Rude messages

Not everything can make the cut obviously, but things like this painting of a naked woman on top of this building near Phoenix, AZ are certainly eye-catching. Thanks to GSS reader prmckinney for sending it in.

Henry sent us a friendly message in New Zealand that, well, gets directly to the point.

Or you could be like this guy near Austin, Texas who loves to express his satisfaction with American president Barack Obama! Make sure you notice the detail of the middle finger! Thanks to Chris S.

Lookalikes

At times just the strange artefacts of Google Maps itself are amusing! Take a look at this rather unfortunately shaped road near the Newcastle FC stadium sent to us by Chris. On the more natural side, Pamela sent us this lake in Alberta, Canada that looks, well, pretty much exactly like a rat.

Signposts for the sky

Rooftops can be an easy target for “on-the-fly” messaging. Marc sent us a link to a huge “Amazing Race” finish line painting on the final approach path to LAX. The wildly popular American reality show has used Los Angeles as the finish line before, but it does seem odd that they actually put a channel and time on it. Maybe it’s just a huge billboard instead?

Quetzal sent us the letter Z carved into the desert next to a highway in Coahuila, México, which is apparently the sign of a notorious Mexican Drug Cartel. On a lighter note, Dawn sent us a link to this extravagant field maze that takes the shape of a steam locomotive!

Mystery circles

Sometimes the most interesting things we see on the ground however are circles. You have the obvious crop circles around the world, but then there are perhaps stranger things out there. For example, any ideas what this little circle in the desert sent to us by Mastboy could be?

Or perhaps this circle off the coast of the United Kingdom? Maybe it could be a beacon of some kind? Thanks to scotty for the link!

In a more mysterious entry, a series of strange circular features have been sent to us from deep in the forests of Maharashtra in India. They’re remote, they’re large, and no one seems to really know where they came from!

The four circles appear to be man-made due to the perfect circular shape and similar size, but no obvious pattern or purpose can be seen. One of the most popular theories are the circles are some sort of ancient water reservoirs, but one could argue how much water needs to be collected in the middle of a monsoon-ridden country!

Some more imaginative people think that ancient aliens visited and made the circles, but they aren’t really a patch on traditional crop circles though.

Even the local villagers in Kumbhale aren’t sure where the circles came from, even though one of them is practically on their doorstep.

Another theory suggests that the circles are “strikingly” similar to meteorite impacts, but the rims of these circles do not appear to share the same crowning effect that occurs near other true craters – and there haven’t been any meteorite fragments found here (although this could perhaps be due to erosion from the monsoons we mentioned).

For some discussion on the circles, including ground level photos, check out this link. What do you think they are? Thanks to Sandesh for sending in this intriguing suggestion.

Locations: Alberta, Arizona, California, India, Mexico, Morocco, New Jersey, New Zealand, Texas, United Kingdom / Categories: Crop Circles, Large Type, Movie Locations, Stadiums and Sport, Weirdness

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Derby Line, USA

The small American village of Derby Line, Vermont actually lies north of the 45th parallel, which is the border between the United States and Canada. The village was first settled back in 1795, when surveying techniques were crude at best¹, resulting in a nearly quarter of a mile error. When the borders were finally adjusted south to their proper locations in the mid-1800′s, Derby Line was reduced to a tiny geographic size of 0.7 square miles (1.8 km2).

Concerned about illegal immigration, the U.S. Border Patrol has tried to close streets which have historically run together with those of neighbouring Stanstead, but they have so far remained open.

If residents cross the border to either country, they’re required to report their citizenship and pay their duties upon their return. Frequent questioning and searches are a normal way of life. Some houses even sit directly on the border itself!

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was purposely built on the border back in 1904. It was intended for use in both countries, but with today’s heightened border security library guests are required to park on their respective sides of the building (in their country) and sometimes have to report to customs before even entering.

There is a thick black line on the floor that represents the border between the two countries. A note on the library’s website offers this bit of friendly advice for folks who don’t take the line seriously,

“First time visitors and old friends of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House must be aware that the border between Canada and the United States that runs through our building is real and it is enforced.”

