Sea Cliffs: Étretat, France

 

 

Étretat is a small coastal village best known for its cliffs, including a famous natural arch. The spectacular sea cliffs and the associated resort beach attracted famous artists including Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet. The pebbled beach, sparked with quartz geodes, is wrapped in dramatic cliffs eroded into giant formations and offshore needles. Two of the arches can be seen from the town, a third requires a walk at low tide.

Cinque Terre: Rio Maggiore, Italy

 

Rio Maggiore is the southern-most of the 5 Terre. During the day you can hear bell towers chiming and at night the frogs are in frenetic chatter as small boats go night fishing for anchovies and other fish using lights to attract the fish. Riomaggiore also has an ancient stone castello, about which little has been written. An information sign outside explains that first mention of the castello appeared in a document from the mid-500s, which already described it as “ancient”. Its quadrangular walls with two circular towers were built to protect the citizens in case of an attack from the sea. In 800, the castello became a cemetery, and parts were destroyed to adapt it to its new function. Nowadays it is one of the monuments of the Parco Nazionale delle Cinque Terre. Most of the action in Riomaggiore is on the main street, Via Colombo, where there is an assortment of cafes, bars, restaurants, and of course, gelaterie. There are also alimentari shops selling the typical yummy Italian fare: fresh fruit (strawberries, cherries, and nespole), an assortment of salumi (salami, mortadella and the like), cheeses, olives, etc. These are good places to stock up for the hikes into the hills, although all of them are not very far from a town. Bar & Vini, perched on the side of the mountain above the sea, is excellent place for a summer night. The place had the usual mix of tourists and local families with their kids, even well into the night. 

Transparent House: Tokyo, Japan

This house in Tokyo by Sou Fukimoto Architects, known as House NA, stands out with its modern and transparent style. The interior of the residence has hardly any walls. The house boasts large glass windows for plenty of daylight, but the downside is a lack of privacy.

The three-story edifice features various levels of living space within the segmented structure that's great to just hang out on, as if you were perched atop a tree branch. House NA is the modern interpretation of an adult treehouse for permanent residence.

Beach Rock Treehouse: Okinawa Japan

 

High above the ground in Japan's Okinawa forest lies the Beach Rock Tree house. It was built by tree house creator Kobayashi Takashi – originally to communicating with extra-terrestrials.
Ladders and platforms providing safe access to the tree house despite its height. For the adrenalin junkies, there's a giant rope swing nearby to take you sailing through the treetops!

Chittorgarh Fort, India

 

Chittorgarh Fort is the largest fort in India and the grandest in the state of Rajasthan. The fort, plainly known as Chittor, sprawls majestically over a hill above the plains of the valley drained by the Berach River. The fort precinct with an evocative history is studded with a series of historical palaces, gates, temples and two prominent commemoration towers. These monumental ruins have inspired the imagination of tourists and writers for centuries.

Fort Carroll: Secure Bird Sanctuary?

 

In the mid-nineteenth century, Baltimore’s ports needed increased protection along the Patapsco River for the routes between Baltimore and Chesapeake Bay. By 1848, the United States War Department had the green light to begin construction on a hexagonal structure designed by Robert E. Lee.

The fort would be named for Declaration of Independence-signer Charles Carroll in 1850, and saw use in the Civil War despite not yet being fully completed.  The structure was planned to have four levels, the first of which cost one million dollars to complete.

Abandoned Airport: Ciudad Real

 

Nothing highlights the Spanish financial problem like an abandoned airport.

Opened in 2009 at a cost of €1.1bn, the Ciudad Real Central Airport saw light use before being shut down in April of 2012.  Ciudad Real is a Spanish city about two and a half hours south of Madrid.  The airport was to be the first linked to the Spanish high-speed AVE rail system, making the trip to Madrid only 50 minutes.

Abandoned Industrial Icon: Armour Meat Packing Plant

 

The Armour & Company meat packing plant in National City, Illinois is a window into a bygone era, a time capsule with late-19th century technology still on display. During its heyday the busy stock yards of East St. Louis were the largest in the world, and known around the U.S. as the “Hog Capital of the Nation.”

Advances in technology and labor disputes ultimately drove the meat packers out of National City. The obsolete Armour plant had become expensive to operate and was eventually shut down by the company in 1959.

Unused since Armour & Co. left nearly 55 years ago, the 110 year-old structure still sits in East St. Louis today.

The Forgotten Castle on the Hudson

 

On a lonely island fifty miles north of New York City, the bricks of a once-proud castle slowly return to the earth. The crumbling fortress is one of several remaining structures on tiny Pollepel Island, an abandoned six-and-a-half acre crag hugging the east bank of the Hudson River.

