Seven Weird Tours

As long as there have been places to go that are more interesting than your house, there has been tourism. People will go anywhere that might remotely be a point of interest: a celebrity’s house, a big pile of stone commemorating some general nobody cares about now, or maybe a concrete staircase that was in a movie once.

And then there are the creative tours, the ones that take you around to the more…specialized areas. Here are seven of those, some of which stay in business just to defy common sense.

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We have absolutely no idea why somebody would want to tour a sewer. It sounds like a Monty Python routine: see the scenic sewers of Sicily. But, believe it or not, these do actually exist, and people do actually tour the sewers. We have absolutely no idea why, but apparently they are somehow historic, if by “historic”, you mean “old.” And it is true the city’s sewers have seen their share of history, as people have hidden out in them, used them as a base of operations, dumped corpses in them, but, let’s face it, mostly what people have done in these sewers, and done an awful lot, is flushed their waste down them, and we just don’t see how any of the former can overwhelm the latter.

We guess maybe you can see the sewage of Mozart or a great Existentialist thinker dried on the walls or something. There’s a photo for you.

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Don’t get us wrong, we’re big fans of AC/DC. No, the band. And we’re also big fans of Bon Scott, the dynamic frontman who was sadly taken from us due to one of the single most embarrassing rock star deaths in music history. But we’re not really sure we want to go on a Bon Scott Tour.

First of all, it’s probably a bunch of people in their fifties, rocking out to AC/DC, which is kind of cool, but would probably get repetitive quickly. Secondly, we’re pretty sure any “Bon Scott” tour requires a ridiculous amount of drinking, because how else are you going to capture the man’s wild rock-n-roll lifestyle. So basically you’ll be surrounded by a bunch of hard-drinking grandmas and grandpas for a week. That doesn’t sound like a vacation. That sounds like a typical family outing to us.

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OK, ghost tours we get. Even though they’re mostly a crock and kind of morbid, it’s still kind of fun to be taken on a tour of the local legends of an area, and to pick up on some historical tidbits that might not be in the standard history books. But where does the karaoke come in?

Seriously, we’ve been trying to figure this one for an hour. Karaoke? On a ghost tour? What do you do, only sing songs with ghosts in the title? Use the karaoke to lure out the ghosts (which probably wouldn’t be effective, if our extensive training on ghosts courtesy of movies is correct)? Just sing for the hell of it? And what would you sing, anyway?

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“Harry Potter” is a truly wonderful, magical series of books that combine the cozy murder mystery (think about it) with light fantasy. They’re quick reads, they’re very cute, they’re lots of fun, and people are so obsessed with them a Harry Potter tour actually makes money, despite one teeny little problem:

The last time we checked, most of the locations in the book don’t exist.

The tour gets around this by showing you where the movies are shot, so we guess there’s that, but we can just imagine some kid piling into a taxi to see the Ministry of Magic and being very, very disappointed. Or the tour itself being disappointing, as most of the time, live locations don’t look like sets; they look like everywhere else.