According to the picture, it’s entirely possible to read one side of your book in the United States, and the other side in Canada.

© Copyright Haskell Free Library and Opera House and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Bristol, USA

The state line between Virginia and Tennessee often gets lost between the cities of Bristol and Bristol. That’s right; two cities with the same name share the same border in two different states! To be honest, these two cities can really be thought of as one with two governments. In fact, they both share the same downtown district without very many signs that show the actual border along the way.

The cities of Bristol are divided by State Street, which happens to be the border for most of the town. On one side of the road you’re in Virginia, and the other side you’re in Tennessee!

There are some signs located around town to indicate the border between the two states, including this one over State Street which lists the two states on the bottom corners.

The Tennessee side of Bristol is also the home to Bristol Motor Speedway, a 1/2 mile racetrack that is home to numerous NASCAR events throughout the year. The facility is known for being one of the few that routinely sells out all 160,000 seats in advance each year. No wonder it looks more like a stadium than racetrack.

Bristol also claims to be the “Birthplace of Country Music” since it was where the first recordings of country music were made. Maybe that explains the huge guitar we found on the side of the road?

Calexico, USA and Mexicali, Mexico

Being quirky doesn’t always mean dealing with the border itself; sometimes you can just split the name like they did in Calexico and Mexicali!

The Mexican city of Mexicali (MEXIco+CALIfornia… get it?) is the northernmost city in Latin America and the border opposite of Calexico, California (CALifornia+mEXICO… we know you got that one!). As you can see from the satellite imagery, the much larger Mexicali is home to over 900,000 people, and its little sister Calexico just thrives on being across the border from such a large population.

This whole area is supposed to be the Baja desert, but in the early 1900s the sand was converted to farmland with the help of new canals made by both Mexicans and Chinese labourers. Some of the canals are connected to the nearby Salton Sea.

From above, Mexicali looks every bit as busy as it is on the ground. One of the most famous features has to be this roundabout known locally (and translated to English) as the “Circle of Death“. The name comes from the fact that, at best, traffic laws are only very loosely followed.

As with any typical U.S./Mexico border town, security is taken very seriously. Take a look at this long straight wall that marks the border between the two countries.

While this post focuses on North America, there are hundreds more quirky border anomalies around the world. Where’s your favourite?

Locations: California, Mexico, Quebec, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia / Categories: Buildings, Stadiums and Sport, Street Views, Weirdness

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Whether they’re big or small, year-round or just for a weekend, carnivals and fairs draw in people of all ages. Some fairs are positively massive, such as the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, which takes place every August.

Many carnivals are small, travelling affairs, setting up in local parking lots or neighborhood parks for a two or three-day shot before moving on. Put it in a really small town, and it can shut whole parts of a town down for a day or two, as we see here in remote Snow Lake, Manitoba, where the main street has been completely taken over by the fair.

Carnival attractions are a popular feature along tourist boardwalks, such as the Santa Monica Pier in California. The Street View trike made its way down the pier to catch many of the sights of Pacific Park, the oceanfront amusement park located right on the pier.

Here, we get a great close-up look at some classic carny games like the ring toss, balloons and darts and the ever-infamous milk bottles. Here are some tips for you marks out there: the rings don’t fit the bottles, the balloons are underinflated, the darts are dull, and one of the bottles is often weighted down. Ha, ha, we’ve ruined the carnival industry forever!¹

A good carnival is built around rides. Of course, the ferris wheel and the bumper cars are standard attractions, like the ones at this beachfront resort in Eforie Nord, Romania, which looks pretty solid.

But then there are the sketchier carnivals, where the rusty rides may be covered in knock-off Disney and Looney Tunes characters, or showing far too much rust, or just look underwhelming. Take, for example, the world’s lamest karting track. Or this unenclosed spin-‘til-you-vomit ride. Or this delightfully rickety dragon boat. Alto, indeed.

