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#3.
La Rinconada, Peru
Where is it? Oh what an enviable joy it must be to toil in the merry gold mines of La Rinconada, high in the Andes Mountains in Peru. Actually, since you asked, it's a hellish nightmare life the likes of which you are powerless to imagine. La Rinconada is, for starters, the highest-altitude permanent settlement on Earth. It's about 5400 meters above sea level, which means it can also be described as the lowest permanent settlement in space. The air is mighty thin up there, but at least the perpetual state of near-suffocation will take your mind off the sub-zero temperatures and the smell of human excrement. Did we mention there is no sewage system in La Rinconada? No running water, either. And no law enforcement of any kind. No wonder the population is dwindling at... oh shit, 30,000 people and growing. Lifestyle In La Rinconada, you have two choices of occupation. (1) You can work the gold mines, or (2) Heh, just kidding. There is no second choice. See, Peru is kind of a hell of unemployment, so a town with one employer is better than the average. The gold mine is what draws tens of thousands of men and their families out of the comparatively more comfortable cities and into one of the most pathetic makeshift shanty settlements this side of District 9. Also, this is old school mining. There's no machinery and no safety precautions. You just turn up and they hand you one of those cartoony flashlight-hard-hats and a chisel.
As Internet writers, we know less about mining than basically anyone else on the planet. But they tell us that there are different kinds of gold mines, and the mine in La Rinconada is, well, the undesirable kind. All the gold is locked up in tiny seams, so most of what you're actually mining is just ordinary rocks, which are probably still worth more than Peruvian currency, but not by much. Trying to mine gold here is like hitting the haystack with a hammer until the needle just flies out of it. Better still are the employment contracts. In Peru, they don't have particularly sophisticated legislation in that area, so the miners work according to the traditional oral contract of cachorreo, probably Spanish for "bend over." Under cachorreo, everything you mine for 30 days is the property of the company. Then comes payday. The only catch is that you have to dig your paycheck out of the mine with your bare hands. That's right, on day 31, whatever you dig up is yours. Sometimes you actually find some gold, but more often than not you go home to the wife--and that hole you dug that is your toilet--empty handed. And then you still have to go out with your chisel and attack wildlife for your dinner. But shit, you earned that barrow full of rocks. #2.
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Where is it? Quick, you've got three million people who need a home and some kind of gainful employment, where is the best place to set them up? If you said "on an active volcano" then you're either an idiot, or you're from Yogyakarta.
Java is an island and 120 million Javanese people live on, or within instant obliteration distance from active volcanoes. Perhaps the most brazen are the citizens of Yogyakarta, the province around Mount Merapi, the most active volcano in Indonesia, and maybe the most fucking terrifying thing that God permits to exist on Earth. The Javanese call it the Fire Mountain. We call it Sir. Lifestyle Yogyakarta is an unusual place because, while it's part of the Indonesian Republic, it's still its own little kingdom with its very own Sultan. For complicated political reasons, the Indonesian government agreed to let Yogyakarta keep its traditional Hindu monarchy. We like to think they just took one look at that goddamn volcano on which the people willingly lived and bid them good day. The people of Yogyakarta are mostly hard-working villagers who deal with the day to day stresses of family, farm life, and a giant volcano that regularly explodes and kills everyone.
Mount Merapi can, at any moment, dump out a shitload of ash, fart out a cloud of searing hot poison gas, or it can fall back on that faithful but reliable trope, lava. All three have impressive body counts to their names, and all three hate you, personally. Oh, and the eruptions are usually followed by devastating earthquakes, like the one that demolished much of Yogyakarta in 2006. Oh, and tsunamis. Man, fuck you, Merapi.
Ironically, the mountain is the reason the Javanese stay. The traditional Hindu villagers worship Mt Merapi as a god, and what it taketh away with one hand, it giveth with the other. It turns out that the bullshit that the volcanoes spew over Java is also the best fertiliser in the world. The farming on Java is out of this world, and it's thanks to the incredible bounty of the people of Yogyakarta and other regions that Indonesia flourishes. The Javans actually look down on the neighboring island of Borneo, where farming is poor thanks to their one pitiful volcano that hasn't even killed anyone lately. #1.
San Pedro De Atacama, Chile
Where is it? Here in our comfortable Western niche, we tend to take certain luxury items for granted. Water, for instance. It's something that organisms need for biological function. It seems not everybody got that memo, which is why some adventurous people decided to set up a town in the middle of the Atacama desert in Chile, the one place in the world where it never rains, ever. And that's not an exaggeration. An unusual combination of pressure systems and geological features makes cloud formation over the Atacama desert literally impossible. Some eggheads have done the math to confirm it. It's just not going to happen, ever. The Atacama desert is actually where NASA conducts its test-runs for sending machines to Mars. The locations are virtually identical. There's no moisture and no life. If you die in the Atacama, you don't even rot. Scientists have found bodies, thousands of years old, that look as fresh as the day they keeled over. This is it. This is literally the most inhospitable place on the surface of the Earth. There are microbes in the calderas of volcanos, but there isn't a single one here. There is, however, San Pedro de Atacama, tourist mecca of Northern Chile!
