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If you ever find yourself traveling near Ottensheim, Austria, (located in Upper Austria just seven miles from Linz on the Danube River) in need of a place to rest your head, the Das Park Hotel offers an affordable night's rest so long as you don't mind sleeping in a former sewer pipe. The hotel, which is only open from May to October, has put cement pipes to unanticipated use with each pipe featuring a made-up double bed and enough room for backpack storage, but bathrooms and restaurants are not on site (it's suggested that you use a nearby gas station should you need to go). The doors of the rooms come affixed with code locks and guests can choose how much they would like to pay for the room each night. The Das Park Hotel is located on Rodlpark, the site of the annual Ottensheim Open Air music festival each summer in June. [Via Passportchop] 

Photo: Dietmar Tollerian

So, opposable thumbs aside, we have more in common with the Japanese Snow Monkey than previously thought.

Perched high in the Japanese Alps, in the village of Jigokudani, is a tranquil retreat for anyone needing some well-deserved R&R. At the Korakukan Inn, visitors can ease into natural hot springs and let the curing waters do wonders - the benefits of which are no longer strictly limited to the human race.

The Korakukan hot springs, originally for the inn's paying guests, also have a regular following of local snow monkeys who often trek from the nearby Jigokudani Monkey Park for a delightful warm-water dip. They're seen here year-round grooming each other or carelessly sprawled out with their arms over the spring's edge. It's during the winter months that their spa rendezvous becomes a notorious habit.

[via Spot Cool Stuff Travel]

Melissa Brandts and her husband were hiking in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada and decided to take a portrait of themselves with spectacular Lake Minnewanka in the background. Melissa set up the camera and went back to pose, and her husband held the remote shutter  release.

Meanwhile, attracted by the sounds of the autofocus, an inquisitive Columbian ground squirrel, common in the park, popped up to investigate. Click!  "Self-Portrait With Ground Squirrel" was born.

Knowing she had struck photo gold, Melissa sent the pic to National Geographic magazine's Your Shot, and photo editor Susan Welchman chose it for her Daily Dozen gallery last week. You can find it in all its furry glory by clicking here.

In the past few days, this photo has appeared on the popular blogs Nothing to Do With Arbroath, Neatorama, and that bastion of adorableness, Cute Overload. Today the photo surfaced on the Daily Mail. 

So it's come to this. Our friends over at Gadling just posted a video from an unfortunate American tourist traveling through Australia by train. Nineteen-year-old Chad Vance stepped off the platform during a crew change, and the train began to leave without him. Instead of waiting for the next train, he jumped on, clinging to a tiny stairway platform for over two hours in sub-zero temperatures. He obviously got bored while there, so he had time to take a video of his escapade (one can only imagine his status update: "Stuck on train platform. Cold. Bored. Please Help!").

Eventually, one of the train's staff noticed him and pulled the emergency brake. He was brought inside and given a cabin upgrade (hot showers!) and continued on his travels through the outback. Fortunately for Chad they found him when they did, as the train had another 3.5 hours to travel before it reached its destination.

[Gadling]

This week marks the anniversary of some serious intrepid traveling: NASA successfully launched the first monkeys into space 50 years ago. Two rhesus monkeys named Miss Baker and Able were launched in a Jupiter AM-18 rocket, and National Geographic's Breaking Orbit blog reports that "they reached to a height of 360 miles (579 kilometers) before plummeting back to Earth to land in the ocean." Scientists found the heroic "monkeynauts" alive and well and they were immediately taken to Washington for a press conference.

National Geographic News has a fantastic "monkeynaut" slide show documenting their role in the development of space travel, and reports that "although humans have been making space voyages since 1961, animals have continued to play a role in international space tests. In addition to monkeys, animals that have gone into space in the name of science include dogs, cats, fruit flies, rabbits, turtles, spiders, jellyfish, and amoebas." And now, with the help of Richard Branson, all of us may be able to follow in their path.