Alas, all good things must come to end, and eventually after years of use and abuse every carnival ride is sent to the junkpile. Sometimes, they don’t even get that. Just look at this string of old rides left to rot in a Mexico City alleyway.

Oh, Daisy Duck, we feel your pain.

Locations: California, Manitoba, Mexico, New York, Ontario, Romania, Texas / Categories: Crowds, Street Views, Theme Parks

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The Street View car has come fairly close to several fires over the years, and many remain to be seen – such as this sidewalk garbage fire in a Marseilles underpass which has filled the air with acrid black smoke, or this small roadside brush fire midway between Cardiff and Newport, Wales.

In Sao Paulo, this petrol station is nearly obscured completely by the smoke from a car fire.

The most inflammatory encounters for the Street View car, however, may be these large roadside fires in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa and Chiapas, Mexico.

I wonder if they’ve tried putting these fires out with the world’s largest fire hydrant? Then again, it probably wouldn’t help, seeing as how as it’s located over in Columbia, South Carolina. Besides, the Street View Car in general has bad luck with hydrants.

Fortunately, there are usually emergency workers on the case. Here in Wiesbaden, Germany, an upper-level house fire is being attended to by a number of fire trucks.

At Philadelphia International Airport, this burned-out husk of an airplane sits in a paved circle. The helpless victim of firefighter training, it joins its comrade at Florida’s MacDill Air Force Base.¹

This small brush fire on the North Island of New Zealand was likely set deliberately as part of the annual process of getting the land ready for the season’s planting, and this field fire in Bulgaria is also deliberate. This other brush fire in Botswana captured by the National Geographic African Megaflyover Project, however, appears to be far more dangerous.

Then there are full-on forest fires. In the wilderness of the Northwest Territories, this forest fire is caught in the heat of the moment, sending a giant plume of smoke into the air that can be seen over 20 miles (30 km) away.

Just as ominous is this massive fire in the far east of Russia, seen here blazing a path toward the Pacific Ocean.

What’s worse than an out-of-control wildfire? Try three, as captured here in Cameroon.

Finally, here’s the Street View car getting incredibly meta, as it takes a picture of someone taking a picture of a fire along the South African coast.

Locations: Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Florida, France, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, Northwest Territories, Pennsylvania, Russia, South Africa, South Carolina, Wales / Categories: Aircraft, Natural Landmarks, Other Vehicles, Street Views

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The walls are riddled with cracks, as though the building had been rocked by a huge earthquake. Just one of several Ripley’s attractions in this tourist-destination city, it is a relatively recent building. The original museum here was destroyed by a real disaster in the form of a fire in 1992.

Tourist towns are a natural fit for Ripley’s bizarre collections which include genetically mutated animals (two headed creatures are a favourite) and relics from infamous events. In Niagara Falls, Ontario, visitors who tire of watching water flow over a cliff can walk up Clifton Hill where they’ll find a prostrate version of the Empire State Building, complete with King Kong.

The details are worth noting, including the person hanging out of a window and the helicopter on the ‘top’ of the building.

Meanwhile Blackpool’s beachfront museum has a veritable trove of exterior oddities, including Jeep embedded in the entranceway with an explorer climbing a rope to escape and a pair of legs sticking out of the wall. On the roof there’s a dinosaur wearing a large clock – maybe he thinks he’s Flavor Flav?

It’s a little hard to make out on the satellite view, but the Odditorium in Thailand’s resort town Pattaya has a plane crashed into its walls. Something similar also happened at the Ripley’s in the small town of Wisconsin Dells.

Another transportation-themed museum is found in Panama City Beach, Florida, where an ocean liner has ‘washed up’ several hundred metres from the shore.

The Street View car even pulled into the parking lot for a visit – giving us a close up look at the lifeboat!

In Branson, Missouri, there is another ‘earthquake-ravaged‘ building, while in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the museum looks as though it has been damaged by the many storms that hit this hurricane-prone region.

Finally, the Ripley’s museum in Guadalajara, Mexico, is not at all architecturally unusual, but Street View does allow us to see an exhibit – a silver Rolls Royce, which I believe (if Google Translate is correct) was once the property of La Doña Maria Félix, a notable Mexican actress.

