The Hongyancun subway station in Chongqing, China is 116 meters deep and the difference in air pressure will often leave users with clogged ears when accessed via its elevator.

When the air pressure outside of the eardrum becomes different than the pressure inside, you experience ear barotrauma. It occurs most often during steep declines and descents and is usually associated with plane takeoffs and landings, or driving up or down mountains. Most subway stations don’t usually cause ear barotrauma, because they aren’t deep or steep enough for your ears to register a significant enough difference in air pressure. But using the elevator to reach the world’s deepest subway station might actually clog up your ears. That’s because it is located 116 meters below the surface, the equivalent of about 40 floors underground.

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A 149-mile-long stretch of highway connecting two towns in Saudi Arabia holds the title of the world’s longest straight road.

Saudi Arabia’s Highway 10 stretches 916 miles (1,474 km), connecting the town of Al Darb, in the southwest, to Al Batha, in the east. It’s quite a busy road, most traversed by trucks shipping goods from one side of the country to the other, but it is most famous for a 149-mile stretch through the Rub-al-Khali desert. This particular piece of infrastructure was originally built as a private road for King Fahd (SAU), but ever since it became part of the public road system, it claimed the Guinness Record for the world’s longest straight road, also known as ‘the most boring road in the world’, due to its complete lack of bends, almost completely flat terrain, and bland, featureless surroundings as far as the eye can see.

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During the month of May, camel riding is such a popular pastime at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots in China’s Kumtag Desert that local authorities use camel traffic lights to avoid traffic jams.

One of the last things you would expect to find in the middle of a desert is a functional traffic light, but you can find several of them in the sand dunes of the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake Nature Park, in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. During the annual holiday at the beginning of May, thousands of people flock to these natural tourist spots and engage in a variety of activities, the most popular of which is undoubtedly camel riding. In 2023, there were around 2,400 camels available for riding, as well as tens of thousands of tourists per day at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots alone, which resulted in serious traffic congestion problems. Luckily, local authorities came up with an ingenious solution – camel traffic lights.

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The Recreo Verde tourist complex in Venecia de San Carlos, Costa Rica, is home to a tiny mountain cavern that has come to be known as The Cave of Death due to its ability to kill any creature that enters it.

Located on the edge of the Poas Volcano, la Cueva de la Muerte is only 2 meters deep and 3 meters long, which makes it a seemingly cozy refuge for insects, birds, and small animals looking for shelter. But appearances can be deceiving, as entering this tiny cavern results in an almost instant death. Although the tiny cave looks harmless to the naked eye, it is filled with carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that also happens to be extremely toxic. To demonstrate just how lethal the Cave of Death actually is, local guides place a lit torch inside the cavern and it is extinguished instantly by the absence of oxygen and the high concentration of carbon dioxide.

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Iran’s Shazdeh Garden, also known as the Prince’s Garden, is a surprisingly lush garden full of greenery and water fountains surrounded by arid desert.

Located 6 kilometers from the city of Mahan, in Kerman Province, Shazdeh Garden is a historical Persian garden built by the Qajar Dynasty, at the end of the 19th century. The rectangular complex is surrounded by stone walls that shield the green paradise inside from the harsh desert surrounding it. Seen from the air, Shazdeh Garden looks like a welcoming oasis in the middle of an arid sea, and it’s photos like the ones below that attract thousands of people to this place every year. It features five impressive water fountains supplied through the Qanat technique of transporting water from a well through an underground aqueduct.

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Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, a small rock in northern Africa conquered by Spain in 1564, holds the title for the world’s smallest national border, measuring just 85 meters in length.

Spain has almost 2000 kilometers of land borders with Portugal and France, but it also has much smaller borders with countries like Andorra, the United Kingdom (Gibraltar), and Morocco. It is with the latter, the African nation of Morocco, that Spain shares the smallest land border in the world, an 85-meter-long stretch of land linking a rock about 19,000 square meters in size to the Moroccan coast. Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera has been Spanish territory since 1564 when it was conquered by Admiral Pedro de Estopiñán, and although Morocco has repeatedly laid claim to it, Spain has never agreed to return the land and actually has troops stationed there to enforce Spanish rule.

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For 50 Years, the Rogan Megane Hakubutsukan or Spectacles Museum in Ikeburo, was the most iconic place to go shopping for eyeglasses and sunglasses in all of Japan, probably the world.

Located on the Higashi-dori shopping street in Minami-Ikebukuro, Tokyo, the Spectacles Museum was one of the most Instagram-worthy places in the Japanese capital. Although this was once a simple warehouse, under the guidance of founder and longtime owner Yutaka Takei, it became a giant advertisement for the products being sold inside. What really put the Spectacles Museum on the map was its unique facade, which consisted of thousands of pairs of colorful sunglasses attached to a giant metal frame. It was meant to attract attention, and that’s exactly what it did, in time becoming one of Ikebukuro’s main tourist attractions.

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Stretching for 65 miles (105 km) between the towns of Of and Bayburt in Eastern Turkey, the D915 is an extreme road regarded by many motorists as the most diffcult in the world.