My question is, what did the monkeys think of all this? This particular guy looks pretty confused by the whole thing. Got a caption for the photo? Let us know in the comments below.

Photo: Courtesy of NASA

Freda Moon gives us the scoop on some not-so-common forms of kinetic transportation.

You could imagine this past weekend's Kinetic Grand Championship as Tour de France meets Burning Man. But really this 3-day bicycle race in Humboldt County, California is an event all its own. In place of traditional bicycles, racers pedal "kinetic kontraptions"-- part sculpture, part bike. Instead of smooth road or velodrome, racers navigate land, sand, mud and water in people-powered art machines built to look like everything from Octomom (an octopus with a baby gripped in each tentacle) to a fire-breathing metallic dragon constructed from discarded aluminum, to a tie-dyed Hippy-Potamus with wiggling ears and batting eyelashes.  

The event, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, began when one local sculptor, Hobart Brown, challenged another to a race down the main drag of Ferndale, California. Forty years later, the route is 42 miles long, and takes racers across sand dunes (including one called "Deadman's Drop"), across a bay, up and down a mile-long hill with a seven percent incline and across a river. The race, which draws thousands of spectators each year, has spawned similar events across the country and as far away as Perth, Australia.  

If you're looking for something slightly macabre to do in Philadelphia, check out Eastern State Penitentiary at 22nd Street and Fairmount Avenue. ESP, a hulking, haunting, crumbling prison turned tourist destination, will open its recently discovered and restored 1924 synagogue, probably the first built in an American prison, to the public the weekend of April 4 & 5.

At one time among the most infamous and expensive prisons in the world, ESP opened in 1829 and remained in operation for 142 years, closing in 1971. Its radiating, spoke-like panopticon design of individual cell blocks guarded by a central rotunda kept its prisoners in near-constant solitary confinement (but for light work and their Bibles) and was based on the Quaker notion of penitence, and the assumption that once so confined, criminals would revert to a stage of "natural" innocence. The prisoners housed at ESP faced sentences of very little human interaction and most turned mad as a result.

Friend of IT Marissa Bea writes to us about a strange aquatic animal found along the Pacific Northwest coast. While it looks more like something straight out of The Empire Strikes Back, the funny-looking geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck") is a sought-after treat and even gains media attention (Dirty Jobs's Mike Rowe worked on a geoduck farm in 2006, and Top Chef cheftestants cooked up geoduck in Season 3). Here's what Marissa has to say about this Northwest clam.

Being from the Pacific Northwest, I have a strange love affair with the species of clam known as a geoduck.

The quick and dirty: the geoduck is an oversize clam, with shell sizes ranging from 7 to 9 inches in diameter. But the amazing feature of this bivalve is not the shell size but the length of the odd siphon (or nose, or tongue, or what have you) that protrudes from it. There have been specimens found that are up to 6 feet in length, however most are not nearly that long.

Geoducks have one of the longest life spans in the animal world, coming in close to tortoises with an average life expectancy of 146 years. They have few natural predators and can reproduce like rabbits. The female geoduck can produce 5 billion eggs in her lifetime (that's almost an entire new planet of people).

This creature is native to the northwest coast of the U.S. and Canada and gets its name from the Nisqually word for "dig deep." It is still possible to go hunting for them along the beaches. You know you have happened upon a geoduck when you step in the sand and water squirts out at you. Dig a few inches and they are easy to spot. This unique animal looks like a freak of nature, but really it's nature at its best, with an almost infallible design that has been working for millions of years.

But if you pick one up, please put it back. They enjoy the beach more than your kitchen.

Smithsonian Magazine caught up with Top Chef Season 3 winner Hung Huynh, who showed them how to prepare geoduck. Click here for the video.

What strange species live in your neck of the woods? Tell us about it!

Photo: Jordan Husney via Flickr

IT Editor Janelle Nanos has been blogging about her behind-the-scenes Mardi Gras Moments for the past few weeks, and she and a few other Traveler staffers went down to New Orleans to document the celebration.


