Big Is Better: Top 10 World’s Largest Tourist Attractions

Posted on 14. May, 2009 by Kerry Banks in International

The Royal Clipper (destination360.com)

A lot of people believe that bigger is better. This view certainly applies to the sailing segment of the cruise business, where two rival companies are constructing the largest and most expensive sailing vessels to ever ply the seas. Star Clippers, which has a fleet of authentic re-creations of classic 19th-century clipper ships, currently operates the world’s largest and only five-masted sailing ship built since the early 1900s. The Royal Clipper, a design inspired by the legendary tall ship Preussen, is 134 metres long, comes equipped with 42 sails and carries 227 guests in romantic and luxurious style. However, by 2010, the majestic Royal Clipper will be relegated to third place in the sailing stakes.

On April 5, 2010, German-based Sea Cloud Cruises will launch the maiden voyage of the Sea Cloud Hussar. Measuring 136 metres long and 17 metres wide, with a total sail area of more than 4,000 square metres, it will be the largest three-masted ship ever built. The vessel will have 69 luxury cabins and boast room for 136 passengers and a crew of 90. After completing its 12-day maiden voyage from Malta to the Greek port of Piraeus, the Hussar will travel along the Cote d’Azur and sail to the German port of Hamburg, which it will enter on June 26, 2010, after completing a musically themed voyage from Portugal, Spain, France and Belgium. The ship will dock in Venice on September 3, 2010, followed by a journey to the Arabian Peninsula in early December. Tickets for the maiden voyage start at $5,976 per person.

Not to be outdone, Star Clippers recently announced it is building an even larger and more expensive vessel. Extending an astounding 157 metres and weighing 7,400 tons, the as-yet-unnamed barque will be 48 per cent larger than the Royal Clipper. The five-masted giant will carry 37 sails for a total of 6,350 square metres of sail surface area; its rigs will soar 65 metres above the waterline and the open sundeck area will be an expansive 2,500 square metres. The ship, which will make its debut in 2010, will have room for 296 passengers and 140 crew, feature three swimming pools on the top deck and house a two-level dining room that can hold all 296 passengers in one seating.

There will also be a private dining room for smaller groups, a piano lounge, a two-level “tropical bar,” a dive/sports bar, a forward observation lounge, library, spa and gym. A retractable marina on the stern will provide access for watersports. One of the swimming pools will have a glass bottom, allowing light to filter down into the piano lounge and dining room. The aft pool, meanwhile, will feature a swim tube that extends down into the dive/sports bar and into the library that will be used for scuba training.

But big doesn’t only apply to sailing ships. Here are the remaining Top 10 travel-related “World’s Largest.”

2. World’s largest museum attraction

The amazing Titanic Museum in Branson, Missouri, was built half-scale to the original. Towering 30 metres above Country Highway 76, it holds 400 priceless artifacts in 20 galleries from the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The structure is anchored in water to create the illusion of the Titanic at sea, and the 90-minute, self-guided tour is designed to give guests the sensation of being one of the passengers on Titanic’s 1912 maiden voyage. As visitors step through an iceberg into the early 1990s world of this historic re-creation they are given a passenger boarding ticket, bearing the name of an actual Titanic passenger and the class they were travelling. Guests learn the individual stories of their adopted namesake and in the Titanic Memorial Room discover whether their ticketed passenger survived or perished. The museum opened in 2006 and has already welcomed more than a million visitors.

3. World’s largest aquarium

onearthtravel.com

Whale sharks, the world’s largest fish, are kings of this 30-million-litre tank. But once visitors to Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium have seen Ralph and Norton–the only whale sharks on display outside of Asia–they will still have about 100,000 fish to go. Shaped like an abstract cruise ship looming over Olympic park, the aquarium was bankrolled almost exclusively by a $200-million gift from Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. Size-wise it has no serious rival. By comparison, Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium–the largest indoor aquarium in the U.S. for decades–has just 19 million litres and about 20,000 fish. More than just a monstrous tank, however, the Atlanta site also boasts a “4-D” movie theatre, which shows films with 3-D animation and other special effects, and a banquet hall that can serve a sit-down dinner for 1,100, catered by a company owned by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck.

4. World’s largest shopping mall

When it opened in 2005, the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, crushed all rival mega malls with 6.5 million square feet of retail space and seven different wings – with theme areas based on Amsterdam, California, the Caribbean, Egypt, Paris, Rome and Venice, and, of course, an amusement park. But customers did not throng to the gigantic emporium. Today, it is not only the world’s largest mall but the world’s emptiest, with fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, making it a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs and dismembered mannequins.