The 100 year-old Bannerman’s Castle was originally built as an arsenal, and has been abandoned for the last forty five years since a fire ravaged the island in the summer of 1969. It was the creation of a nineteenth-century businessman and served as an advertisement for the era’s largest military surplus empire.

When the castle’s namesake passed away, the island was forgotten. It’s brief resurrection was cut short by a fatal fire. For half a century the building has been losing battles against nature. Absent intervention in the very near future, it may lose the war.

Sigiriya: The Lion Rock of Sri Lanka

 

Deep in the middle of Sri Lanka, a massive column of rock juts out from the green tropical forest. It reaches 660 feet tall and features frescoes, graffiti, and landscaped gardens. The rock is known as Sigiriya (see-gee-REE-yah) and holds a special place in the island’s cultural history.

It was established as the stronghold of a rogue king over 1,500 years ago, and today the Sigiriya complex stands as one of the earliest preserved examples of ancient urban planning. Ultimately the rock was unable to save its king, but it succeeded in preserving ancient Sinhalese culture.

Hiller lake(pink lake), Western Australia

Lake Hillier is a pink-coloured lake on Middle Island, the largest of the islands that make up the Recherche Archipelago off the coast of Esperance.

From above the lake appears a solid bubble gum pink. The lake is about 600 meters long, and is surrounded by a rim of sand and dense woodland of paperbark and eucalyptus trees. A narrow strip of sand dunes covered by vegetation separates it from the blue Southern Ocean.

No-one fully knows why the lake is pink. Scientists speculate that the colour comes from a dye created by bacteria that lives in the salt crusts.

Petra, Jordan

Petra (from the Latin word 'petrae', meaning 'rock') lies in a great rift valley east of Wadi 'Araba in Jordan about 80 kilometers south of the Dead Sea. It came into prominence in the late first century BCE (BC) through the success of the spice trade. The city was the principal city of ancient Nabataea and was famous above all for two things: its trade and its hydraulic engineering systems. It was locally autonomous until the reign of Trajan, but it flourished under Roman rule. The town grew up around its Colonnaded Street in the first century CE (AD) and by the mid-first century had witnessed rapid urbanization. Following the flow of the Wadi Musa, the city-center was laid out on either sides of the Colonnaded Street on an elongated plan between the theater in the east and the Qasr al-Bint in the west. The quarries were probably opened in this period, and there followed virtually continuous building through the first and second centuries CE.

Aogashima Volcano, Japan

 

Aogashima is a small, tropical volcanic island in the Philippine Sea, under the administration of Tokyo despite being located some 358 kilometers away from the country’s capital. It is the southernmost and the most isolated inhabited island of the Izu archipelago. The island itself is a giant volcanic crater, and within that crater there’s another, smaller volcano. Aogashima is still considered an active Class-C volcano though it last erupted in the 1780′s. When last erupted it killed nearly half of the island’s population and forced the remaining inhabitants to flee. It took just fifty years for the people to return. Today, some 200 brave villagers live on the island.

Ghost Town: Klomino, Poland

 

The village of Klomino (located in northwestern Poland) is the only “official” ghost town in Poland. Originally known as Westfalenhof, it was a large garrison and training ground of the German Wehrmacht during World War II. After the war the village (then renamed Grodek) was a base for the Red Army, and for many years it existed only on Russian military maps. Since the Red Army withdrew its forces from Poland in 1993, Klomino has sat empty and deserted.

The Manhattan of the Desert: Shibam, Yemen

 

Deep in the middle of Yemen lays a town nearly two-thousand years old that pioneered skyscrapers.  Shibam, a town of about 7,000 people, was founded sometime around the 3rd century AD.  The town was built in its unique way to help protect residents from regional Bedouin attacks. Enormous clay walls were built around the city and residences were built upward rather than outward. Shibam is often referred to as “the oldest skyscraper city in the world,” and is one of the oldest examples of vertical urban planning.

Ghost Town: Craco, Italy

 

Craco is a commune and medieval village located in the Region of Basilicata and the Province of Matera, about 25 miles inland from the Gulf of Taranto at the instep of the “boot” of Italy.  The medieval village of Craco is typical of the hill towns of the region with mildly undulating shapes and the lands surrounding it sown with wheat. Around 540AD the area was called “Montedoro” and inhabited by Greeks who moved inland from the coastal town of Metaponto. Tombs have been found dating from the 8th century suggesting the original settlement dates back to then. Today, earthquakes, landslides, and a lack of fertile farming land have contributed to the abandonment of Craco