Hotels in the jungle, Bali

Bali : Island of the Gods, The Morning of the World, a mystical place that evokes different visions for all that have experienced it, and for those that have only heard the name. An island that encompasses many diverse regions and styles – regions of untouched beauty, traditional villages, heaving and raucous budget-traveler districts, resort areas, playgrounds for the rich and famous, and many little hideaways all combined to form the identity that...

Mount Roraima, Venezuela

Mount Roraima (also known as Roraima Tepui or Cerro Roraima in Spanish, and Monte Roraima in Portuguese) is the highest of the Pakaraima chain of tepui plateau in South America. First described by the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh in 1596, its 31 km2 summit area is defended by 400-metre-tall cliffs on all sides. The mountain includes the triple border point of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.Mount Roraima lies on the Guiana Shield in the southeastern...

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

Salar de Uyuni (or Salar de Tunupa) is the world's largest salt flat at 10,582 square kilometers (4,086 sq mi). It is located in the Potosí and Oruro departments in southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes, and is elevated 3,656 meters (11,995 ft) above the mean sea level. The Salar was formed as a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes. It is covered by a few meters of salt crust, which has an extraordinary flatness with...

The Stone Forrest, China

The Stone Forest or Shilin (Chinese: Shílín) is a notable set of karst formations located in Shilin Yi Autonomous County, Yunnan Province, People's Republic of China, approximately 120 kilometres (75 mi) from the provincial capital Kunming. The tall rocks seem to emanate from the ground in the manner of stalagmites, with many looking like petrified trees thereby creating the illusion of a forest made of stone. Since 2007, two parts of the site, the...

Socotra Island, Yemen

Socotra, also spelt Soqotra, is a small archipelago of four islands in the Indian Ocean. The largest island, also called Socotra, is about 95% of the landmass of the archipelago. It lies some 240 kilometres (150 mi) east of the Horn of Africa and 380 kilometres (240 mi) south of the Arabian Peninsula. The island is very isolated and through the process of speciation, a third of its plant life is found nowhere else on the planet. It has been described...

Pacific Trash Vortex, Pacific Ocean

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N. The patch extends over an indeterminate area, with estimates ranging very widely depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define the affected area.The Patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical...

Bingham Canyon Mine, United States

The Bingham Canyon Mine, also known as the Kennecott Copper Mine, is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in the Oquirrh Mountains. It is the deepest open-pit mine in the world. The mine is owned by Rio Tinto Group, an international mining and exploration company headquartered in the United Kingdom. The copper operations at Bingham Canyon Mine are managed through Kennecott...

Son Doong Cave, Vietnam

Son Doong cave (meaning Mountain River Cave) is a cave in Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, Bo Trach District, Quang Binh Province, Vietnam. The cave is located near the Laos-Vietnam border. It has a large fast-flowing underground river inside.The cave was found by a local man named Ho-Khanh in 1991. The local jungle men were afraid of the cave for the whistling sound it makes from the underground river. However, not until 2009 was it made known to...

Pripyat, Ukraine

Pripyat is a ghost town near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Kiev Oblast (province) of northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus. The city has a special status within the Kiev Oblast, being the city of oblast-level subordination (see Administrative divisions of Ukraine), although it is located within the limits of Ivankiv Raion. The city also is being supervised by the Ministry of Emergencies of Ukraine as part of the Zone of Alienation...

Aircraft Boneyard, United States

The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG), often called The Boneyard, is a United States Air Force aircraft and missile storage and maintenance facility in Tucson, Arizona, located on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. AMARG was previously Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center, AMARC, the Military Aircraft Storage and Disposal Center, MASDC, and started life after World War II as the 3040th Aircraft Storage Group.AMARG takes...

Hashima Island, Japan

Hashima Island, (or correctly Hashima, as -shima is Japanese for island), commonly called Gunkanjima or Gunkanshima (meaning Battleship Island), is one among 505 uninhabited islands in the Nagasaki Prefecture about 15 kilometers from Nagasaki itself.The island was populated from 1887 to 1974 as a coal mining facility. The island's most notable features are the abandoned concrete buildings and the sea wall surrounding it. The island has been administered...

Tunguska, Russia

The Tunguska event, or Tunguska blast or Tunguska explosion, was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 7:14 a.m. KRAT (0:14 UT) on June 30, 1908.The explosion is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) above the Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded varying...