Disney Land of Dubai

 

5 Deepest Cave of the World

Mammoth Cave (52,835 acres)

 

 World’s Largest Cave is located in Kentucky, USA. It is assumed that 52,835 acres long cave was discovered by Frank Houchin who used to live nearby the cave. The cave is also famous for The Kentucky Cave Wars; it was a period of competition between local cave owners for tourist money. Private Citizens formed the Mammoth Cave National Park Association in 1926 which was later dedicated to National Park in 1941.

 

Jewel Cave (1,273.51 acres)

 

An estimated 109,000 people visit World’s Second Jargest Cave each year. Approximately 1,273.51 acres long cave is located in Custer County, South Dakota, USA. It was discovered in 1900; become national monument on 7th Feb, 1908. The Cave administration offers three different types of tour packages.

 

Optymistychna Cave (214 kilometers)

World’s third largest cave is located in village of Korolivka, Borschiv Raion, Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine. World longest gypsum cave was discovered in 1966 by a speleological club called Cyclope. The Ozernaya cave (eleventh longest cave in the world) is also located near to optymistychna.

 

Wind Cave (28,295 acres)

 

Likewise Jewel Cave, Wind Cave is also located in Custer County, South Dakota, USA. World’s forth largest cave was discovered by two brothers in 1881. Several roads run through the park and there are 30 miles (48 km) of hiking trails, so almost the entire park is accessible. The park had 591,049 visitors in 2006

 

Lechuguilla Cave (203 kilometers)

 

World’s fifth largest cave is 203 km long. It is located in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. The cave contains a large amount of gypsum, lemon-yellow sulfur, speleothems, soda straws, hydromagnesite balloons, cave pearls, subaqueous helictites, rusticles, U-loops and J-loops.

Beautiful Alsek River Lake Canada

 Beautiful Alsek River Lake, Canada

8 Mysterious Underground Cities

 From ancient hideouts to Cold War-era bunkers, explore eight astonishing settlements beneath the Earth’s surface.

1. Derinkuyu

The volcanic rock landscape of Turkey’s Cappadocia region is pockmarked with several different underground cities, but perhaps none is as vast or as impressive as Derinkuyu. This labyrinthine complex dates to around the 8th century B.C. and was most likely built to serve as a refuge during periods of war and invasion. With this in mind, its 18-story interior was a self-contained metropolis that included ventilation shafts, wells, kitchens, schoolrooms, oil presses, a bathhouse, a winery and living space for some 20,000 people.

2. Naours 

Located in northern France, the underground city of Naours includes two miles of tunnels and more than 300 man-made rooms—all of them hidden some 100 feet beneath a forested plateau. The site began its life around the third century A.D. as part of a Roman quarry, but it was later expanded into a subterranean village after locals began using it as a hiding place during the wars and invasions of the Middle Ages.

3. Wieliczka Salt Mine

Also known as the “Underground Salt Cathedral,” Poland’s Wieliczka Salt Mine is a massive subterranean complex of rooms, passageways and statues located on the outskirts of Krakow. The site dates to the 1200s, when miners first descended beneath the earth’s surface to find rock salt. In the centuries that followed, they slowly carved the mine into a warren of galleries and tunnels that extended more than 1,000 feet underground. When they weren’t digging for “white gold,” the workers also used the mine’s salt crystal deposits to build a stunning collection of chapels, chandeliers, statues and bas reliefs, including a detailed replica of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

4. Lalibela

In the 12th century A.D., a devout king ordered the construction of 11 eye-catching Christian churches in the Ethiopian village of Lalibela. This “New Jerusalem” is notable for having been fashioned from the top down: all of its churches were hewn from volcanic rock below the earth’s surface then hollowed out, giving them the appearance of having grown directly out of the ground. The most iconic building is the cross-shaped Church of Saint George, which was cut from a monolithic slice of stone inside a trench 100 feet deep. It was then connected to the rest of the complex via a network of underground passageways, hidden caves and catacombs. Legend has it that the construction of Lalibela took just 24 years, but many historians believe it was actually completed in phases over several centuries.

5. Beijing Underground City

In the 1960s and 70s, as the threat of nuclear war loomed, the Chinese government ordered the construction of a mammoth fallout shelter beneath their capital of Beijing. Also known as Dixia Cheng, the hand-dug site was supposedly capable of safeguarding around one million people for up to four months. It consisted of fallout-proofed rooms and tunnels that snaked their way underground over an area of several dozen square miles. Certain passageways were reportedly large enough for tanks to pass through, while other housed purpose-built schools, hospitals, granaries and restaurants. There was even a skating rink and a 1,000-seat movie theater. 

6. Petra

Famed for its cameo in the film “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” Petra is an ancient caravan city tucked away in the mountains of southern Jordan. The site has been inhabited since prehistory, but it reached its peak some 2,000 years ago, when the ancient Nabataeans hand-chiseled the surrounding sandstone hillsides into a dazzling collection of tombs, banquet halls and temples. One of the most exquisite edifices is Al Khazneh, or “the Treasury,” which includes an ornamental façade that extends 130 feet up a rock face. Petra may have been home to 20,000 people at its height, but it was later abandoned sometime around the seventh century A.D. and wasn’t known to Europeans until the 1800s. Excavations at the site are still ongoing today, and it’s believed that the vast majority of its ruins may still lurk underground.

