Traveler completes his own bucket list

Long before the hit movie ever appeared, I had made my own "Bucket List" of places that I felt I absolutely had to see before my life was over.

Last month, with my trip to India and a visit to the Taj Mahal, I completed my original list of 10 places on Earth that I had to visit.

My original bucket list was probably made somewhere in my late 20s when I was living in Germany. By that time I had done some serious international traveling and knew what was important to me in terms of places to visit. The list was the following (not necessarily in order of importance):
  • The Egyptian pyramids
  • The Great Wall of China
  • Diving the Great Barrier Reef
  • Machu Pichu
  • Angkor Wat
  • Mayan temples of Central America
  • Samarkand
  • African safari
  • A trip to the bottom of the world, Tierra del Fuego
  • The Taj Mahal

I have now completed this list and the one question that people consistently ask me is: Did all of the places meet my expectations or were they a disappointment? The simple answer is that they all exceeded my expectations. By a wide margin.

If everyone on Earth made their own bucket list, it would be a pretty safe bet that the Egyptian pyramids would be on every list. What shocked me about the pyramids was how close to the jam-packed city of Cairo they were located.

One minute you're driving through the suburbs and the next instant the pyramids spectacularly leap up before your eyes, almost as if by magic. Unimaginably huge when you are standing next to them, it's hard to believe that each pyramid was constructed to hold the body of just one man.

There's nothing hidden about the Great Wall of China, the only man-made object visible from space. But what is interesting is that 99 percent of tourists see just one little section outside of Beijing, while the total length is more than 6,000 miles, much of it heavily eroded because the oldest sections were built of adobe bricks.

The wall is the world's oldest and largest ongoing public works project, as whenever times got tough, the current emperor would simply send everyone to work on the wall. Presto, unemployment problem solved.

While the Great Wall is the largest man-made structure on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living organism on Earth, a string of countless coral creatures, 1,500 miles long off the coast of Australia.

That particular trip will always hold fond memories for me, as I was able to take my daughter along and she went through scuba dive school in Australia. So we spent a lot of time diving together, and both of us saw some really beautiful (and deadly) sea snakes.

No diving necessary, but plenty of climbing to get to Machu Pichu high in the Andes Mountains of Peru. Easily one of the most impressive physical locations on Earth, this ancient Inca city is so high it often sits above the clouds.

On the day I visited, the sun was out and the weather was perfect, something the locals said was highly unusual. I'll never forget the views of the mountains from this impressive "city in the clouds."

It's ironic that my just-completed journey to India made me appreciate the ancient temples of Angkor Wat even more than I did from my original visit. Although located in Cambodia, the 300 or so temples of Angkor are built with a distinctive Hindu architectural style that is found all over India. Proof once again that some of the ancients traveled great distances and made impressive changes to their environment with only the most basic of tools.

While the concentration of temples in Angkor Wat is impressive, it is the widespread distribution of Mayan pyramids in Central America that is astonishing. This was obviously a great civilization with an advanced mathematical system, an extremely sophisticated calendar and some pretty advanced observations of the physical universe.

So what happened? Why did they just disappear? And if they were such short people, why are all the steps to the temples so big? One of the great mysteries for the ages.

Samarkand would probably not be on many bucket lists, or mine either, except for a book I read when I was about 12 years old on Tammerlane, the great central Asian, 14th-century conqueror who made Samarkand his capital and the grandest city along the ancient Silk Route.

Today it is still home to the great university he founded. Although one of the most merciless butchers of ancient times, he always spared the lives of doctors, scientists and artisans in his conquered lands and had them sent back to Samarkand to enrich the city.

I just had to visit his tomb and for the price of a $1 bribe to the security guard, I was able to descend the 30 feet below into the actual burial chamber that holds Tammerlane's body. Way too cool when mixed with the memories of a 12-year-old.

Even a 12-year-old would appreciate a safari to Africa and the chance to camp out among the wild animals in the bush.

I remember lying in my tent in the Okavango Delta, listening to the roaring of lions hunting in the night and thinking how safe I felt in my tent with that 1 millimeter of nylon fabric between me and the lions. I slept so soundly that when a herd of elephants trampled through the camp in the middle of the night, I didn't even wake up.

I was always mesmerized by the phrase "to the ends of the Earth." To me, that always meant Tierra del Fuego, the very tip of South America and the furthest south a person can go without getting their feet wet.

This past February, I made it to Tierra del Fuego and found that yes indeed, it was a long way from there to anywhere else on Earth. It was also cold, rainy and so windswept that all the trees, bushes and shrubbery were bent in one permanent direction. And this was summer, their "nice" season.

A cruise through the Beagle Channel, named for the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin's ship of discovery on his voyages, made this truly unforgettable.

And finally, the Taj Mahal, perhaps the most perfect building ever constructed and a lasting memorial to a great Indian emperor's love for his wife.

Built of gleaming translucent white marble, it is inlaid with semiprecious stones and is so painstakingly constructed that the building is absolutely identical in symmetry when seen from each of its four sides. I didn't get to see it by moonlight, but early morning daylight is good enough for me.

So there's my original bucket list, completed and forever committed to memory. But in the movie, the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman characters had so many items on their list, they never completed them. That's the whole point of a bucket list. It should never be completed.

So I have to come up with a new list. Let's see: I have been on six continents and have only Antarctica to complete all seven. You can go diving with great white sharks off the coast of South Africa and bungee jump off the world's tallest bridge in New Zealand.

There's also the little town of Timbuktu, one of the most difficult cities to reach in central Africa. I also have not seen orangutans in the wild in Borneo, nor camped out in the Sahara desert in Libya. There's scuba diving through the underground caves of southern Mexico and ... Do I really have time for all this?