While wandering the streets of New Orleans with the Societé de Sainte Anne parade, we National Geographic folk stumbled upon Danielle King, a photographer who was costumed as... a National Geographic photographer. Wearing a thick blonde mustache and a pith hat and vest, she carried around our iconic yellow border (cut from the pages of an actual magazine). Her project was called "Irrational Geographic," and she attempted to photograph both the wildlife, and the wild life, of the Mardi Gras experience. She snapped my portrait and I passed her my card, and lo and behold, a gallery of images arrived in my inbox a few days later. I loved them so much I just had to share them here, and asked King to explain the project in her own words.

Her e-mail after the jump.

I'm not the biggest supporter of theme restaurants - I did the Hard Rock Cafe circuit as an adolescent and wouldn't do it again - but I have to admit that the Hospitalis restaurant in Latvia is pretty brilliant. Created by one of the head medical officials in the city, the restaurant partnered with local hospitals and the History of Medicine to create a eating experience that's both cool and creepy:

Both floors of "Hospitālis" really resemble a hospital: sterile white walls and ceilings, floor tiled with shiny tiles, walls decorated with polished and renewed surgical instruments, medical literature in book-shelves. If the client wants to, he can become a patient and choose between having meal in stylized operating room, gynecology or dental cabinet. Screens located in all rooms of the restaurant demonstrate medicine-related episodes from movies.

Other elements include a mirror room for megalomanics, a meal where lab mice are your dinner mates, and a lobby with padded walls and furniture out of a madhouse. The menu sticks with the theme, with items listed in Latin, and you can opt to eat with surgical instruments instead of traditional cutlery. And naturally, nurses are tableside, overseeing your stay.

Would you eat here? Is surgical dining your thing?

[Via Cool Things in Random Places]

Sweden's tiny, traditional red country houses, called stugas, could reach an audience of galactic proportions.  Swedish artist Mikael Genberg and the country's space program want to put a stuga on the moon.

Says Genberg on the project's website, LunarResort.com,

If one individual person from a small worker's town in a small country in northern Europe can engage enough people to realize such a seemingly far-fetched idea, then anyone can do anything,...Luna Resort is a way of inspiring and giving hope to people all over the world.

German photographer Daniel Weigert captured this image of a stuga on the moon, part of an advertising scheme to promote the program.

"What started as a funny idea became very well known through media, and as an advertisement gag they even created those little 'sand-moons' with little stugas next to Autobahns to advertise the idea," says Weigert.

Genberg told BBC news, "We know where the Americans want to land people [on the moon] in 2020... It would be nice if we had a house for them when they come."

Photo: Daniel Weigert

Sometimes, I think I've become almost too reliant on Google Maps to help me find my way. Last weekend, I was out with a friend trying to get to Mount Vernon to see the holiday decorations at George Washington's home. We plugged the place name into my friend's iPhone and started driving, and it wasn't until we pulled up to the Pirates Cove Waterpark (closed for the season) that we realized we'd been Googleduped (a phrase I'm coining here, for lack of better options).

So I was tickled when I came across the Street with a View project, a collection of folks in Pittsburgh who teamed up with the Google Maps Street Team to present a more interesting glimpse into the lives of some city residents who live, work, and play along one alleyway. Spearheaded by two art school grads of Carnegie Mellon University, Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett, and taking a page from the Improv Everywhere gang, the group staged a marathon, a parade, a mad-scientists laboratory, and a sword fight all along the route. The Google Maps crew captured their antics as they drove down the street, and the results can now be found on the actual Street View of Sampsonia Way.

I think it's brilliant, and a fun way to inject some personality into the Google Maps experience. If there had been an actual pirate waiting for me at Pirates Cove, I would not have been nearly as upset at being Googleduped.

Have you been Googleduped? Tell us about it in the comments below.

The South is a land big on tall tales. Growing up, I often heard stories about "haints" (ghosts) and "boogers" (mischievous spirits), who generally hang around at the "witching hour" (the hour just before sunset). So in the spirit of today's spooky holiday, here are a few favorite haunted places from my hometown of Cookeville, Tennessee.

