strange-geographies

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Strange Geographies: the Happy, Haunted Island of Poveglia

A quarantine station, a dumping ground for plague victims, more recently a mental hospital -- the tiny island of Poveglia in the Venice Lagoon has served many unpleasant purposes over the years, but today it stands empty, a crumbling collection of abandoned buildings and weeds run riot just two miles from the glittering palaces of the Grand Canal. Legends and rumors about Poveglia are nearly as pervasive as the weeds, and they read like a horror story: that so many people were burned and buried there... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Searching for the "Real" Venice

It's been said that Venice is not just a city of museums, but a museum city, a place to be visited and appreciated but not lived in, where on a sunny summer day tourists can outnumber locals two-to-one. When I announced my trip to Venice a few weeks ago and asked our readers what they'd like me to look into while there, several people voiced the same question: what's the real Venice like? How do the locals live? What goes on beyond the crowds and behind the touristy facade? What I discovered was an... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Walking on Glaciers

If there's one thing I can say about New Zealand (and there are many), it's that it is a place certainly not lacking in geographical diversity. In the South Island alone, a landmass five times smaller than the state of Texas, you have amazing fjords, mountain ranges, a world-class wine country, lonely, bronze-hued mining towns that'll remind you of California's gold country, beaches crowded with albatrosses, penguins and seals, and glaciers surrounded by temperate rainforest. It was that last feature I... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Bombay Beach

Bombay Beach may be the most famously depressing place in California; the poster child for the post-apocalypse. On the edge of the dying Salton Sea, an enormous body of water half the size of Rhode Island and so salty and polluted that by 2030 no fish will be able to survive in it, there is a town. There are several towns, actually, along the Salton's 70+ miles of rancid coastline, but the most in tact, the most iconically awful, is Bombay Beach. It's a 10-by-10-block square of squat houses and mobile... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: the House on Ghost Mountain

Deep in California's Anza-Borrego desert wilderness -- an hour from the nearest town, miles from the nearest paved road, atop the rocky crags of a mountain stippled with razor cactus -- is a house. Or the remains of one, at least, built and occupied for sixteen years by a noted writer and his family, who wanted to live off the land like Native Americans. Some people think Marshal South was crazy, others consider him an inspiration; one thing everyone can agree on is that he was interesting. People... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Death at the Border

I took an unusual road trip yesterday, to a cemetery near the Mexican border. There's nothing inherently unusual about visiting a cemetery, of course, except that in this case, I didn't know anyone who was buried there. Technically speaking, no one does. Some people call it the Juan Doe cemetery. It's a potter's field: hundreds of anonymous paupers' graves, unadorned save for a single, dun-colored brick assigned to each, spread across a few muddy acres of ground on the outskirts of a one-horse farm... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: The Fjords of New Zealand

For most people, the word "fjord" conjures up thoughts of Scandinavia and the majestic, frozen North. But New Zealand, unbeknownst to many, can boast some of the world's best fjords -- hemmed by towering cliffs, fantastically deep and stretching like long, crooked fingers from the Tasman Sea into some of New Zealand's most lush and remote scenery. They are to be found, appropriately enough, within an enormous and mostly unpopulated wilderness known as Fjordland. The easiest of the fjords to visit is... READ ON

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Vacation to Mars: Antarctica's Dry Valleys

Most of Antarctica has about 2 1/2 miles of ice covering it, and that cold, white wasteland is what most people picture when they think of our south pole. But as I discovered last week, when I posted about its mysterious Blood Falls, there is a series of dry valleys in Antarctica, about 4,000 kilometers square, that have no ice on them at all. The world's harshest desert, the moisture is sucked from the dry valleys by a rain shadow effect -- winds rushing over them at speeds up to 200/mph -- that leave... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Almost the Outback

Last spring, a friend and I took a trip to Australia and Vanuatu. Our main reason for being in Australia was to go diving on the Great Barrier Reef -- mission accomplished -- but even though we were in the humid, tropical northeast portion of the country, I'm a desert lover and made it my mission to see if we could find something like "the Outback" in the short time that we had between dives and our flight out of the country. So we rented a 2WD sedan that was laughably inappropriate for any sort of... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Cape Tribulation

When most people picture Australia, the endless brown wastelands of the Outback come to mind; after all, it is the world's driest country. But there's a lesser-known landscape nestled far in the country's remote northeast that's anything but dry and barren; through the Wet Tropics of Far North Queensland run mighty rivers and dramatic waterfalls, ancient rainforests that house 18% of the nation's bird population in just 0.2% of its landmass, and endure a mind-blowing 250 inches of rain a year -- most of... READ ON