Top 20 Craziest Places to See Before You Die
Some places look as if they were designed by a special-effects team. Here are twenty spots on Earth that seem too strange to be real, and every one of them is.
1Mount Roraima, Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana
This flat-topped "tepui" rises with sheer walls to around 2,800 metres where three countries meet. Its summit is a lunar landscape of black rock, crystal pools and plants found almost nowhere else, often wrapped in cloud. It is said to have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World.
2The "Sea of Stars", Vaadhoo, Maldives
On some nights the waves along this beach glow electric blue. The light comes from bioluminescent plankton that flash when disturbed, so every breaking wave and footprint lights up.
3The Eye of the Sahara, Mauritania
The Richat Structure is a set of concentric rings about 40 kilometres across, so large it is best seen from space. Geologists think it is an eroded, uplifted dome rather than an impact crater.
4Turquoise ice of Lake Baikal, Russia
In late winter, wind polishes the frozen surface of the world's deepest lake into clear, turquoise slabs that crack and pile up into glassy ridges along the shore.
5Antelope Canyon, Arizona, USA
A narrow slot canyon near the town of Page, carved by flash floods into swirling sandstone walls. Despite what you may read, it is not part of the Grand Canyon. Around midday in summer, beams of sunlight pierce the gloom. Visits are by guided tour only.
6Tunnel of Love, Klevan, Ukraine
A stretch of industrial railway several kilometres long where the trees have grown into a perfect green arch, shaped by the trains that pass through. Couples come to make wishes; photographers come for the symmetry.
7Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
The world's largest salt flat covers more than 10,000 square kilometres. After rain, a thin film of water turns it into a gigantic mirror, and the horizon disappears.
8Hidden Beach, Marieta Islands, Mexico
Off Puerto Vallarta, a beach sits at the bottom of a hole in an island, open to the sky and reached by swimming through a short tunnel. Visitor numbers are now strictly limited to protect it.
9Plitvice Lakes, Croatia
Sixteen terraced lakes linked by waterfalls in shades from emerald to sapphire, in Croatia's oldest national park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.
10Ice caves of Vatnajökull, Iceland
Each winter, meltwater channels inside Europe's largest ice cap form blue caves that can only be visited safely with a guide. Each season's caves are different from the last.
11Bigăr Waterfall, Romania
Water used to spill over a dome of moss in thin veils, making it one of the most photographed waterfalls in Europe. Much of the famous moss curtain collapsed in 2021, a reminder that even natural wonders are temporary.
12Waitomo Glowworm Caves, New Zealand
Boats drift in silence under a ceiling of thousands of tiny lights. They are the larvae of a fungus gnat found only in New Zealand, which glow to lure insects into sticky threads.
13Yuanyang rice terraces, China
For more than a thousand years the Hani people have carved terraces into the mountains of Yunnan. When flooded in winter and spring, they reflect the sky like stacked mirrors.
14Grand Prismatic Spring, Wyoming, USA
The largest hot spring in the United States, in Yellowstone, is ringed with bands of orange, yellow and green. The colours come from heat-loving microbes, with the deep blue centre too hot for most of them.
15Pamukkale, Turkey
Mineral-rich hot water has built brilliant white travertine terraces down a hillside, right beside the ruins of the Roman spa city of Hierapolis.
16Fly Geyser, Nevada, USA
This multicoloured mound in the Black Rock Desert is partly man-made. A well drilled in the 1960s was never properly capped, and scalding water has been building mineral cones ever since, coloured by algae and bacteria.
17Tianzi Mountains, China
Thousands of sandstone pillars rise from the forests of Zhangjiajie in Hunan, often half hidden by mist. They are widely said to have inspired the floating mountains of the film Avatar.
18Snow-crowned trees of Finnish Lapland
In deep winter, layers of frost and snow build up on spruce trees until they become strange white statues, sometimes called the "sentinels of the Arctic".
19The "underwater waterfall", Mauritius
Seen from the air off Le Morne, sand and silt sliding down an underwater shelf look exactly like a waterfall plunging into the deep. It is a pure optical illusion, and a spectacular one.
20Aogashima, Japan
A volcano within a volcano, far out in the Pacific south of Tokyo, with a village of fewer than two hundred people living on the outer rim. The volcano last erupted in the 1780s and is still considered active.
Bonus round: crazy places within reach of the casino cities
Look at a map and you will notice something useful for planning: several of the strangest places on this list sit within a road trip of America's gambling capitals. Fly Geyser is in Washoe County, a few hours' drive north of Reno, the "Biggest Little City in the World". Antelope Canyon is a long but popular day trip from Las Vegas, roughly four to five hours each way by road, and Yellowstone pairs nicely with a loop through the Mountain West.
That makes it easy to combine desert wonders with a few nights of shows, buffets and blackjack. We have gathered the best of those destinations in 7 Casino Cities to See Before You Die, from Las Vegas and Reno to Macau and Monte Carlo. And if the building itself is the attraction, see the most amazing casinos in the world.
