Catherine Price (14 page)

T
he 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.

L
ocated 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

O
h! 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.

I
magine 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 island. 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.

I
n 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

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.

I
f 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.