Depending on where you travel, you may come to realize that leaving home was a terrible mistake. That’s because every destination with a public relations budget endeavors to attract tourists and drive revenue. Yet every destination doesn’t deserve a visit from you.

A world of tacky, boring, bland, too hot, too rainy, and too cold destinations is eager to seize your vacation dollars. I’m here to expose five of them, although I acknowledge there are many, many, many more. You may not agree with the following selections; I acknowledge one person’s misery (mine) may be another person’s joy.

MYRTLE BEACH, South Carolina

Freak Week

Everything crude, tacky and low-rent about America comes to spin its wheels in Myrtle Beach during Bike Week. Miles of fast-food joints and miniature golf courses lure tattooed grandpas on deafness-inducing hogs and their red-hot mamas straight off Walmart mobility scooters. Add in families with too many children under the age of ten, battalions of bleached blonde bimbos in Daisy Dukes, enough rebel flags to upholster every plantation from Fort Sumter to Jacksonville, and you’ll discover that for at least one week a year Myrtle Beach is a visual, auditory, and gustatory assault.

BERGEN, NORWAY

A Whale of a Bad Time

A coastal town with a pungent fish market, a harbor, and a row of historic, gable-roofed structures, Bergen is Norway’s second-largest city. What is there to do? Ride the funicular to the top of Mount Floyen… to look down at the fish market, the harbor, and the old buildings. If you get hungry, don’t try the whale meat. It will take hours to get rid of minke mouth taste. Alternative pescatarian picks await, as well as reindeer and (yes) moose meat. Fortunately, there is also a McDonald’s nearby. As for accommodations, avoid the trendy but terrifying Hotel Oleana. My room boasted a shower with a graphic evoking the famous scene in Psycho. Pining for the fjords? You can take a half-day roundtrip cruise from the port. Trust me: that’s long enough.

ARUBA

Bland Strand of Sand

If all you want on vacation is a beach, well, I have nothing more to say to you. If you like culture, variety, appealing cuisine, and activities other than picking sand out of your crevices, take Aruba off your bucket list. One redeeming aspect: Aruba has casinos. With a little luck, you can win enough money to pay for an earlier flight home to save yourself from dying of boredom.

ORLANDO

Family “Fun”

For any sentient childfree adult, hell is located in this desiccated patch of central Florida. Screaming childrens’ noxious and bacterial excrescences are expelled from every orifice, showering the innocent visitor drawn by exorbitant Disney prices and brain-dead attractions. One memory stands out. We were in Epcot, naively hoping to find something international that wasn’t ersatz. A tow-headed Opie tromped over our shoes and underscored the futility of our search by shrieking, “Maw! We already done France.”

CHINA

More a Poo-Poo than a Wu-Wu Experience

A vast nation with a complex history and culture that span millennia, China still belongs on the casual traveler’s skip-it list. The attractions for which it’s most famous — the Forbidden City, Great Wall, Terracotta Warriors, and the Yangtze River are each disappointing in their own way.

Spanning 180 acres and containing nearly a thousand buildings, the Forbidden City is crowded and overwhelming. Just try finding a clean bathroom, a place to sit for a few minutes, or a decent snack on the premises. Thanks, Communist Party.

And forget the city of Beijing. Until China gets its pollution under control, it’ll be a rare day when the entire gray city doesn’t look like it needs to repeatedly go through a car wash. The Yangtze River isn’t much cleaner. Plastic flotsam and Styrofoam jetsam are floating companions to ships that ply the dirty gray-green water.

The Great Wall? More like the Great Staircase. If you went on vacation to escape your Peleton, you’ve found an Asian equivalent. Unless you’re being chased by Mongol hordes advancing on the Badaling entrance, plant yourself in the adjacent café and use their bathroom rather than the public one, which has a long line and revulsion at the end.