You can learn more at Wikipedia, or Ripley’s official website.

Locations: England, Florida, Mexico, Missouri, Ontario, Tennessee, Thailand, Wisconsin / Categories: Buildings, Street Views, Weirdness

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Dean’s Blue Hole is a spectacular underwater sinkhole situated in a bay on Long Island in the Bahamas, which as well as being perhaps the finest example of these incredibly beautiful geological features, also has the distinction of being the world’s deepest blue hole.

Although relatively small in initial diameter at around 35 metres (115 ft), where Dean’s Blue Hole is unique is in its depth – at 202 metres (663 ft) it descends nearly twice as far as any other known blue hole.

Due to the unique geology of the Bahamas, there are dozens of smaller water-filled caves to be found, many of which are accessible to divers who wish to explore the cave systems they reveal.

Sawmill Sink, where numerous pre-human fossilised remains have been discovered.

Other blue holes have been found all over the world, such as the second deepest – the 130 metre (360 ft) Blue Hole on the coast of the Red Sea, which due to having claimed the lives of between 40 and 80 divers is known as “the World’s Most Dangerous Dive Site”.

The largest known entrance to a Blue hole is that of the Great Blue Hole in Belize, which is some 300 metres across.

There are (of course) water-filled sinkholes far deeper even than Dean’s Blue Hole, such as El Zacatón in Mexico (335m / 1,099 ft) and Pozzo del Merro in Italy (392m / 1,286 ft), but without the spectacular visual contrast between deep and shallow water of a true blue hole, from our aerial viewpoint they seem far less impressive.

There’s more info about blue holes at Wikipedia and the Wondermondo site has an impressive amount of sinkhole information.

Do you know of any other blue holes we should mention? Post a comment with a link!

Locations: Belize, Egypt, Italy, Mexico, The Bahamas /

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Also known as Tlachihualtepetl (‘artificial mountain’), the pyramid has a base 450m square – four times the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. At 66m tall it is considerably shorter than the more well known monument, though its total volume would have been much larger.

While the satellite view above doesn’t give a real sense of the location, Street View gives us numerous different perspectives. Rampant tropical plant life has grown over the pyramid; from a distance it looks like a natural hill topped by a Church.

The pyramid was built as a temple in what was at the time Mexico’s second largest city. Its size is in part a result of four distinct stages of construction between the 3rd century BCE and the 9th century CE. Each development increased the overall size of the structure, and beginning in the 1930s, excavations of the interior have revealed a complex history of which little can be sensed from the outside.

Archaeologists exploring inside the pyramid have created 8km of tunnels and discovered several different structures including the small adobe pyramid in the north-west corner of the site, and more recent – and much larger – stepped stone structures. Some of these have areas with detailed painted murals. Several hundred sets of human remains have also been discovered, including some apparently from human sacrifices.

About 10% of the tunnels are open to the public, accessible from a ticket booth and low doorway on the northern side.

There is little of note on the exterior of the pyramid – these steps visible on the west side are not part of the original structure – they were reconstructed by archaeologists.

To the south of the pyramid is an area known as the Courtyard of Altars which contains at least three altars and numerous large stone sculptures.

The Church which crowns the site  is the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Church of Our Lady of Remedies). It was built in the late 16th century by Spanish colonials and is now a major pilgrimage location for Mexican Catholics.

In recent decades further excavation of the pyramid has been limited because of the religious significance of the site and the Church. Similarly, the general belief is that there are many more features of archaeological significance in the surrounding area that will never be discovered because they are on private property.

You can learn more from the detailed history at Wikipedia, and see some images at the Aztec History and Sacred Destinations sites.

Thanks to Carlos Om.

Locations: Mexico / Categories: Monuments, Street Views, Structures

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A keen environmentalist, Sowa wanted to make a statement about low-impact construction and recycling, so he built a floating platform from a quarter of a million old plastic bottles (and other waste materials). The first iteration was built in a lagoon on Mexico’s Mayan Riviera, and was named for the pattern in which the bottles were connected. Unfortunately it was badly damaged during a 2005 hurricane, and washed ashore.

