An artifact taken from one of America's shortest wars.
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ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS anyone notices during a visit to Cambodia, is the unbearable heat. Sweltering and oppressive temperatures and humidity beat down on travelers wading through the dense tropical jungles of the Southern region. Incidentally, when a larger and more aggressive group of travelers, the French military, made their way through the country, they also found the weather brutal and unforgiving. As the unfamiliar temperatures began killing off French troops, the occupying European power needed to create artificial respite. Their answer to the tropical problem was Bokor Hill Station, a small resort town for French soldiers in the region.
Anarchic, organic, surreal, this enclave was once among the most densely populated places on Earth.
As Hollywood boomed in the early 1930s, moviegoers wanted to see more of the world, and the film industry had the means to show it to them. Films set in exotic locations grew popular for this reason, with South Seas-inspired stories becoming a particular draw. Decades before South Pacific hit Broadway stages, films of the era featured white, male adventurers and native maidens grappling with magical island enchantment, shipwrecks, pirates, romance, and the like. They were a hit, and Polynesia became the de facto image of paradise in America’s collective imagination.
Newscasters and Stephen Colbert seem to think so.
An eccentric garden of Indian sculptures in the green of Ireland dedicated to Alan Turing.
Landscape photography like this helped create the National Park system.
Mike Parker, General Manager of Atlas Obscura Trips, shares his thoughts about a return to travel in 2021. In the background of our socially distant days, a sense of community and solidarity hums through our quiet streets and shuttered gathering places. In New York, it reaches a daily crescendo at
Its dedicated, sagelike maker isn't at all upset.
IN THE 1960S, FIDEL CASTRO faced many challenges by becoming an ideological enemy of the United States. One was being seen as the tip of the Soviet spear, a menace to democracy just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Another was that America maintained the Guantanamo Bay military base, which was capable of sheltering 50 warships, on the southeastern tip of Cuba. But arguably the most vexing issue for Castro, especially on a sweltering summer day in Havana, was the United States cutting off Cuba’s dairy supply. That was a problem, because Casto was obsessed with ice cream. When he was still a young revolutionary in the jungle, a wealthy supporter, Celia Sánchez, sent him an ice-cream cake via mule for his birthday. When the rebellion succeeded, he established himself at the Havana Libre Hotel, where he habitually enjoyed the cafeteria’s milkshakes. In “A Personal Portrait of Fidel,” novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez described Castro polishing off 18 scoops after Sunday lunch. His affection for ice cream was such that the CIA attempted to poison his milkshake. “That was the closest the CIA got to assassinating Fidel,” a retired state security general told Reuters in 2007.
Once, Americans rode the rails for charbroiled steak, golden French toast, and prunes.
When America left the military base after the war, the remaining goods—everything from weaponry to bottles of Coca-Cola—were offered to the French and British at a very low price, 6 cents to the dollar. However, the colonizers were going on the assumption that should they refuse to buy the items, the U.S. military would be forced to simply leave them behind for free. The Americans were having none of this. To spite the British and French, the military made the rash decision to drive all of the vehicles, food, clothing, drinks, and other equipment to a wharf on the southern coast of the island. The army then drove all of the vehicles into the sea, used bulldozers to dump the rest of the supplies over the wharf, before also driving the bulldozers into the sea, ensuring that the European countries would not be able to get their hands on the items at all, free or otherwise. Millions of dollars worth of goods were completely destroyed over the period of those two days, rendered unusable at the bottom of the ocean. As a result of the dumping, the waters were contaminated with fuel, rubber, metal and other waste, leaving the local Vanuatuans shocked at the carnage, though they salvaged what they could once the Americans had finally departed.
The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times. Most interestingly of all, for me at least, you can ruminate about what those differences say about American travel, American writing, American history.
From 1896 until the 1930s, showmen would travel the country staging wrecks at state fairs.
