Author: Ms. R.

Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we meet back up with our pal Bernie Harberts, the beast whisperer, who trekked 19 million mule steps across the United States only to find himself, for the first time, a little homesick. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and……

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The Mawaki Site in the Noto Peninsula, Ishikawa Prefecture, was continuously inhabited for over four millennia between 6,000-2,300 years ago, bearing witness to the dawn and twilight of the prehistoric Jōmon period of Japan. Discovered in 1982-1983 during the pre-construction survey for a canal, the Mawaki Site contains several shell middens, mass graves, and the remains of a timber circle consisting of 10 chestnut poles, which has since been reconstructed on the site. The diverse finds from the site……

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Regarding the concrete figures arranged across the yard of the late B.G. (“Gene”) Cockrell, the artist reportedly claimed that they are simply things that he saw that he then wanted to build. That modest self-assessment may be entirely true but it fails to express what a keen eye Cockrell had for the iconic. Dinosaurs, Native Americans, Jesus, mythical creatures, extra-terrestrials, an American Bison; the two dozen sculptures are all instantly recognizable as part of contemporary culture. At one time,……

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While phở is Hanoi’s most iconic noodle soup, there are many others worthy of your attention. One such example is bún thang (pronounced “boon taang”), a rice vermicelli noodle soup known for being light yet filling and savory. In the Vietnamese capital, you’ll find nearly a dozen restaurants hawking this noodle soup. Our favorite is this over 20-year-old standby near the scenic Hoàn Kiếm Lake, where bowls start at just VND50,000, or roughly two dollars.  Often considered to be……

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The Alaska-Canadian Highway, also known as the Alcan Highway or simply the Alaska Highway, was an ambitious engineering project constructed during World War II. It has been described as the largest and most difficult construction project since the Panama Canal.  The highway begins at Dawson Creek in British Columbia, where this sign and a small cairn mark the start of the road. From there, the 1,400-mile-long highway snakes northwest through Canada to Alaska. The majority of the roadway is……

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A delicacy of northern Vietnam, steamed rice roll, or bánh cuốn (pronounced “banh kwohn”), is one of the most underrated Vietnamese dishes. A testament to the sophistication of even everyday Vietnamese food, the dish is known to be technically challenging, requiring finesse and precision. Restaurants serving the best bánh cuốn tend to specialize in that dish alone.  This 30-plus-year-old, Michelin-recognized street food canteen (whose name translates simply to Mrs. Xuan’s Bánh Cuốn) is one of them. Here, watch the……

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Located in Mandeville, Louisiana, in a lakefront park on Lake Pontchartrain, this low, spreading live oak, sporting long beards of sphagnum moss, was planted around 1799. One of the many live oaks that Mandeville is known for, its long, spread-out limbs have grown so heavy that they need external support to stand….

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Jutting abruptly from the Sahara Desert, Ben Amera stands 633 meters (2,027 feet) as the largest monolith in Africa. Though Uluru in Australia is officially larger, some geologists believe that if the portion of the rocks below the surface were included in the measurements, Ben Amera would claim the title. But there’s more to Ben Amera than just its size. The mammoth rock stands at the end of a chain of monoliths of different sizes. At the far end……

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In the 12th century, roughly 600 years before Paris’s first restaurant welcomed customers, Kaifeng, China, already had a thriving restaurant scene. By then, the Song Dynasty was underway and the city’s roughly 1 million residents could not only choose to eat out, but select a restaurant specializing in certain dishes or cuisines. “If cooking was key to the revolution of humans in general, only the Chinese have placed it at the very core of their identity,” writes Fuchsia Dunlop……

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Friday Musicale began in 1890 as a meeting between 12 music-minded women in the home of Claudia L’Engle Adams. It grew over the years, eventually hosting its first public concert in 1896 at the Park Opera House. In 1929 it settled on its current location, though a fire in 1995 caused the building to be rebuilt. Friday Musicales was originally intended as an event for women where they could enjoy world-class musicians in the company of other women. This……

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This sign marks the start of the infamous 2,300-mile system of trails that connected Seward to Nome. The trail was used by the famous sled dogs, Togo and Balto, to bring a serum to Nome before the inhabitants were wiped out by a diphtheria epidemic. Today, that heroic run is commemorated by the now-famous 1,049-mile Iditarod sled dog race. The start of the event is in Anchorage, not Seward, but it covers a part of the historic trail….

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Up, up and away with TWA! The pioneer of air travel’s rise, fall, and everything in between is documented at this Kansas City museum. Once the headquarters of Trans World Airlines, the Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport gradually became the site of the TWA Museum. Museum guides, many former TWA employees, guide guests through rooms filled with model airplanes and antique flight simulators, to an airplane hanger and full-scale copy of the TWA’s ambassador suite. In 1930 two passenger……

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