Spiral Island II was constructed a couple of years later in a lagoon on Isla Mujeres near Cancun. Street View gives us a glimpse from a nearby road.

The 20m-wide platform was created from about 100,000 bottles enclosed in netting. A variety of reclaimed materials – such as scrap wood – were used to build the small house that Sowa lives in. Mangrove plants provide shade and help with the structure’s stability.

While the island may look a little ramshackle, it has a number of home comforts such as an outdoor dining area, a composting toilet, a couple of ponds, and solar panels to provide power. The surface of the platform is covered with sand which – coupled with the palm trees – provides that authentic tropical island feel.

Ecoble.com has an article giving more details about the construction process, while this blog post and a YouTube video give an idea of what life is like on Spiral Island – the “Island floating on plastic bottles“.

Locations: Mexico / Categories: Islands, Street Views, Structures, Weirdness

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As this sign will tell you, Isla Mujeres is the easternmost point of Mexico. In fact, it’s fewer than 140 kilometres to Cuba.

Isla Mujeres is a long, skinny island. In places it’s less than 100 metres wide. Here’s a fellow working on some resort property at the very northern tip of the island.

Almost every picture of Isla Mujeres includes one moped scooter or golf cart. There are 1500 scooters on the island and over 500 golf carts, which make for easier navigation of the tiny island.

If the busy life of Isla Mujeres is too much for you and you need to get away to go scuba diving, bird watching, or fishing, head off for the even smaller Isla Contoy. Contoy is about an hour away and a popular day trip from Isla Mujeres (and 3 sq km total). Some day, perhaps, Google Street View will make it there, too.

There’s not much else to say about Isla Mujeres besides the fact that it’s one of the most stunningly gorgeous places the Street View car or trike has ever visited: white sandy beaches, picture-perfect palm trees, and glassy blue water. Click some of these images below and see for yourself!

Overall, not a bad way to spend your holiday:

Locations: Mexico / Categories: Islands, Natural Landmarks, Street Views

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We’ve previously covered Very Large Buddhas (which were seriously large), so now it’s time to seek out which is the largest Christ statue in the entire world!

Cristo de la Concordia, Bolivia

In Cochabamba, Bolivia we find the Cristo de la Concordia a 33.8m high statue (including 6.2m base), which makes it the third largest Christ in the world. One interesting feature of this monument is that you can climb up the stairs inside his chest, and get an excellent view of the city by way of reward.

Christ the Redeemer, Brazil

Possibly the best recognised of all the statues of Christ in the entire world, Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil stands 709 m above sea level and measures in at 38 metres tall (including an 8m pedestal). The monument was inaugurated in 1931, and currently receives over two million tourists every year.

Christ the King, Colombia

Located 1,440 m above sea level and weighing in at around 464 tonnes, Christ the King, in Cali Colombia is a seemingly modest 41m, but is considered the largest representation of Jesus Christ in the world¹. The figure was completed in 1953, and at night the view is pretty impressive.

Cristo-Rei de Almada, Portugal

Now we’re talking! The world’s tallest Jesus Christ is surely the Cristo-Rei de Almada in Portugal, as it’s 110 metres tall! Unfortunately this is only the case if we include the height of the base – if not then it’s only a paltry 28m! Completed in 1959 it is of course an important religious and conventional tourist location.

Christ of Copoya, Mexico

Our last Christ is of truly epic proportions. The Christ of Copoya in the Mexican state of Chiapas began its construction in 2006, and when finished will top out a truly enormous 62 metres tall, which will make it the largest figure of Christ in the entire world. At least for a while

Finally, I recommend you also take an aerial tour of the Cristo del Otero in Palencia Spain, the Cristo de las Noas in Coahuila, Cristo del Cubilete in Guanajuato and the Cristo de la Habana.

Locations: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal / Categories: Monuments, Shadows

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