7. Orvieto

The Italian hilltop town of Orvieto is known for its white wines and picturesque architecture, but its most mysterious wonders lie underground. Beginning with the ancient Etruscans, generations of locals burrowed their way deep into the volcanic rock bluff on which the city was originally built. The subterranean maze was first carved to build wells and cisterns, but over the centuries it grew to include more than 1,200 interlocking tunnels, grottoes, and galleries. Some chambers include the remnants of Etruscan-era sanctuaries and medieval olive presses, while others show signs of having been used as storage places for wine or roosts for pigeons—a common local delicacy. Orvieto’s underground city was also frequently employed as a hiding place during times of strife. As recently as World War II, people were still using certain sections as bomb shelters.

8. Burlington

In the event of a Cold War-era nuclear strike, the most important members of the British government would have retreated to a 35-acre underground complex located 100 feet beneath the village of Corsham. This “Burlington Bunker,” as it was codenamed, was first built in the 1950s from a series of existing tunnels and stone quarries. It contained office spaces, cafeterias, a telephone exchange, medical facilities and sleeping quarters—all of it designed to keep the British Prime Minister and some 4,000 other key government personnel alive during an emergency. There was even an in-house BBC studio that the PM could use to address the public. While never put into active use, the Burlington facility remained partially operational until 2004, when it was finally decommissioned and declassified.

STONEHENGE Places - Megalithic Sites

 Archaeological evidence found by the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2008 indicates that Stonehenge could possibly have served as a burial ground from its earliest beginnings. The dating of cremated remains found on the site indicate that deposits contain human bone material from as early as 3000 BC, when the initial ditch and bank…

Japanese 10 Best Ghost Towns

Common Wisdom says Japan is a Tiny Island Nation crammed from shore to shore with people living one on top of the other. Every bit of spare space is used to build Prius Factories and Grow Rice.

In actuality, though, there are far more Dark Spots on the Map than you’d imagine. The general view that every square inch of Land is worth a Bazillion Dollars is just not true.

There are gaps in the Façade that whole towns have fallen into, along with Bizarre Abandoned Theme Parks, Ruined U.S. Air Force Bases and The Tawdry Remnants of Pay-By-The-Hour Love Hotels.

These places are known as "Haikyo", the Japanese Word for "Ruins" and Japan has plenty of them. Based on over six years of actively exploring these "Haikyo", here is a list of the 10 Most Beautiful, Most Historic and Most Interesting Towns.

10. Yamanaka Lake’s Lost Bunker

The underground bunker haikyo by Yamanaka Lake in the shadow of Mount Fuji is one of the strangest abandoned structures I’ve ever explored. I stumbled upon this bizarre spot in an unpopulated and obscure part of the Japanese countryside while hiking. I knew nothing about its history.

At first I thought it must be the headquarters of a cult — maybe Aum Shinrikyo, the one that bombed the Tokyo subway with sarin gas in 1995. A sigil of 5 unknown logos formed a cross on the inner wall of the bunker, but none of the other explorers wandering the halls while I was there could recognize them.

Finally, the mystery was solved by a fellow explorer who had found a magazine featuring one of the logos at the location. The bunker belonged to the brokerage firm Sanyo Securities, which went bankrupt in 1999.

9. Ashio Dozan Ghost Town

Ashio Dozan was a mining town in the mountains some 200 kilometers northwest of Tokyo, and infamous in Japanese history as a site of extreme environmental damage.

The town was mostly abandoned 40 years ago, the mines and factory shut down, and new standards in environmental care called for at the highest national levels.

It had been a copper mining and processing town for over 400 years. At its peak, it supplied over a third of Japan’s entire copper supply. But in the process, the nearby mountains were poisoned with sulfurous acid gas from the plant’s smelters.

Now it’s a creaking conglomeration of fading facilities — a power station, the factory, numerous barricaded mines, a train station, a temple, a school, and a small town of tumble-down wooden apartments, haunted only by a few aged holdovers who have nowhere else to go.

8. Keishin Radiology Hospital

The Keishin Hospital in Kanagawa prefecture was once a pre-eminent site of super high-tech radiology equipment, leading the charge as Japan raced into the modern era. 

 Some 20 years ago that dream fell by the wayside, and the place was left to the vandals.

They tore out everything that could be torn out, leaving only a few metal fixtures too heavily stapled down. 

Then came the taggers, followed by the true graffiti artists, the young people shooting documentaries, and the cosplay kids playing truant from school. Keishin has a whole other life now that it’s dead.

7. The Russian Village Theme Park

A gigantic complex without any rides and built in the middle of nowhere, the Russian Village Theme Park in Niigata is an almighty folly. It opened in 2002 but closed only 6 months later for lack of visitors. 

The major attractions were a huge mammoth hall, in which the genuine fake bones of a prehistoric woolly mammoth were on display, and a grand Russian-style church for fantasy wedding retreats.

