
SIMILAR But wait: Qantas is about to be knocked off its perch. As of February 1, 2016, Emirates will be flying direct from Dubai to Panama, a 17-and-a-half hour journey of 13,821 kilometres.
MORE qantas.com; emirates.com/au
HIGHEST WATERFALL
WHAT Angel Falls, Venezuela
WHY GO? While the gong for "most spectacular waterfall" would probably be fought out between Victoria Falls and Iguazu, you can't argue with a solid record like "highest", and that goes to the 979-metre Angel Falls in Venezuela. That's right: almost a full vertical kilometre of falling water, including 807 metres uninterrupted as the Guaja River pours over Auyantepui mountain. You have to see it to truly appreciate the scale.
SIMILAR It's unlikely many people will go to visit, given its location in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the world's largest waterfall by volume is Inga Falls, over which 25,758 cubic metres of water pours every second.
MOST DANGEROUS WALKWAY
WHAT Caminito del Rey, Spain
WHY GO? Adrenalin junkies, lace up your hiking boots. You might think you're going for a gentle stroll in the mountains when you set forth on the Caminito del Rey in Malaga, but what you've just got yourself into is a hair-raising, death-defying teeter along a one-metre-wide wooden pathway bolted to the side of a huge cliff. And while we say "death-defying", that's not always the case: six people died walking it before it was recently renovated.
SIMILAR If hiking a scary trail sounds a little sedate, you could always cycle Bolivia's "Death Road", a high Andean mountain track full of huge cliffs and no barriers.
MORE caminitodelrey.info/en/; bolivia.travel
LONGEST STAIRCASE
WHAT Niesenbahn Funicular, Switzerland
WHY GO? If you've ever sought the challenge of climbing 11,674 stairs, there's only one time of the year you can do it, in June, when the staircase that runs alongside the Niesenbahn Funicular near Bern, Switzerland, is opened to the public for a fun-run. The rest of the year you'll just have to take the tram and think how lucky you are that you don't actually have to walk up those things.
SIMILAR If you'd like to set a slightly more sedate record, the world's longest single escalator is the 137-metre whopper at the Ploshchad Lenina metro station in St Petersburg. The longest escalator system is in Hong Kong.
MORE niesen.ch; saint-petersburg.com
LARGEST BUILDING
WHAT Boeing Everett Factory, United States
WHY GO? Fans of giant feats of engineering get a double-whammy at the Boeing factory: not only do you get to see the 13,385,378 cubic metre space of the world's largest building, but you also get to see what's made inside that building. We're talking some of the world's most innovative passenger aircraft, Boeing 777s and Dreamliners rolling off the production line.
SIMILAR If you want to measure by footprint, the world's largest building is the Aalsmeer Flower Auction building in the Netherlands, which covers 518,000 square metres (about 73 football pitches).
MORE boeing.com; floraholland.com
OLDEST MUSEUM
WHAT Capitoline Museums, Italy
WHY GO? The world's first museum is thought to have been built about 2500 years ago – however, it closed long, long ago. The oldest surviving establishment on the planet can still trace its history back to an impressive 1471 though, when Pope Sixtus IV donated a collection of bronzes to the people of Rome, and the Musei Capitolini was born. Today the museum still houses those bronzes, plus renaissance art, jewellery, coins, and ancient Roman statues.
SIMILAR One of Britain's oldest and most enduringly popular museums is the British Museum, which opened in 1753.
MORE en.museicapitolini.org; britishmuseum.org
NORTHERNMOST POINT ON LAND
WHAT Kaffeklubben Island, Greenland
WHY GO? While it sounds like a dance party for caffeine freaks (the name actually means Coffee Club in Danish), Kaffeclubben is not the sort of place you'd go for a good time. This is as far north as north goes if you want to keep your feet on land – a tiny outcrop on the tip of Greenland, on the 83rd parallel, that can only be visited if you're on a special polar expedition. Still, there's life on this uninhabited island, in the form of wildflowers that bloom for just a few days a year.
SIMILAR The town of Alert, on Ellesmere Island in Canada, is the world's northernmost permanently inhabited place. It's on the 82nd parallel, and has a population of between zero and four.