Crazy George's Bridge - Legend has it that this isolated bridge in a wooded hollow marks the place where a railroad worker named George met his untimely end. An incorrigible drinker, George was wandering the tracks one night near the bridge when he was struck by a train and beheaded. Locals will tell you that if you come out to this lonely place after midnight and turn off your car, it won't start again. And if you call for Crazy George three times, he's certain to reappear, carrying a light as he searches for his lost head.

A phone call with Jim Schultz of the Middle Tennessee Paranormal Society debunked this story for me, although it's worth noting that self-proclaimed local occult groups often perform rituals here - visitors have seen mysterious symbols, strange figures standing in circles, and even dead animals. (I came here in high school, and as a matter of fact, the car did not start immediately when we turned it on again - although that may have been more an effect of the driver's shaky hands than any real haunting).

We blogged about friendly little Lawrence, Kansas, earlier this year, but it seems the "Liberal Oasis" of the Midwest has a few spooky skeletons in its closet. Room 506 of the historic downtown Eldridge Hotel is purportedly haunted by the ghost of Colonel Shalor Eldridge, one of the state's most celebrated Civil War figures.

Colonel Eldridge built the eponymous hotel in 1857, a year after a pro-slavery sheriff from neighboring Missouri burned down what had been the Free State Hotel, standing on the same historic corner of Seventh and Massachusetts streets. In August 1863, during the bloodiest event in Kansas history, the hotel and most of Lawrence was burned down by William Quantrill's Raiders. The Colonel, who had always held the Eldridge near and dear to his heart, triumphantly rebuilt it in 1865. To honor the Eldridge's historic importance, it was rebuilt in 1925 due to deterioration concerns. Today, it's the city's leading hotel.

It's also the city's leading haunted attraction. Ryan Kehr, room divisions manager, says the story is that the Colonel's attachment to the Eldridge is what keeps his supposed spirit lurking. "It's not proven that he died or was killed here, but the family did live in the hotel at the time of his death in 1899," Kehr added. "He was always very sentimental about his hotel."

Tucked away among the giant oak trees dripping with Spanish moss in Louisiana's Plantation Country is "one of America's most haunted homes."  The 10-acre, 18th-century Myrtles Plantation, featured in Traveler's 2008 Stay List, charms visitors with rocking chairs on the cast iron porch and cozy French furnishings in its B&B.  But all the Southern charm can't detract from the eerie feeling people get as they wander around the mansion and grounds. Rumor has it, ghosts abound.

The most popular ghost to haunt the Myrtles is Chloe. According to the legend, in the 1800s Judge Clark Woodruff, the plantation's owner, had an affair with Chloe, the household servant. When Judge Woodruff began having an affair with another girl, Chloe feared that she would be banned from the house and forced to work in the fields with the other slaves. 

If you've seen Ghostbusters (pictured) you know that libraries are prone to paranormal activity. But for all you skeptics out there who doubt the credibility of the movie that involves a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man - you should know that Britannica is on board as well.

Today at Intelligent Travel, we're bringing you a slew of local haunts in celebration of Halloween. Ghosts, spirits, and other oddities can be found anywhere you're traveling, and these stories can often help to fill in the history of a place (all while giving you the willies).

For example, I'm from Long Island, New York, home of the famed Amityville Horror house. But I was surprised to find out that according to some local paranormal "experts," one of my favorite area attractions is apparently haunted as well. The iconic Fire Island Lighthouse is said to be haunted by the ghost of a former keeper who hung himself in the building. People have reported that "heavy doors open and close by themselves, strange laughing and banging sounds seem to come from inside, and have experienced eerie feelings, as well as the appearance of a shadowy figure in the caretaker's house."

O.K., I'm officially creeped out.

What are your own local haunts? Share your favorite spooky travel tales in the comments, below.