5. World’s largest dinosaur

Standing adjacent to the Visitors Centre in Drumheller, Alberta, a fiberglass-and- steel Tyrannosaurus Rex rises 26 metres and weighs 66 tons. Travellers from as far away as Africa and Australia have climbed the behemoth’s 106 steps, plodding past the prehistoric mural paintings that decorate its belly, to be spit out inside a toothy mouth. There, they are rewarded with a choice view of the Red Deer River Valley and its eerie badlands landscape, where so many dinosaur bones have been unearthed. Cheesy as it may sound, the T-Rex blends in with the rest of the dinosaur statues stationed throughout the town in parks, on street corners and even busting out of the local IGA’s brick facade.

6. World’s largest casino

roongthongtour.com

Thousands of Chinese poured into the Venetian Macao resort, built by U.S. operator Las Vegas Sands, when it opened in August 2007. Macau is the only place in gambling-mad China where casinos are legal, and business is booming. Last year, gaming revenues surpassed those of the iconic Las Vegas Strip. The Venetian Macao promises to push the numbers even higher. It boasts 3,000 hotel suites, 1,150 gaming tables, 7,000 slot machines, 350 shops, a 1,800-seat conference centre and a 15,000-seat entertainment arena. If the Venetian succeeds, according to analyst estimates, it will help double Macau’s annual gaming income to $13.7 billion by 2010.

7. World’s largest place name

This Maori name for a hill, 305 metres high, located near Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, is so absurdly long that I won’t attempt to reproduce it here. The 85-letter-long place name is a combination of the words taumata (brow of a hill), whakatangihanga (music making), koauau (flute), o (of), tamatea (name of a famous chief), turi pukaka (bony knees), piki maunga (climbing a mountain), horo (slip), nuku (move), pokai whenua (widely travelled), ki (to), tana (his), tahu (beloved). Therefore, it means: the summit of the hill, where Tamatea, the man with the big knees who slid down, climbed up and swallowed mountains, known as land eater, played on his flute to his loved one. Nowadays, the moniker has been abbreviated to Taumata.

8. World’s largest hotel

Until recently, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas held this title, but First World Hotel in Pahang, Malaysia, has now secured the crown. Located in the mountain gambling resort of Genting Highlands, about 40 kilometres north of Kuala Lumpur, this three-star hotel has 6,118 rooms (1,000 more than the MGM) in its dual 23-storey towers. One thing you are not going to hear at the First World: “Sorry, all our rooms are full.” But with its pulsating lime-green, canary-yellow and fire-engine-red colour scheme, the hotel is unlikely to ever win any awards for design. The sizeable premises incorporate a theme park and a half-million square feet of shopping space. There are 32 check-in counters with 64 terminals located in the hotel lobby, and the laundry department manages an incredible production of 40 tons worth of laundry per day.

9. World’s largest swimming pool

latimes.com

Do a few morning laps here and you’ll be in intensive care. The new San Alfonso Del Mar resort, situated about 130 kilometres west of Santiago, Chile, has been recognized as having Earth’s largest crystalline pool by the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s actually a saltwater lagoon that runs for more than a kilometre between the ocean and several apartment buildings. Its surface area is eight hectares, roughly equivalent to 6,000 standard backyard pools. It took five years to build and cost nearly $2 billion and the annual maintenance bill is $4 million. It easily dwarfs the next biggest pool–the Orthlieb in Casablanca, Morocco–which is 150 metres by 100 metres. The pool utilizes a technology developed by the Chilean company Crystal Lagoons, which uses water pumped from the Pacific Ocean that is then filtered and treated for supply to the pool.

10. World’s Largest Miniature Village

Visiting Madurodam is like Gulliver being let loose in Lilliput. Located in The Hague, in the Netherlands, it’s a model of a Dutch town on a 1:25 scale, composed of typical Dutch buildings and landmarks as found in various locations in the country. This major tourist attraction was built in 1952 and has been visited by tens of millions of visitors since. The miniature city was named after George Maduro, a law student from Curaçao who fought the Nazi occupation forces as a member of the Dutch resistance and died at Dachau concentration camp in 1945. In 1946 Maduro was posthumously granted the honour of Knight 4th-class of the Military Order of William, the highest and oldest honour in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, because he had distinguished himself in the Battle of the Netherlands against German
troops. His parents donated the money to start the Madurodam project.

Tags: Travel Trivia