Catherine Price

by 101 Places Not to See Before You Die

  Of course, since the mine extends about a dozen stories underground, there’s more to see at Khewra than just the salt mosque—for example, an assembly hall with backlit walls and a replica of the Great Wall of China. But be prepared: it too is smaller than the real thing.

  Chapter 61

  Anywhere on a Yamaha Rhino

  Introduced in 2003, the Yamaha Rhino is one of America’s most popular recreational utility vehicles. Reminiscent of a miniature Jeep, the Rhino’s been described as a “tricked-out golf cart,” but that doesn’t capture its true power. What golf cart, after all, can reach forty miles per hour and is recommended for use on sand dunes?

  And that’s not all it does.

  To quote from the legal complaint for an anti-Rhino class action lawsuit:

  The Yamaha Rhino is prone to tip over and seriously injure its occupants due to several defects, including its top-heavy design, dangerously narrow track width, high center of gravity, wheels that are too small to maintain stability, steering geometry that facilitates rollovers and tip overs even at low speeds and on flat terrain, heavy rigid steel roll cage that has no safety padding, lack of doors, leg guards, or other enclosures to protect occupants, lack of handholds or handles for passengers, and defective restraint systems.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rhinos have been involved in a lot of accidents, causing everything from head, back, and neck wounds to severe crush injuries that often require surgery or amputation. According to the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission, at least forty-six drivers or passengers have been killed by Rhinos, including several cases where people were thrown from their RUV and then smushed when the half-ton vehicle landed on them.

  In 2009, thanks to pressure from lawsuits and the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission, Yamaha announced a free repair program that retrofits Rhinos with several safety features that lessen the likelihood of a rollover and help prevent people from flying out. For example, doors. But they still haven’t recalled the Rhino—instead they continue to market it as a family-friendly off-road vehicle.

  Ride at your own risk.

  Chapter 62

  Chacabuco, Chile

  The tiny town of Chacabuco, Chile, has never been a tourist hotspot—it’s in the middle of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth. Founded in 1924 by the Lautaro Nitrate Company Ltd., Chacabuco started off as a mining town for sodium nitrate, an ingredient in fertilizer that used to be one of Chile’s major exports. But sodium nitrate is also an important ingredient for bombs, and during World War I, Germany perfected a method of creating it synthetically on a large scale. That was great news for Germany, but it devastated Chile’s economy. Chacabuco closed down in 1938, making it one of 170 nitrate ghost towns scattered through the Atacama.

  Being a ghost town would have been bad enough. But then in 1973, Pinochet decided to turn it into a concentration camp. For the next year and a half it held between six hundred and one thousand political prisoners, who lived in former mining quarters that had been turned into barracks.

  For a prison, Chacabuco’s location is ideal. Stretching some six hundred miles up and down the Chilean coast, the Atacama Desert is fifty times drier than Death Valley and is lifeless except for some algae, lichen, and the occasional cactus. The landscape is so desolate that NASA has used it as a practice ground for life-detecting robots, and in Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets, the Atacama played the role of Mars. Any escapees would have quickly died of dehydration and been turned into mummies, which makes the fact that the Chilean army surrounded Chacabuco with nearly one hundred land mines seem like a bit of overkill.

  If you decide to visit, you’ll get a warm welcome from the town’s sole resident, Pedro Barreda, who has devoted the past few years of his life to protecting and preserving the town. With a daily schedule that consists mostly of tending to a few plants and tidying up his living quarters, Barreda loves showing people around. He doesn’t charge anything for the tours, but if you feel like bringing a thank-you gift, he’d certainly appreciate some water.

  Chapter 63

  The New South China Mall

  Located in the muggy, smoggy city of Dongguan, the South China Mall opened in 2005 to much excitement: with 7.1 million square feet of retail space, it’s one of the largest shopping centers in the world. Replete with an amusement park, IMAX theater, and hotel complex—not to mention a full-size Arc de Triomphe—it was built in anticipation of seventy thousand visitors a day.

