Just outside Lisbon Airport we can see an old jet airliner. Nothing unusual about that, clearly – however you’d have to go a very long way to find another aircraft that has ever been converted into a strip bar, complete with DJ booth in the cockpit!¹

The aircraft is a relatively rare Convair 880 – there were originally 65 built, but today there are just 8 left in the world. Only one of these has been fully preserved: The Lisa Marie, which used to belong to Elvis Presley.

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to pay this historical location a visit, as just a few weeks ago the strip bar was closed down and the plane destroyed.

So there’s only 7 now.

Thanks to Frank.

Completely unknown to the Western world until 1812, this is the ancient city of Petra in Jordan.

Although nobody knows for sure when people first settled here, the incredible architecture that survives is thought to be at least 2,000 years old – and the most impressive thing is that much of what remains wasn’t built, but actually carved directly out of the sandstone cliffs – like this entire amphitheatre for example.

Ground level photo

Probably the best preserved part of the ancient city is Al Khazneh, or The Treasury, which is sheltered at the end of a tall, narrow gorge known as al-Siq. The shelter afforded by the high walls explains why the Treasury hasn’t been sandblasted away like many of Petra’s other architectural features.¹

Although the angle these images were taken at doesn’t allow us to see the façade itself, we can see a crowd milling around in front of it.

The Treasury is at the top of this thumbnail, and the pictures that the crowd are taking would look a lot like this.

If you’re thinking this place seems familiar, perhaps you recognise it from 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which it played a part as the fictional “Temple of the Holy Grail”.²

If you’d like to explore more, here’s a good map of all the local sights, or read Petra’s Wikipedia page.

Thanks to Jason Griswold and Dan Kuck.

The Langkawi Sky Bridge perches precariously over a spectacular chasm, 700m above sea level on Pulau Langkawi, an island within Malaysia’s Langkawi archipelago of 99 distinct islands¹.

Incredibly, the cable-stayed bridge actually curves 125m around a single support, sweeping out dramatically over the vast emptiness below.

Acrophobics should probably avoid watching this wonderfully terrifying Youtube video, and gephyrophobiacs definitely won’t enjoy these stunning bridge-level photos…

Thanks to Rusbridge.

The town of Progreso, Mexico, sits on a limestone shelf that falls away extremely gradually as it gets further out to sea. As a result, when they built a pier to allow cruise ships to dock here, it had to be long. Really long.

Measuring a phenomenal 6.5 kilometers (4 miles), this is the world’s longest pier.

The original pier was completed in 1942, and despite being little more than a two-lane highway, is actually quite nice looking seen from the beach. In this satellite shot you can clearly see where the original construction ends, and the more recent one begins.¹

Cruise ships dock here for a day or two to allow the tourists to visit some of the nearby archaeological sites, and we can see there’s one berthed here at the moment. Tourists need to take a bus to shore, which takes nearly 10 minutes!

The pier also plays a major part in the local container industry – we can see loads of them stacked on the pier – and there’s also a tanker here just now too.

For more long piers, see our previous posts on England’s 2.1 km Southend Pier (the world’s longest pleasure pier) and Australia’s 1.8 km Busselton Jetty².

Thanks to cboone and Michael.

As any bond villain will attest, a true megalomaniacal dictator should have a number of underground lairs from which to hatch evil plots.

As we can see, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il and his associates have plans to go one better than the average Bond villain, and are imitating the Thunderbirds with this runway being constructed underneath a mountain.

The runway, in the region of Wonsan, sticks out a bit at either end so we can measure it at 1800m long and 30m wide. A close up of the entrance shows it’s still being constructed.

The idea here seems to be that foreign military satellites (and Google Earth enthusiasts) would be unable to see what aircraft North Korea have under the mountain, so if a war broke out Thunderbird 2 could use the runway for launch.

The North Korean military are apparently so convinced that the “runway mountain” is the future of modern warfare that they’ve actually built three separate runways across the country. This second example is in the area of Onchon.

I’ve never claimed to be a military expert, but this all seems a bit mad to me – surely the benefits of hidden aircraft are outweighed by the fact that it would be very easy for an attacker to completely ruin the airbase with one strategically placed bomb at the entrance?

Thanks to danescombe.