I often get wacky trip ideas.

[randomness]

Sometimes I even implement them.

This is one I'm unlikely to implement, because I have more sanity than money, but here it is:

The largest 52 metropolitan areas in the world, one a week for a year!

The reasoning goes like this. I like cities, and I like travel. I've been to a lot of these places, and I'd like to visit most of the ones I haven't been to yet. (Clearly, there are exceptions: for example, I won't be going to Baghdad as a tourist until the security situation improves.)

Wikipedia and world-gazetteer.com both have lists of metro areas, which of course conflict. In fact, Wikipedia has two: a list of urban areas by population and one of urban agglomerations. (I prefer the former, because Boston/Providence is on that list at #37, while on the latter Boston is way down at #56. On world-gazetteer.com it just misses the top 50.)

Needless to say, this trip would be very expensive and quite a test of stamina. Even if I didn't visit them in order of population, but chose some (relatively) sane geographic order instead.

But boy, imagine the food blogging!

Comments

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Huh!

I think I'd want to shop the book idea around first. You may be onto something, though. It'd be a stunt, but there seems to be a market for stunt travel books.

There are a lot of third-world cities on the list, which isn't a particular problem for me, but may limit the number of potential buyers.

[ladybird97.livejournal.com]

Seriously! There's a market for stunt travel and a market for stunt food tourism, too. Multiple food-tourism books have just come out, and if they do well, other publishers are probably going to want to jump on the bandwagon.

And heck, I know I'd buy it! I mean, even if it weren't written by someone I know :)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure that would actually be a problem. My scan of the first Wikipedia list you cited suggests that it's mostly a bunch of cities in each of China, India, and the United States, plus a smattering through the rest of Asia including Indonesia. All of those seem like things people would be interested in. Then there are the "most important cities in large but not huge countries", like Tehran, Baghdad, Istanbul, and Kinshasa. Many of those have a fair amount of allure anyway, and you can play up the ones that don't precisely because they don't. I think lots of people would be interested in a chapter on Kinshasa: the largest city you've never even thought of going to. (I don't know how safe Congo is these days, but...)

Anyway, I think if you planned the trip carefully, it would be exhausting but not nearly as bad as it seems on the surface. For example, spending a month and a half or two months touring China seems less tiring than "visiting 6 or eight Chinese cities." And I think it totally could produce a book-- or even multiple books. I bet you could get both a "food of the world tour" and a "touring the world's great cities" out of the same trip. One of the keys would be organizing the books coherently, but that could be part of the same process as planning the trip.

--Adam

(All that said, it might be easier to do this as several distinct regional trips: the great cities of China, the great cities of India, etc. And that would still probably be marketable.)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

As a matter of fact, I was looking at Kinshasa-Brazzaville. I think it's a bit hairy, but so is Lagos.

But yes, I noticed that many of the cities group naturally.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

I don't think that limits the number of buyers. I think it increases it, if anything. Those are the cities most people will never visit, so they want to read about people who have! Plus, the adventures you can write about are likely to be more...adventurous.