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 Most bizarre landscape:
Cappadocia, Turkey
The rocky lunar landscape of Cappadocia, Turkey is truly
one-of-a-kind. Tunnels rigged with booby traps and vast underground
cities carved by the Hittites 3,000 years ago are just a few highlights
of this strange place, where houses are carved into the rock and
so-called ‘fairy chimney’ rock formations dot the volcanic tufa rock
land. This area, located 200 miles south of Ankara, is claimed by some
to have magical magnetic healing powers.
 Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
Driving across the world’s largest salt flats – Salar de Uyuni in
Bolivia – can feel as if you’re about to disappear into nothingness. The
way the sunlight reflects off the vast expanse of salt makes the sky
seem to blend into the landscape.
Alien-like piles of salt piled into cone shapes by workers, waiting
to be collected and processed, enhance the feeling that you’re in a very
unique place. Salar de Uyuni contains about 10 billion tons of salt,
with only about 25,000 tons extracted every year.
 Spotted Lake, Canada
About a mile north of the border between Washington State and British
Columbia, Canada, you’ll find what’s sure to be the weirdest body of
water you’ve ever seen. The Spotted Lake – known as Klikuk in the
indigenous language – divides itself into a strange patchwork of white,
green and yellow pools in the summertime. The ‘walkways’ in between the
pools are actually made up of salts, titanium, calcium, sulphates and
other minerals.
 Tessellated Pavement, Mauritania
It may be hard to believe that the extremely straight, geometric
rectangles that form at Eaglehawk Neck on the Tasman Peninsula of
Tasmania aren’t man-made. But, this ‘tessellated pavement’ is a natural
phenomenon – a rare erosional feature formed when sedimentary rock
fractured through stress on the Earth’s crust. As the rock dries out at
low tide, salt crystals form on the surface, wearing it away and leaving
just the joints behind.
 Vale de Lua, Brazil
It’s not hard to feel as if you’ve left the planet Earth when
visiting Vale de Lua, Brazil. This ‘valley of the moon’ is the
most-visited area of Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, located on the
Chapada dos Veadeiros, an ancient plateau thought to be about 1.8
billion years old. Its rock formations, eroded by the waters of the San
Miguel river, are among the oldest in the world.
 Dry Valleys, Antarctica
It seems strange enough that there are areas of Antarctica that get
almost no snowfall – but the landscape itself of these ‘Dry Valleys’,
located within Victoria Land west of McMurdo Sound, is like some kind of
twisted, desolate film set. Vast stretches of sand, seal skeletons,
rocks eerily sculpted by wind and steaming ice fumaroles (volcanic gas
vents) make this place seem like it can’t possibly be real.
 Rio Tinto, Spain
The blood red Rio Tinto, a river originating in the Sierra Morena
mountains of Andalusia, Spain, gets its unusual hue from its high iron
content. A site along the river has been mined for copper, silver, gold
and other metals for over 5,000 years. However strangely beautiful it
may be, this river is actually an environmental disaster due to heavy
metal contamination and mine leaks. Though it’s been on hiatus for 10
years, a recent increase in copper prices has prompted plans to reopen
it in early 2010. |