  Alas, those shoppers never came. As of June 2008, there were fewer than a dozen stores operating in a shopping complex built to accommodate fifteen hundred. Instead of bustling with shoppers, its long hallways were quiet, abandoned except for a few bored salesclerks and the occasional security guard. Escalators stood still, their railings covered in dust-coated plastic. From the very beginning, business was so bad that some of its monuments weren’t even finished. “The mall entered the world pre-ruined,” wrote one reporter, “as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay.”

  But if the mall itself is depressing, its marketing material is aggressively cheery. “Do you want to take a dreamlike journey?” it asks in a description of the Amazing World, an indoor/outdoor amusement center—and one of the mall’s only functional features—that is supposedly “full of excitement, scream, fashion and joy.” There is a roller coaster. There is a log flume ride (though it sometimes lacks water). There is a free fall ride that asks visitors whether they would like to “experience the feeling of ‘death.’ ” As if that’s not enough, “there are other peculiar amusement activities suitable for the old and the young.” “Bumping car, Wizard of Oz, Self-enjoyment”—there’s even a “special area for naughty children.”

  If only some would visit.

  An empty store in the South China Mall

  Swoolverton/Wikipedia Commons

  LISA MARGONELLI

  Sumqayit, Azerbaijan

  Oh! Sumqayit, Azerbaijan! Once, you made all the petrochemicals the Soviet Union could consume. Once, your massive factories, your lurching cooling towers, your python-esque pipes must have gleamed in the wintry sun of the Caspian! Your workers walked in throngs, carrying the extra rations of milk and cheese they received to prevent bone loss. But all that ended, and now you are rusting. Workless, people dig holes in the ground, hoping to sell the dirt. What remains is the pollution, enough to put little Sumqayit on both Time magazine’s and Scientific American’s lists of the top ten most polluted places on earth in 2007. Given that, the absolute saddest place on earth can be found in the city cemetery, which is crowded with tiny graves that are the result of Sumqayit’s horrendously high infant mortality rate. Azeri graves often have photographs of the deceased, and here they are of well-dressed children with birth defects, obviously much loved during their short lives. There are restaurants in Sumqayit, but the longer I stayed in town, the more terrifying the idea of consuming local food became—so I recommend bringing snacks and water with you from Baku, thirty kilometers away.

  LISA MARGONELLI is the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.

  Chapter 64

  An Island off Germany’s East Coast, January 16, 1362

  Imagine the scene: you’re a German farmer in the mid-1300s, diligently tending your livestock in your field on the island of Strand. In the distance you can see the buildings of Rungholt, Strand’s main port, and beyond that the North Sea. You’re working hard but you’re happy—your wife’s pregnant again, and your youngest sons are just old enough to start helping out on the farm. You take a moment’s break to gaze out into the distance, giving thanks for all that is good, and that’s when you realize that something is not right. The clouds are dark and rushing toward you. The wind is screaming. Your rudimentary hoe is blown out of your hands just as the sky erupts into pelting, horizontal rain. You try to run to shelter, but you never make it. The storm is too strong. The sea rises up and enormous waves crash over the is
land. You, your family, and your entire community are killed.

  No, it’s not the apocalypse. It’s the Grote Mandrenke, Low Saxon for “the Great Man-Drowning”—a massive cyclonic windstorm that hit the northern European coast on January 16, 1362. The mandrenke was so grote that it killed at least twenty-five thousand people, destroyed some sixty Danish parishes, sank the entire city of Rungholt, and smashed the German coast into islands. Not bad for a day’s work—and not a good day to have been there.

  Chapter 65

  Fucking, Austria

  In 2004, the residents of the small Austrian town of Fucking took a vote on whether to change their village’s name. Our town can’t be mentioned on international television, argued the proponents of a switch. And besides, it wouldn’t be the first time a group of people abandoned what they considered an embarrassing moniker: the Canadian village of Gayside is now known as Baytona.