Located just over 1,500 miles from Japan, Tinian was an ideal launch site for the U.S. 509th Composite Group and 313th Bombardment Wing. But first, a massive construction project had to be undertaken on the north end of Tinian. Working for more than 45 days and nights, troops built docks, airport runways, barracks, an administration building, oil storage facilities, weapons depots, an air-conditioned bomb assembly building, and two bomb loading pits. The result, North Field, was the largest airport in the world at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBP0IKaPZxI
WALK INTO A PATCH OF forest in New England, and chances are you will—almost literally—stumble across a stone wall. Thigh-high, perhaps, it is cobbled together with stones of various shapes and sizes, with splotches of lichen and spongy moss instead of mortar. Most of the stones are what are called “two-handers”—light enough to lift, but not with just one hand. The wall winds down a hill and out of sight. According to Robert Thorson, a landscape geologist at University of Connecticut, these walls are “damn near everywhere” in the forests of rural New England. He estimates that there are more than 100,000 miles of old, disused stone walls out there, or enough to circle the globe four times. Who would build a stone wall, let alone hundreds of thousands of miles of them, in the middle of the forest? No one. The walls weren’t built in the forest but in and around farms. By the middle of the 19th century, New England was over 70 percent deforested by settlers, a rolling landscape of smallholdings as far as the eye could see. But by the end of the century, industrialization and large-scale farms led to thousands of fields being abandoned, to begin a slow process of reforestation.
All the places in Atlas Obscura in the United States, on one map.
For two days in 1944, Allied bombers rained destruction on the beaches of the Caroline Islands in the South Pacific. During World War II, the lagoon was host to Japan’s Imperial Fleet, which was left destroyed in the wake of Operation Hailstone, often referred to as Japan’s Pearl Harbor. Today, hundreds of Japanese aircraft and other military machines remain at the bottom of the lagoon, making it one of the world’s best World War II wreck dive sites. The islands were once part of the Spanish West Indies, explored by Magellan and later visited by Spanish merchants and missionaries. The low coral islands are surrounded by a remarkable, sheltered reef — ideal for housing a navy. On February 17, 1944, five fleet carriers and four light carriers, along with support ships and some 500 aircraft, descended on the islands in a surprise attack. Just a week before the attack, the Japanese military had moved additional ships to the area, and, as a result, approximately 250 Japanese aircraft were destroyed and more than 50 ships sunk. An estimated 400 Japanese soldiers were killed in one ship alone, trapped in the cargo hold. Most of the fleet remains in exactly the same spot it was left, largely forgotten by the world until the late 1960s. Jacques Cousteau’s 1969 film Lagoon of Lost Ships (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAqxu2RKO04) explored the wreck-littered lagoon, and many of the sunken ships were then still full of bodies. As wreck divers brought attention to the site, Japan began recovery efforts, and many bodies have been removed and returned to Japan for burial. A few, however, remain. Many of the wrecks are visible through the shallow, clear water, making it an accessible dive. The wrecks themselves can be very dangerous, not only because of ragged edges and tangles of cables but because of half-century old oil and fuel leaking into the water, creating a potentially dangerous situation. Up until the 1990s, the lagoon was known at Truk, but it is now called Chuuk. Many maps still show both names.
La Cueva (“The Cave”) is a favorite weekend spot for locals and the venturesome tourists that get wind of it by word of mouth. The cavernous disco is located on the northern outskirts of town, about a 10-minute walk up a hill away from the center of Trinidad, an old Spanish colony that feels even more preserved in time than the rest of Cuba. Two hundred miles from the bustle of Havana, horses still trot down the narrow cobblestone streets of sleepy Trinidad, a Caribbean coastal town founded by Spanish explorers in the 1500s that rose to prominence as Cuba’s sugar economy boomed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The historic town is an unlikely setting for one of the world’s most bizarre discos. As you approach La Cueva, the first curious thing you’ll notice is there’s no noise at all coming from the club. It’s not until you walk through the gated entrance, descend down a long flight of stairs and through a tunnel into the jagged cavity that the dance floor opens up and the music starts blaring. The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s very hot. You’re in the Caribbean after all, dancing in a throng of a thousand people. In a cave.
A tiny red pebble marks "One Square Inch of Silence" in the Washington woods.
