Jack Tame: Visitor spots in mint condition

Germaphobes would do best to bypass Ireland's Blarney Stone on their travels. Photo / iStock

When you think about it, the Blarney Stone is just a bit gross.

All those people with all those puckered lips, lining up to land a smooch?

Think of the cold sores.

I'm no germ freak, but I prefer my tourist attractions at the sanitary end of the scale. Perhaps Blarney could benefit from a Listerine station nearby.

Seattle outdoes Cork, though.

For the past 20-odd years a random brick wall in the centre of town has been nearly as popular as the flying salmon and the world's first Starbucks in Pike Place nearby.

Walls make for good attractions. The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem draws millions of pilgrims a year. Murals along the remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall still delight the Contiki crowd.

The city walls of Dubrovnik and Istanbul allow tourists to trace history's footsteps.

The sorry brick walls of Belfast remind us The Troubles aren't long past.

And, of course, that's not to mention the wall-iest wall of all: the Great Wall makes that driveway extension you have been saving for seem humble, to say the least.

Still, for all their history and tactical importance, none of the world's best compare with Seattle's Bubblegum Brick Wall.

In the space of 20 years, you couldn't guess how many million of pieces of chud have been chewed and pressed against its brick.

No one knows how many variations of spearmint have been tongued, molared and masticated, folded against someone else's freshly discarded squidge.

The wall these days is the colour of a freshly exploded cockroach, guts full of Neapolitan icecream, splattered wet and flat.

The excess gum weighs a ton. The city says the wall is a safety hazard and is calling in the experts to clean off the gum.

Now, there's a summer job.

But it won't be long before the Bubblegum Brick Wall is back to its sickly best.

The Blarney Stone proves that a bit of shared saliva never puts the masses off.

And at least in Seattle, the tourists have good breath.

Jack Tame is on Newstalk ZB Saturdays, 9am-midday