  But the good people of Fucking decided that no, they did not want to change the name. They were proud of their home, this hamlet of just over one hundred people, founded in 1070 and named after a man named Focko. Besides, a good part of their annual GDP came from T-shirt sales.

  There was one problem, however: the town’s road signs. Long considered tempting trophies by immature tourists, they have been stolen more times than the town’s budget could afford. So Fucking’s leaders came up with a plan. They commissioned new signs, bolted to steel posts that were embedded in a concrete block—a creation so sturdy that according to Fucking’s mayor, it would take all night to steal. And in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, they decided to address another local nuisance at the same time: speeding. So right below the town name they hung a different placard that says, BITTE, NICHT SO SCHNELL, accompanied by a picture of two cartoon children.

  “Fucking,” the signs now announce. “Please, not so fast.”

  Skip Fucking, but you might want to check out the Newfoundland town of Dildo. It’s home to the Dildo Museum interpretive center and everyone’s favorite summer event, the Historic Dildo Days.

  One of Fucking’s former stealable signs

  Wikipedia Commons

  Chapter 66

  The White Shark Café While Dressed As an Elephant Seal

  I know you think it’s an unlikely situation: you, floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, dressed as an elephant seal. But it’s not like it’s impossible. You’re at a costume party on a cruise boat from Hawaii, there’s free booze, you decide to reenact the “I’m the king of the world!” scene from Titanic, and then, boom. You fall overboard.

  Please make sure this doesn’t happen. If there’s one spot you don’t want to go swimming in a seal outfit, it’s the four-hundred-mile-wide stretch of ocean halfway between Hawaii and Baja, California. Known to scientists as the “White Shark Café,” this is a popular congregation spot for great whites, who come to the café from all along the North American coast to spend some quality time—sometimes months—hanging out with other sharks. They swim in circles; they participate in mysterious dives. Eventually, they return to the coast for their favorite time of year: elephant seal breeding season.

  No one’s really sure what attracts the sharks to the café or, for that matter, what they eat while they’re there—despite its name, the White Shark Café is considered by scientists to be a food desert, devoid of any other creatures that the great whites might enjoy. Which brings me back to why you shouldn’t visit: no matter what the sharks are doing, they’re likely to be eager for a snack.

  Chapter 67

  The Sidewalk Outside the Roman Coliseum During the Crazy Gladiator’s Shift

  If you visit Rome you should, of course, go to the Coliseum. But do not linger on the sidewalk outside.

  I say this because of the gladiators. No, not the ghosts of the thousands of men slaughtered in the Coliseum’s ring to give nobles something to do on a Sunday afternoon. I’m talking about the modern-day gladiators: the guys in sandals and capes who accost tourists outside the coliseum’s entrance, offering to pose for photographs in exchange for tips.

  Most of these gladiators are harmless, more interested in carrying on loud cell phone conversations with their girlfriends than they are in accurately portraying ancient Rome. But there is one gladiator who takes his role-playing more seriously than the rest. Trust me: you’ll know him when you see him.

  I caught my first glimpse of his feathered helmet and silver face mask as I took a gelato break on a nearby stone bench, and it didn’t take me long to realize that this gladiator was different. The other gladiators smiled and posed for photographs with people who had voluntarily approached them. The crazy gladiator grabbed a woman off the street, hoisted her above his head with a grunt, and held her hostage until her boyfriend had taken a picture. The other gladiators let kids touch their swords. The crazy gladiator seized a small girl by the back of her overalls and pretended to plunge his trident into her stomach as her flustered parents struggled to find their wallets. The other gladiators attracted children by letting them try on their helmets. The crazy gladiator had a net.

  The tactic worked. He drew a crowd. And I, a person who experiences a rush of anxiety any time I see a mime, decided that I wanted a picture with him.