For many years, Bolivia’s Yungas Road, aka the “Death Road”, held the unofficial title of world’s most dangerous road. Photos and videos of motorists navigating the gravel track winding its way through the Cordillera Oriental mountain range to an altitude of 4650 meters have made Yungas one of Bolivia’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing around 25,000 people every year. However, according to some adventurers, there is one less popular road that surpasses the Death Road in terms of difficulty. Linking Turkey’s Northeast Anatolia Province to the Black Sea, the D915 mountain road features a myriad turns and dangerous drop-offs that make it extremely perilous to traverse even for the most skilled drivers.

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The Santuario Della Beata Vergine Maria Delle Grazie, in Italy’s Lombardia region, is an old church famous for having a real taxidermied crocodile hanging from the ceiling.

What’s the last thing you expect to see when you look up in a church? Granted, there are plenty of interesting answers one can think of, but ‘a crocodile’ definitely ranks up there with the quirkiest of them. But if you travel to the small municipality of Curtatone, in Lombardia, Italy, you’ll find a church with a five-century-old crocodile hanging from the ceiling. It’s a peculiar sight, to say the least, but one that has been around for as long as anyone can remember. How the croc wound up at the Santuario Della Beata Vergine Maria Delle Grazie is, and will probably remain a mystery, but its purpose had been linked to religious symbolism.

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The Chained Tree of Peshawar, in Pakistan, has been under arrest since 1899, when a British officer decided to teach it a lesson for moving away from him. It has remained chained ever since.

125 years ago, a drunk British officer by the name of James Squid performed one of the most bizarre arrests in history in Landi Kotal, a town near the Torkhan border. Convinced that the tree was trying to get away from him as he struggled to approach it, Squid ordered it chained to the ground and placed under arrest. The chains have remained in place ever since, and a plaque tells the story of the arrest for curious tourists.

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Mori Ouchi, a cozy cafe in Tokyo’s laidback Shimokitazawa district, is famous for only catering to pessimists and people with a generally negative mindset.

Negative people tend to get a bad rep and are constantly told to be more positive, but, if you think about it, is there really anything wrong with being negative? The founder of Mori Ouchi, a small cafe in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, certainly doesn’t think so. A self-described gloomy person, he got the idea for like-minded people over a decade ago but only decided to open it three years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The man had always felt like negative people were more sensitive and more easily hurt than others, so he created a space dedicated exclusively to them.

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Tokyo’s Ikebukuro shopping district is home to the world’s largest gashapon capsule toy store – a 1,250m² area decked with over 3,000 gashapon machines filled with various figurines.

Gashapon machines have been a big part of Japan’s recreational culture for over half a decade, but while these toy capsule-filled machines are ubiquitous in the Asian country, the Mecca of gashapon machines is the Gashapon Official Store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. It features over 3,000 coin-operated machines and probably millions of collectible toys and figurines. Using most of these machines requires a few hundred yen – from ¥200(~$1.33) to ¥500 (~$3.32) – but if you’re feeling generous, you can spin the wheel at the much more expensive ‘premium’ machines, which can cost up to ¥2,000 (~$13.27) on average for one random toy.

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Inishmore, the largest of Ireland’s Aran Islands, is home to a remarkable natural wonder, a rectangular pool cut so straight into limestone that it looks man-made.

Also known as “The Wormhole” or “The Serpent’s Lair”, Poll na bPéist is a natural water basin with an edge length of approx. 10 by 25 meters within a stone formation. It can only be accessed by walking along the cliffs south of the ancient site Dún Aonghasa, but in recent years it has become famous for hosting the renowned Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. The most fascinating thing about Poll na bPéist is its remarkable rectangular shape, which has led many to question its natural origins and sparked several theories, including that it is the work of an ancient civilization.

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Western Poland’s Notecka Forest is home to one of the country’s most controversial buildings, a medieval-style complex known as Stobnica Castle.

The construction of Stobnica Castle began in 2015, but it didn’t start attracting nationwide attention until 2018, when people started wondering what this gargantuan structure rising up at the edge of a well-known nature reserve, on what looked like a man-made island on Lake Stobnica, was. Aerial photos of a 15-storey medieval-like castle rising up in the middle of a pristine natural paradise about 50 km from the city of Poznan started going viral online and piqued people’s curiosity. What was this building, who was the owner and how had they obtained a building permit for it, considering its location at the edge of a Special Protection Area for Birds (20 species) within the Natura 2000 network?

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The so-called ‘Guyiang White House’ is a gigantic structure located in the posh Huaguoyuan Wetland Park area of Guiyang City, in China’s Guizhou Province. It has gone viral as China’s largest mansion, but you can’t believe everything you read online…

Featuring an architectural style usually observed in European palaces and museums, the Guiyang White House has become one of the most iconic sights in the Chinese city of Guiyang. Although many have described it as ‘kitsch’, ‘over-the-top’, and overly opulent’, there is no denying the eye-catching appeal of this megalithic structure, both during the day and at night, when it is illuminated by countless light installations. The structure got its name because of its white exterior and Western architectural influences, but when it comes to size, it actually dwarfs its Washington namesake. The entire complex, including the artificial pond in front of the edifice, is said to cover an area of ​​18.3 million square meters.

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