MORE britannica.com; canada.travel
OLDEST BUILDING
WHAT Gobekli Tepe, Turkey
WHY GO? While some of the oldest ruins from human civilisation can be found in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, the title of oldest complete (or even semi-complete) building is one that's still up for debate. Some would say it's Barnenez, a grave site from 4850BC that has been discovered in France. Others would claim it's the recently excavated Gobekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, a possible religious site that dates back to the 10th millennium BC. Can these ruins really be counted as a building though? You'll have to decide for yourself.
SIMILAR The Barnenez site, in Brittany, is still an extremely impressive one for history buffs, and much easier to visit than Gobekli Tepe.
MORE goturkey.com; barnenez.monuments-nationaux.fr/en/
BIGGEST CHRISTMAS LIGHT DISPLAY
WHAT Canberra, Australia
WHY GO? Well, 'tis the season, and it's nice to know that if you want to gaze upon the shining glory of the world's largest Christmas light display, you only have to go as far as our nation's capital. Last year a record was set for lights in general – this year it's the most lights on a single Christmas tree, which in Canberra city centre this year tops out at 518,838 LEDs.
SIMILAR If you're into all things Christmas, the world's tallest Christmas tree is in Mexico City, while the world's largest gingerbread village is in New York.
MORE visitcanberra.com.au
SO CLOSE: THE SECOND-PLACE-GETTERS WORTH VISITING
TAIPEI 101, TAIWAN
The world's second-tallest building is still worthy of a visit, mostly to see its unique architecture and the great views from the 101st-storey observation deck. While the air might not be quite as clear as it is in Dubai, the vantage point from 391 metres up is still very impressive. taipei-101.com.tk
ZOCALO, MEXICO CITY
Coming in a close second to Istanbul's Grand Bazaar in terms of highest visitor numbers is the Zocalo, the main square in Mexico City. This buzzing part of town is a huge open area hemmed in by the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace, visited by more than 85 million people a year. visitmexico.com
SINGAPORE FLYER, SINGAPORE
If you can't make it to Vegas to ride the world's largest Ferris wheel, you can always pop over to Singapore to experience the second largest. The Singapore Flyer is 165m tall – just three metres under the mark set by the High Roller. singaporeflyer.com
TUGELA FALLS, SOUTH AFRICA
Some claim these falls, with a combined height over five cascades of 948 metres, should actually be classed as the tallest in the world. Regardless, they're still an impressive second place getter, tucked away high in the Drakensberg Mountains in KwaZulu-Natal, accessible via a two-hour hike. southafrica.net
THE VATICAN MUSEUMS
The world's second-oldest museum is also one of its most famous, a display of the immense collection of artworks amassed by the Roman Catholic Church. First opened by Pope Julius II in 1506, the Vatican Museums are on almost every modern-day traveller's hit list. mv.vatican.va
TINY CHANCERS: THE WORLD'S SMALLEST RECORD-HOLDERS
SMALLEST HOTEL
Copenhagen's Central Hotel has just one room measuring about three metres by two, and it's booked solid most times of the year. It sits above the city's smallest coffee shop, which has five seats. centralhotelogcafe.dk
SMALLEST MUSEUM
Somerville, Massachusetts, is not only home to the brilliant Museum of Bad Art, but also the "Tiny Museum", which has four very small exhibits in a space that's about a quarter of a cubic metre. tinymuseum.org
SMALLEST AIRPORT
The Juancho E Yrausquin Airport, on the Dutch-owned Caribbean island of Saba, has a 396m runway – that's only slightly longer than an aircraft carrier, and no jets can land there. sabatourism.com
SMALLEST RESTAURANT
In Vacone, just north of Rome, you'll find Solo Per Due, a restaurant whose names mean "just for two", and that's exactly what it is: a two-seat restaurant where romance (or at least privacy) is guaranteed. soloperdue.com
SMALLEST DRAWBRIDGE
The Somerset Bridge in Bermuda has what's thought to be the world's smallest drawbridge: an 80-centimetre gap that opens in the middle of the bridge and is just wide enough for a yacht's mast to pass through. gotobermuda.com
SMALLEST THEATRE
Better not plan on inviting many friends to the Kremlhof Theatre in Villach, Austria – the playhouse can fit a total of eight patrons, all of whom get front-row seats to the theatre and ballet performances. kremlhof.blogspot.com
SMALLEST PARK
Everything is bigger in America – except in Portland, Oregon, where the 2920-square-centimetre Mill Ends Park claims the title of smallest in the world. It has one tree. travelportland.com
See also: World's 10 most loveable cities
See also: The new Aussie city that's the 'capital of cool'
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