Lifestyle Life isn't very breezy in San Pedro. They do get their water somewhere, obviously, but the thing about Atacama water is, well, it's basically arsenic. Just another one of nature's cruel jokes, what little water there is to be found is naturally laced with up to 60 times the fatal dose of this poison. The locals just shrug their shoulders, though. It's okay - they're fucking immune. After centuries of living in the Atacama wasteland, the residents of this dustbowl nightmare have actually built up a tolerance to arsenic that makes them a medical oddity. In recent years, they've built filtration plants so that visitors can actually survive their vacation. Oh, you didn't think people would vacation here? Well, as it turns out, the majority of San Pedro's real money comes from tourism. For some fucking reason.
Around 40,000 people venture into this town every year just to see the closest thing to the surface of the moon that can be found on Earth. There is so much tourism that the conservative residents have had to crack down on revellers - they have ordinances banning both binge drinking and "nocturnal dancing." Okay. It's not Cancun. But you have to give some credit to a people who can take miles of literally nothing and turn that into a tourist empire. Do you have something funny to say about a random topic? You could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow. Go here and find out how to create a Topic Page. For more places to avoid visiting, check out Fun Size Countries: The Insane Histories of the World's 6 Tiniest Nations. Or find out about some some cultures you should be glad you didn't grow up in, in The 5 Most Terrifying Rites of Manhood from Around the World. And stop by our Top Picks to see the vicious squalor the Cracked staff works in. And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get dick jokes sent straight to your news feed. |
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can you please just ban kaly76hummer? I don't want to have to read about meeting older women every time I look at the comments on an article. Great article btw.
that flood picture of cherrapunjee isn't really cherrapunjee, since there's no flooding there because of the weirdass water swallowing ground... it's just some random flood, probably another part of india or bangladesh
This was the best article on cracked for a while now !!! Good job, mate !!
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Yogyakarta is NOT dangerous. You have to understand that while Mount Merapi is an active volcano it is still considered sacred by many of the people living there. Yogyakarta is associated with (mostly) a calm and peaceful way of Javanese life. Much like the sacred mountain itself. When it is not erupting, that is. You got to love living in the beautiful mountainside! Anyway the 2006 earthquake was really destructive. So probably I agree with you anyway.
Siberia-the most f**ked up retarded piece of s**t landmass on the planet Boy have strong feelings about this Cracked?
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REALLY!?!? How about Rotorua New Zealand where the whole city is built inside a volcano? If that is not enough, Auckland New Zealand is built on top of approximately 50 yes FIFTY volcanoes!!! If that were not enough, it is exposed to the Tasman sea on one side, and the open Pacific on the other side... one tsunami from any direction and... Not to mention that it is a serious earthquake risk being on the ring of fire, and that you cant even escape the lava flows because the islands just offshore can also be active volcanoes. Not to mention your ship will be attacked by terrible monsters. YES, "Here be Monsters"! The waters just offshore are where those evil giant squid come from... that does not stop the locals having more boats per capita than any other city on earth... when they say the big one got away, it is a good thing. Finally throw in fairly regular force five hurricanes and you have the mans man of cities.
I was looking at the average temperature for Oymyakon and even though the average temperature in winter is about -50, in the summer the average is up around 70, with a record of over 90. That has to be a record for average extremes in temperature. So in the summer Siberians aren't stuck in the house. Well, actually they are because they're still passed out from their massive winter drunk.
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Great article, thanks!!
When land was first being handed out to, we guess, the cavemen or somebody, the Russians thought they were getting a pretty sweet deal with their colossal tract of real estate. Unfortunately, they neglected to look at the fine print and realize that almost 80 percent of their nation was goddamn Siberia, the most f**ked-up retarded piece of s**t landmass in the world. No wonder the Russians drink so much. Siberia is evidence that God should have worked on the seventh day, because this job ain't finished. You racist c**t...
wow. this article had me laughing out loud! and it was so interesting! I love, love, love, reading about weird and cool things, kudos on the amazing article :)
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seabassuk: If it´s such a nasty bad place, then why is it in Lonely Planet´s top 10 of places to visit in South America? See for yourself, since you seem to be the kind of jackass that believes anything he read online. http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-america#
Has everybody forgotten about Mogadishu?
Holy s**t this article was amazing. AND informative!
This was the funniest article in a long time, and was fun to read. oh, and here's how to stop the spam comments; pay cracked.com even more money to not let spammers spam than the spammers are paying to spam, that way the spammers will have to pay cracked.com even more money than you're paying cracked to get cracked to let them spam again, then you just have to pay even more money... ad infinitum, .. or ad nauseum, whichever fits.
Isn't there any way to block those "My friends recommended me a very interesting place..." SPAM comments? I'm sick of them.
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