Creepy, Bizarre, Isolated Places

[Maaik]

Not man-made, but the Crystal Caves in Mexico are beautiful, surreal and will fucking kill you.



here's another article on them: http://www.ironammonite.com/2009/12/surviving-cueva-de-los-cristales-giant.html

[Good Intentions]

Woah

[davy]

Seriously.

[YojimboMonkey]

I think they showed that place in the Planet Earth series, it's pretty amazing looking

[Andrew_TSKS]

There are plans to make the whole Iron Curtain into a long-distance path, the Iron Curtain Trail.

I'd be way more into walking that than the Appalachian Trail. Maybe it's just me, but I'm sayin. That would rule.

[Thermofusion]

does the Iron Curtain trail go to Argentina?

[cold before sunrise]

Not man-made, but the Crystal Caves in Mexico are beautiful, surreal and will fucking kill you.



here's another article on them: http://www.ironammonite.com/2009/12/surviving-cueva-de-los-cristales-giant.html

wowza. i've seen articles on those giant crystal caves before but what a photo!

[jebreject]

Oh, wow, I just now realized those were people in there. My sense of scale was way, way off.

[ellaguru]

Oh, wow, I just now realized those were people in there. My sense of scale was way, way off.

Yeah, I find it hard to look at the people and not see them as though they were photoshopped in.

[The_Tourist]

i thought they were doozers.

[davy]

Ha!

[davy]

Streaming right now on Netflix Instant: Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness.



As far as decent-documentaries-about-subjects-I'm-interested-in go, this definitely scratched an itch. It's interesting to see that there's an international network of groups dedicated to doing what I used to do all the time back in Macon. In the late-90s, I was exploring shit every bit as dangerous and illegal as the stuff that the hardcore urban explorers were doing in bigger cities with better equipment. In a different life, I might've hooked up with these guys--perhaps if I'd been internet savvy a few years earlier. Who knows?



These were taken some time around 1998 or so, in a dead industrial district of downtown Macon, GA. That place in the lower-right was perilous, man. We went into the basement of that place and I swear the entire floor was submerged in 3 inches of green sludge that seemed to glow in the dark. Hard to breathe. We didn't venture too far.

[Maaik]

I've had my eye on that--so it's worth watching?

[davy]

I'd say so, yeah. Tons of cool footage. The camera operators were game for pretty much anything.

They go inside this one crazy-ass place in Orlando--a touristy "house of the future" that had been abandoned years before--and there's a homeless guy living in there. Just fucking sleeping in a recliner while they tiptoe around him. He wakes up while they're upstairs and starts to get all aggro on 'em, but when he realizes they came just to check the place out, he starts giving them a tour and flirting with the girl. Nuts.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Cairo, Illinois:

http://www.visualnews.com/2010/11/30/cairo-illinois-picture/

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eddwx/what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/

[Antero]

Oh man.  We stopped there for the night on the way down to NOLA last spring.  It was incredibly creepy at night.  We hypothesized that their primary industries were bloody corpses hanging in abandoned buildings and revealing horrible things in flashes of lightning.

[Ignatius]

CHAPTER XXIII.
IN WHICH THE POWERFUL EFFECT OF NATURAL SCENERY IS EVINCED IN THE CASE OF THE MISSOURIAN, WHO, IN VIEW OF THE REGION ROUND-ABOUT CAIRO, HAS A RETURN OF HIS CHILLY FIT.

   AT Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack  -- his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.

   In the dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies, the boat now lies before Cairo. She has landed certain passengers, and tarries for the coming of expected ones. Leaning over the rail on the inshore side, the Missourian eyes through the dubious medium that swampy and squalid domain; and over it audibly mumbles his cynical mind to himself, as Apemantus' dog may have mumbled his bone. He bethinks him that the man with the brass-plate was to land on this villainous bank, and for that cause, if no other, begins to suspect him.

I was like "why again is Cairo Illinois vaguely familiar to me?" And then I remembered.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Melville, right? What is that from, Moby Dick?

[Ignatius]

The Confidence Man

[Maaik]

Hey, here's a neat post to Metafilter about Kowloon Walled City that includes youtube links to a German documentary about the place.

[Antero]

And a link to an awesome cross-section!

[auto-da-fey]

has this thread covered Manshiyat naser, Cairo [Egypt]'s "Garbage City"? It's this gigantic area, within the Cairo metropolitan area, where a group of Coptic Christians (the Zabbaleen) collect the city's garbage, sort through it, and recycle/re-utilize it.

the way our host described it, I expected a shantytown along the likes of the makeshift housing in Guatemala City. but it turns out to look like a small Midwestern factory town in terms of infrastructure/architecture--except, with every single building packed full of garbage.

the people apparently live in abject poverty, with terrible health conditions. but to my surprise, it's pretty common to see people dressed like they just stepped out of a Gap, walking through this all-encompassing trashscape.

M took some good shots of it that I can try to post later, but thought I'd throw it out there now because the inspiration struck.

[fishjim]

Just found this thread - loving it. That photo TSKS posted is stunning. The colors remind me of the industrial dystopias of Edward Burtynsky.

Here in the SF Bay Area all the creepy, bizarre, isolated places are old mining towns. I grew up a half hour's drive from New Almaden, at one time the nation's largest mercury mine, which still has the deepest shaft on the continent (sealed off, alas) and which produced the bulk of the mercury used to extract silver from Nevada's Comstock's mines, and gold in the mother lode.

It's also the single greatest point source of mercury pollution in the Bay Area, and the reason we don't want to dredge the Bay much deeper. Any further and we'll kick up silted layers of methyl mercury in the sediment.

[YojimboMonkey]

An "urban decay/exploration" type post right up my alley: 7 Abandoned Breweries Open for Exploration

Dixie Brewery, New Orleans, LA, USA


Stella Artois, Leuven, Belgium


Hamms Brewery, St. Paul, MN, USA

[Aglaya]

The Stella Artois one is gorgeous!