Travel
Discover facts about travel. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Travel
The plateau where strange species evolved in isolation
Evolution threw a giant party atop Mount Roraima and flatly refused to invite the lowlands. The sheer vertical cliffs prevent local animals from ever mixing…
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The harmless shell that can fire a venomous dart
Picking up a seemingly harmless shell results in a venomous dart firing directly into your hand. These predatory mollusks pack enough neurotoxins to drop a…
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The swimming pool perched above Victoria Falls
Swimming at the absolute edge of a colossal drop requires zero common sense. The Devil's Pool rests directly atop Victoria Falls, separated from the abyss by…
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Why birds dive into Mexico's Cave of Swallows
Base jumping into a pitch-black abyss is normal if you happen to be a suicidal bird. The Cave of Swallows is a vertical shaft so deep it could easily swallow…
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How rain turns Brazilian dunes into lagoons
Massive rolling hills of white grains suddenly transform into highly temporary swimming pools. Heavy rains flood the valleys between the dunes, creating…
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Why Spain’s Rio Tinto runs red
Flowing completely red due to intense acidity makes for deeply terrible drinking water. The Rio Tinto dissolves heavy metals from the soil, turning the…
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A bullet ant sting can ruin your whole day
Getting stung feels exactly like getting shot, hence the highly uncreative but accurate name. Bullet ants drop from the canopy onto unsuspecting heads,…
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Why Arashiyama bamboo clacks in the wind
When the wind hits, these giant green stalks scream like tortured wooden ghosts. The Arashiyama bamboo towers sway violently, knocking into each other with…
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The fish that catches birds in midair
Leaping directly out of the water to snatch swallows mid-flight is purely terrifying. Tigerfish boast interlocking razor teeth protruding from their jaws even…
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Texan limestone caves reek of accumulated bat guano
Millions of flying mammals creating a literal tornado of wings erupts at dusk. Bracken Cave houses so many bats that their collective exit looks exactly like…
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Australia has so many beaches it would take 29 years to visit them all
Australia has so much pristine coastline that they could lose a few hundred beaches and literally no one would even notice. Boasting over 10,000 distinct…
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Why airport liquids are limited to 100 milliliters
Your expensive face cream is a national security threat entirely due to metric conversions. The TSA arbitrarily settled on 3.4 ounces for carry-on liquids…
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Your phone probably wasn't going to crash the plane
Your Kindle was never going to bring down a Boeing 747. The Federal Aviation Administration banned devices during takeoff entirely out of an abundance of…
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The unremarkable town at North America's exact center
If you perfectly balanced the entire continent on a pinpoint, the exact center wouldn't be a majestic monument, but rather an incredibly obscure dot in Rugby,…
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Most of the Sahara isn't sand
If you came looking for endless romantic dunes, you're mostly out of luck. Seventy-five percent of this terrifying wasteland is actually just painfully flat,…
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A Quebec town has two exclamation marks in its name
No, it's not a typo. This small Quebec municipality officially registered its absurd name complete with bizarre punctuation, leaving cartographers forever…
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Badwater Basin firmly defends the absolute lowest elevation
Resting intensely at 282 feet below actual sea level, this blindingly white, salt-crusted hellscape is officially the deepest gouge in the North American…
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One country spans all four hemispheres
Why pick a hemisphere when you can greedily claim them all? This sprawling island republic scatters its tiny atolls so widely across the Pacific that it…
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South Pole stubbornly sits upon heavy continental ice
Unlike its oceanic northern equivalent, the exact bottom of the Earth sits atop an intensely massive slab of solid rock that is completely smothered by almost…
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Why Vancouver isn’t on Vancouver Island
In a naming decision that has successfully confused travelers for a century, the actual massive mainland metropolis is nowhere near the giant island that…
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The river that flows north
Defying every logical assumption you have about North American gravity dragging water downward toward the Gulf, this ironically named ancient waterway…
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Lake Tanganyika stretches further than any freshwater lake
This absurd African rift lake doesn't just sit there; it violently stretches itself into a 418-mile long crack in the earth's crust, holding so much ancient…
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Bay of Fundy violently generates the highest global tides
If you enjoy leaving your boat docked only to return and find it sitting fifty feet up in the air on dry mud, this bizarre Atlantic funnel shoves more water…
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Some Atacama weather stations went centuries without rain
While you complain about a dry week in summer, certain weather stations in this brutal South American wasteland recorded absolutely zero drops of water from…
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