As for China’s terracotta warriors, they’re assembled inside a square edifice the size of several airplane hangars and displayed on a sunken floor. Viewers are so far away that it’s difficult to discern their individual features. Fortunately, you can get a lot closer to the models in the gift shop and even pick up a palanquin, which is really the only way to travel.

And don’t get me started on the food. Your corner Chinese restaurant with a C rating cooks more appetizing fare. At least they de-bone fish before serving and keep the most disgusting pig parts off the menu.

The next time you start thinking about a vacation to one of these places, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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For the uninitiated – mostly everyone – SNUBA, not surprisingly, is a cross between scuba and snorkeling. Unencumbered by the heavy accoutrements of scuba divers who have air tanks on their back allowing them to access 60 feet below the surface, SNUBA participants simply have fins and a mask similar to snorkelers but which is attached to an outside oxygen supply that allows them to dive 10-20 feet below the surface and see way more than is usually accessible to the average snorkeler.

I was up close and personal with the coral moonscape and the many multi-colored residents who call it home. Trigger fish, trumpets, sergeant major fish, blue parrots, butterfly fish — “The list is so long it would take me a whole day to tell you,” my instructor claimed. At one point, he directed me to the bottom to look underneath a big coral formation where a Puffer Fish was happily hiding. You can’t do that when snorkeling!

And that barely touches the surface – so to speak – of what De Palm Island has to offer. An all-inclusive day trip a five-minute ferry ride away – but worlds away in terms of excitement – De Palm offers a smorgasbord of food and activities. First, let’s deal with the basics: $109 per adult buys you unlimited snorkeling tours with free snorkel gear, an impressive waterpark for the kids, exhilarating water slides for the kid in you, banana boat rides galore, as much food and drink as you can handle, and, of course, salsa lessons. And oh yes, a variety of sandy beaches with chaise lounges and palapas to relax upon if you can find the time. And that’s just for starters.

Usually in the Caribbean you see a lot of flamingoes, but they’re usually in the form of mailboxes, lawn decorations or home décor. On De Palm, they’re there to entertain you in the flesh. The stately, pretty, light pink, long-legged birds happily roam their own sandy habitat at their leisure for you to interact with at yours.

So not only does De Palm Island offer SNUBA, of which there are only about 56 operations worldwide, but also Sea Trek, with the same number of opportunities around the globe – but to have them both in the same place. Highly rare!

So what’s Sea Trek you ask? Donning a huge helmet with breathing apparatus, you walk along a cushioned sea bottom 10-15 feet below the surface, always following certain caveats – remain vertical at all time, walk and breathe, yawn to equalize pressure, hold on to the hand rails and never look down.

Forget flapping flippers or your snorkel mask filling with water. Here, you just have to focus on the multitudes of fish swarming around you. Admittedly, the thought of a 72-pound helmet on my 90-pound frame initially sounded a little daunting, but once in the water it was very manageable – even if the diver-guide had to keep re-adjusting it to fit my face.

And, of course, a video was taken to be sold later – and for the sake of said video, we had to pretend to drink a bottle of wine and pretend to drive an underwater vehicle. Also to actually stroke a sea cucumber and a very scaly sea start. But I was in it for the fish – and at times there were so many of them, I felt an integral part of their school which I suspect was more fun for me than the fish….

Along with the SNUBA and Sea Trek add-ons, you can also opt for a well-stocked private cabana, a back or foot massage, a DIY craft shop or a henna tattoo, but the pick-up basketball game is free as is so much else. The kids waterpark with age-appropriate slides and the ever-present bucket of water on high that spills over at unexpected intervals elicited the de rigueur squeals of joy every time. A number of snorkeling areas consistently populated by bouncing snorkel-masked heads that once would have beckoned me had I not just experienced other fish-enhanced realms of a much higher order. And the always inviting chaise lounges enabling you to listen to the surf hitting the rocks – sheer heaven!

De Palm Island, Aruba: one of the most unique sources of unending entertainment above and below water imaginable. And from which they had to drag me, kicking and screaming. This time, without flippers. For more information, visit De Palm Island.

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