  I handed the camera to my friend Mark, and we approached, feigning calm. This did not fool the crazy gladiator. “Ah! Christians to kill!” he shouted in English. He ran at us, trident raised, and grabbed me by the neck. “Come over here!” he said, gesturing toward a fellow gladiator. “Christians to kill! I love killing Christians!” His friend obliged, holding a plastic sword to my throat as the crazy gladiator pointed his trident toward my chest and yelled, “Silicone, ha ha ha!” as Mark snapped a photo.

  I barely had a chance to recover from this public reference to my (decidedly silicone-free) chest before the crazy gladiator grabbed our camera, handed it to his friend, and pulled us both toward him for another shot. Then he angled the trident toward Mark’s crotch and gave the camera a worried look and a thumbs-down.

  Luckily, no breasts or testicles were actually harmed in the making of our photographs. Instead, the second gladiator snapped a final picture, turned to Mark, and said, “You tip the gladiators, yes?” And like countless tourists before us, we nodded and pulled out our wallets, grateful to have escaped.

  Chapter 68

  Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiberglass THING

  When it comes to this particular type of roadside kitsch, I thought that America must be the winner. Take, for example, the giant muskie at the Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame & Museum in Hayward, Wisconsin. More than four stories tall and as long as a Boeing 757, the fish is the largest fiberglass sculpture in the world.

  But while we might have the biggest, Australia has the most: it’s home to more than 150 giant roadside sculptures, which are affectionately known as Big Things and are becoming recognized as a type of folk art.

  It all started with the Big Banana. Built in 1964 at Coffs Harbour, it’s since been joined by scores of oversize creations, from the twelve-ton Giant Koala to the Big Merino, an enormous sheep known to fans as Rambo. There’s the Big Golden Gumboot, the Big Trout, and the Big Cigar. Sometimes the sculptures are cartoonish (the Big Boxing Crocodile); sometimes they’re mundane (the Big Coffee Pot). They can even be scatological—the Big Poo appeared briefly in 2002 as a protest against sewage ocean dumping. But more commonly they celebrate food, as is the case with the Big Oyster, Big Cherries, the Big Mango, and the Big Lobster (known to locals as Larry). Some represent things you don’t really want to see larger-than-life: witness Big Mosquito.

  Clustered mostly in the southeast, Australia’s Big Things have a campy appeal that makes it fun to take a picture next to one or two. But before you join the trend of people scheduling road trips to see all 150, be sure to evaluate your priorities: to visit every Big Thing, you’d have to drive the circumference of Australia.

  Paulscf/Wikipedia Commons

  Chapter 69

>   The Path of an Advancing Column of Driver Ants

  If you don’t relish the idea of spending your vacation being attacked by flesh-eating insects, you should stay clear of driver ants. Native to the African rain forest, they protect themselves by plunging their giant, razor-sharp jaws into anything that stands in their way. Get pinched by one driver ant and you’ll have two irritating puncture wounds; get pinched by a colony and your African safari will come to a quick and gruesome end.

  Luckily, driver ants travel in groups of up to twenty million, which makes them pretty easy to avoid. “Viewed from afar, a huge raiding column of a driver ant colony seems like a single living entity, a giant amoeba spreading across 70 meters of ground,” says Bert Hölldobler, an expert on the species. The ants also prefer the taste of insects to human flesh and, thanks to their tendency to eat anything in front of them, are excellent for pest control—provided that you’re not home at the time of their visit. If you are home and are for some reason immobilized, however, you could be eaten alive.

  In the unlikely case that that happens, here are some interesting facts to distract you from the searing pain: driver ants are blind, so they communicate through pheromones. Fertile males are driven out of the colony when they’re young and spend their pubescent weeks developing into gross-looking winged insects whose bloated abdomens give them their even grosser nickname: “sausage flies.” Once a sausage fly reaches sexual maturity, he sniffs out a nearby driver ant column and then plops himself down in its path. The other ants swarm on top of him and, as if punishing a philandering husband, rip off his wings. Once he’s been suitably incapacitated, the ants carry the sausage fly off to a virgin queen, who nabs a lifetime’s worth of sperm, and then leaves him to die.