For more than a year Australia has sent asylum seekers arriving on Christmas Island to a holding camp in Papua New Guinea. If their applications are upheld they can stay in Papua New Guinea, but will never return to Australia. A year ago there was bloodshed, and many in the camp are at breaking point. "Imagine a large and real cage in the most isolated island, surrounded by ocean and jungle and tall coconut trees," says Omid, a 25-year-old Iranian.

No rowdy neighbours keeping you up at night. A view that we could only dream of.

What do you do with the house Hitler was born in? For years the building in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn has been rented by the Austrian interior ministry to prevent misuse by neo-Nazis. It was once a day-care centre for the disabled. Now it is empty, as the owner has not agreed to any plans for its future use. Braunau am Inn is a pretty little town in northern Austria, right on the border with Germany. But it has a heavy legacy.

In Beijing, even the tiniest apartment can cost a fortune — after all, with more than 21 million residents, space is limited and demand is high. But it is possible to find more affordable housing. You'll just have to join an estimated 1 million of the city's residents and look underground. Below the city's bustling streets, bomb shelters and storage basements are turned into illegal — but affordable — apartments.

The town of Hogeway, outside Amsterdam, is a Truman Show-style nursing home.

The biggest slum in struggling Ghana is bounded by a burning dump and a sewage channel. Meet the hustlers, builders, prostitutes, entrepreneurs, bad boys, and dreamers who live there, illegally but cheaply, gambling that they’ll come out better than when they went in.

There are thousands of abandoned big box stores sitting empty all over America, including hundreds of former Walmart stores. With each store taking up enough space for 2.5 football fields, Walmart’s use of more than 698 million square feet of land in the U.S. is one of its biggest environmental impacts. But at least one of those buildings has been transformed into something arguably much more useful: the nation’s largest library.

In the sparsely populated Karoo desert in the heart of South Africa's Northern Cape, the spirit of apartheid lives on. I spent a few days in Orania, a town established in 1991 where no black people live. I was part of a BBC crew, including Zimbabwean journalist Stanley Kwenda, who were accredited to visit.

History and literary buffs will rejoice as VirtualTourist members uncover the list of the "Top 10 Historical Homes From Literature."

IT’S an area shrouded in mystery with stories of unexplained disappearances and strange happenings. So its no wonder that Bermuda is also home to one of the biggest shipwreck sites in the world.

Henry Jolicoeur is a retired French Canadian hypnotherapist and a glass-products importer who enjoys making very low-budget documentary films. In the summer of 2012, Jolicoeur read that Larry Ellison, a founder of the Silicon Valley giant Oracle and the fifth-richest man in the world, had bought 97 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai — not a 97 percent stake in some kind of company, but 97 percent of the physical place. Jolicoeur was curious, so he booked a flight and packed his camera.

In Japan's Sagano Bamboo Forest, on the outskirts of Kyoto, towering green stalks of the famously versatile plant sway in the wind, creaking eerily they collide and twist, leaves rustling. The sun filters through the densely packed grove, projecting thin slashes of light onto the dozens of camera-clutching tourists shuffling down the wide trail that cuts through the middle of the forest as they awkwardly angle their shots, attempting to crop human forms out of their frames.

Have you ever dreamed of moving to a quaint, faraway island where, at first, you can’t adjust to the locals’ slow-paced ways, and they just don’t seem to understand your big-city talk; but after a few weeks of kismet encounters and possibly even a flirtation with a sweet local cattle-herder, you and the locals begin to mesh together as you all realize that the only way to live life–no matter where you are in this world–is with an open heart and an open mind?

In the almost 20 years since Action Park first shut its doors, the amusement park’s reputation has only grown. Maybe it was the insane ride designs (looping water slide, anyone?), or perhaps the allegedly inattentive, underaged employees, or the unfortunate rate of injury that kept its infamy alive.

This has to be the weirdest business deal of the week: The Church of England just sold a chunk of forest-covered land on the Fijian island Vanau Levu for $8.8 million to the government of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. For the moment, Kiribati plans to use its 20-square-kilometer (7.7-square-mile) plot for agriculture and fish farming. But the investment is really a fallback for its 103,000 residents—a place to live if they must leave their home island.

Do you love to explore the world just like us? Than you should check out our awesome list of 20 “secret” or less known places you just have to visit.

Not many people can claim Hell as their hometown. But Todd Domboski, and the several thousand former residents of Centralia, Pennsylvania, come closest to that distinction. In 1981, a 12 year-old Domboski fell into a pit that suddenly appeared in his grandmother’s backyard. He grabbed onto a tree root, and his cousin pulled him out from the steam-emitting hole in the earth.

The words of Hossain Bogale, who passed away recently at around 90 years of age. Hossain was a wise and elegant man and one of the founding members of a community called Awra Amba. He did not live there until he was older, but helped build the village and moved there once his children had left home. Hossain spent the latter part of his life living in Awra Amba, which he considered his spiritual home.

When famed British explorer and cartographer Captain Cook mapped the coast of Newfoundland in the late 1700s, he had no reservations about enlisting his crude sense of humor. With a complete disregard for future residents, he went about pervishly enshrining towns across the island - Cuckolds Cove, Blow-Me-Down, and Come-By-Chance among them.

The Sphinx Observatory is an astronomical observatory located above the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland. It is named after the Sphinx, a rocky summit on which it is located. At 3,571 m (11,716 ft) above mean sea level, it is one the highest observatories in the world.