Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.
MY 25,000 WONDERS OF THE WORLD
The coaches at the Uluru Sunset Viewing Area were parked three deep. Guides were putting up tables and setting out wines and snacks. Ten minutes to go. Are we ready? Five minutes, folks. Got your cameras? OK, here it comes ...
Whether an American backpacker or a wealthy traveller, Danish, British, French, we all saw that sunset over Uluru, or Ayer Rock, in what seems to be the prescribed tourist manner: mouth full of corn chips, glass full of Château Somewhere, and a loved one posing in a photo's foreground, as the all-time No 1 Australian icon behind us glowed briefly red.
Back on the coach, our guide declared our sunset to be 'pretty good', although not the best she'd witnessed in her six years. Behind me, Adam, a student from Manchester, reinserted his iPod earphones: 'Well, that's enough of that rock.' Indeed. Shattered from getting up at five in order to see Uluru at dawn, I felt empty and bored. What was the point? What made this rock the definitive sunset rock event? Why had we come here? Well, I suppose my sons would remember it always. Except they'd missed the magical moment while they checked out a rival tour group's snack table, which had better crisps.
So now I've visited four of the “25 Wonders of the World", as decreed by Rough Guides. And I think this will be the last. While in my heart I can see myself wondering enchanted through China's Forbidden City, in my head I know I would be standing grumpily at the back of a group listening to some Imperial Palace Tour Guide. At the Grand Canyon I would be getting angr with tourists watching it through cameras – eyes are not good enough, since they lack a recording facility.
As we become richer and consumer goods are more widely affordable, and satisfy us only briefly before becoming obsolete, we turn to travel to provide us with 'experiences’. These will endure, set us apart from stay-at-home people and maybe, fill our lives with happiness and meaning, Books with helpful titles like 1,000 Places to See Before You Die are bestsellers. I'd bet many backpacks on the Machu Picchu Inca Trail are filled with copies, with little tieks penciled in the margins after each must-see sight has been visited. Travel is now the biggest industry on the planet, bigger than armaments or pharmaceuticals. And yet viewing the main sight of any destination is rarely the highlight of a trip. Mostly it sits there on your itinerary like a duty visit to a dull relative. The guilt of not visiting the Sistine Chapel, because we preferred to stay in a bar drinking limoncello, almost spoilt a weekend in Rome.
In Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef reproached us. How could we travel 15,000 miles without seeing it? How would we explain back home that we were too lazy, and preferred to stay playing a ball game in our hotel pool? In the end, we went to the reef and it was fine. But it won't rank highly in the things I'll never forget about Australia. Like the fact that the banknotes are made of waterproof plastic: how gloriously Australian is that? Even after a day's surfing, the $50 note you left in your surfing shorts is still OK to buy you beer! And the news item that during a recent tsunami warning, the surfers at Bondi Beach refused to leave the sea: what, and miss the ride of their lives? Or the stern warning at the hand luggage X-ray machine at Alice Springs airport: "No jokes must be made whilst being processed by this facility' - to forestall, no doubt, disrespectful Aussie comments: 'You won't find the bomb, mate. It's in my suitcase.’
The more I travel, the clearer it seems that the truth of a place is in the tiny details of everyday life, not in its most glorious statues or scenery. Put down your camera, throw away your list, the real wonders of the world number indefinitely more than 25.
What did the author think or feel after seeing the sunset over Ayer Rock?
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Thưởng th.10.2024
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