The place was already in tatters when I went to visit. In souvenir shops, Matroska dolls lay smashed and scattered. Mannequins stood on the weedy walkways. A stuffed swan guarded a hallway, having broken free of its glass case.

6. Osarizawa Factory and Mine

Mining of gold and copper at the legendary Osarizawa mine began around 1,300 years ago, with the last of the smelting facilities closing down in 1978. Now the site is owned by Mitsubishi, who run guided tours around the highlights and a museum for 1,000 yen. 

One legend of Osarizawa mine involves a gorgon-headed lion with the wings of a phoenix, the legs of a cow and the head of a snake. Its roar and monstrous appetite for children terrified the nearby villagers, who urged the village’s wisest old man to go battle it on the mountain top. The old man had long gray hair, and went to battle the beast in a series of 6 dreams. In the final one he managed to slit open the beast’s belly, from which poured gold, copper, and lead.

The vibrant blue color of the water in the pools is probably due to dissolved copper or a solution of copper sulfate used to precipitate out the purified solid metal. 

5. The Toyo Bowling Alley

The Kanagawa Toyo Bowl was one of several 1980s alleys built during Japan’s bowling boom by Hideki Yokoi, a man with a true rags-to-riches story.

Yokoi came to Tokyo with nothing in 1928, when he was just 15 years old. By 1957, he had become the manager of a bowling alley and department-store chain. In 1958, he was shot by a Yakuza gangster for 20 million yen in outstanding debts — but he survived. 

In 1987, he built the Toyo Boru. It had 108 lanes, and was the second biggest bowling alley in Japan. In 1991, he bought the Empire State Building in New York.

The alley went bankrupt at the same time as Yokoi’s holding company in 1999. Its lanes were stripped of wood, and its gambling halls of machines. It has sat empty ever since. 

4. Akasaka Love Hotel

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A love hotel is much the same as a roadside motel, though built with only one purpose in mind — it’s a place for people to go when they don’t have a private place of their own. Rooms can be rented by the hour (a “rest”) or for the whole night (a “stay”).

The Akasaka Love Hotel is situated at the far end of a strip of love hotels on a quiet country road in western Tokyo, and clearly suffered for the lack of passing traffic. It was built only 11 years ago, but closed after just 3 years in business.

Love hotels are infamous for their gaudy “fantasy” rooms, decked out in vivid Day-Glo colors and with so little taste that they can still shock and awe, even in ruin.

3. Matsuo Ghost Town

Matsuo mine in the north of Japan opened in 1914 and closed in 1969. In its heyday it was the biggest mine for sulfur in the Eastern world. It had a workforce of 4,000 and a wider population of 15,000 people, all of whom were accommodated in a makeshift city in the mountains of Hachimantai Park.

The city was known as the “paradise above the clouds” for its comparatively luxurious apartment blocks and near-constant ebb and flow of mist. That same mist nearly prevented me from finding the place at all.

I drove on featureless roads up and down oddly rolling hills for nearly an hour before the first of 11 giant apartment blocks finally emerged from the mist, like granite crags on the hillside. 

Walking through the empty corridors I felt my love of ruins reinvigorated. The mist surrounded me, tamping the world down to just my small pocket of existence. I walked the length of three blocks in awe. I climbed to the roof, careful over rotten-through concrete steps, and looked out into the thick enveloping fog, and remembered why I go to these odd places.

2. Fuchu U.S. Air Force Base

The abandoned U.S. Air Force base in Fuchu is a vine-slathered memento from the early days of Japanese-American war and peace, built shortly after World War II in co-operation with the still-active nearby Japan Self-Defense Force Base, and abandoned in the 1980s.

Its huge twin parabolic dishes are still visible from the exterior — though now half-eaten up by the passing decades, rusted red and bobbing like hole-riddled yachts on the sea of green jungle. Its roads swim with weeds and trees shot up through the cracks, and its barracks buildings glisten with waterfalls of rushes and creepers, windows and doors barely peeping through the shadowy gaps.

Going in the base was out of the question, but by shooting through the fence and borrowing photos from intrepid explorers who had braved charges of trespassing, I can shed some light on what the place looks like now.

1. Sports World Theme Park

Sports World is a massive theme park, featuring a hotel, large mini-golf course, gym, dive pool, wave pool, swimming pool, log flume, speed flume, triple tube-flume, and inner-tube rushing river, all in ruin. It was built in 1988 and abandoned only 10 years later, falling prey to its out of the way location and its proximity to the then-new Disneyland.

It’s an explorer’s dream come true, 20 years abandoned, overgrown, but still relatively intact, set in a truly gorgeous forested mountain area. 

There are terrifying screaming monkeys and birds at night, models on fashion shoots by day, and all manner of ways to entertain oneself clambering, clowning, and investigating the rest of the time.

Sports World was the first haikyo I overnighted in. I brought along a tent and arrived under cover of darkness. I ended up sleeping on the tatami mat floor of the park’s fairly pristine abandoned hotel. The next day I awoke to a breathtaking view of rolling forested mountains to the horizon, a view unseen by anyone for years. That’s why I go to haikyo.