Photo: Via Long Island Paranormal Investigators

As a Texas native, I always look forward to this time of year, not because of fall foliage and temperatures that hover somewhere between brisk and perfection—autumn is somewhat of an abstract concept in Texas—but because this is Texas State Fair season.   

I’ve never been to any other state fairs, but I have a hunch that Texas’ annual celebration in Dallas is one-of-a-kind.

First of all, as you walk into the 277-acre Fair Park complex, you are greeted by a 54-foot-tall cowboy, lanky and smiling as he calls out “Howdy folks” over and over. His name is Big Tex, and he has been a Texas State Fair icon since 1952. In his former life, he was the world’s tallest Santa Claus, but these days he wears mostly denim and pearl-snaps, custom fit by a team of eight seamstresses.

This year, Big Tex is joined on the fairgrounds by a 25-foot statue of the Egyptian god Anubis (left). The jackal-headed statue is there to promote National Geographic's latest King Tutankhamun exhibit, "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," which will be showing at the Dallas Museum of Art through May 17, 2009. (There's no word yet as to how Big Tex feels about sharing the spotlight with his Egyptian friend.)   

But after you pass the odd duo and head deeper into the fairgrounds, the fun really begins. Choosing between concerts, craft booths, daredevil stunt shows, and pig races (yes, pig races) can be difficult, but choosing what to eat is even harder.

Which brings me to the most mind-boggling thing about the Texas State Fair—the food.

While many state fairs boast an array of standard, fairground junk food such as corn-dogs (Texas's own Fletcher’s corny dogs are hand-dipped right in front of you) and funnel cakes, the Texas State Fair takes this to a whole new level. Texans just are not satisfied with ordinary fried foods, which is why each year, there is some strange, new, fried creation that astounds North Texas and everyone else who hears about it.

A recent article by the BBC led me to the conclusion that Italy just may be the place for me. After all, who wouldn’t want to visit (or live in!) a land where wine flows like water? Literally.

Just this week, residents of Marino, Italy were pleasantly surprised when, instead of tap water, wine began flowing out of their faucets.

Granted, wine isn’t exactly hard to come by in this smallish town (population around 38,000) southeast of Rome. Each year, beginning on the first Sunday in October, town officials provide approximately 792 gallons of local white wine during the four-day Sagra dell'Uva festival. Oh, and the fountains flow with wine as well.

The latter was the source of the recent fortuitous faucet mishap. Apparently, somewhere in the process of connecting wine to the fountains, an error occurred and the wine was sent to local homes instead. (A popular bar on the town square also benefited from the crossed pipes.)

Marino Mayor Adriano Palozzi told the BBC that the wine flow was short-lived: "Apparently the people living around the square who got the wine coming out of their taps were very surprised, they thought that it might be some kind of present from the local council! It only lasted three minutes, we corrected it straight away."

The locals living in the town square may have been the only ones to enjoy wine from their faucet, but visitors arrived from the world over to enjoy the rest of the festivities.

The Sagra dell'Uva, which is one of Italy’s oldest grape festivals, commemorates the return of Admiral Marcantonio Colonna and his victory over the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto in October 1571. Admiral Colonna was one of many sons of Marino who participated in the battle and returned safely. 

Photo: Wine flows from Marino's famed Fontana dei Quattro Mori during Sagra dell'Uva; courtesy of the Marino Town Council Website

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Want all of the perks of cruising but none of the guilt (in the form of high gas prices or that gut that you'll inevitably get from too many trips to the buffet)? We recently came across the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Göynük, Turkey, a 325-room "cruise ship" that is "docked" in the country's Antalya beach region. Completed last year to the price tag of $50 million, the nautical-themed hotel sits among a vast network of pools, allowing for all the pleasure of an ocean-side cabin, but without the seasickness. With its Turkish Bath and an amusement park, we're interested in coming aboard, but a word of warning: since opening, reviews have been mixed, so it seems as if it might be time for the hotel's owners to sink or swim...

Know of other hotels that should be on our Strange Planet radar? Let us know in the comments below.

Photo: via Deputy Dog

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