Places Aksel Wants to Go

One of the world's largest salt caves is filled with fragile salt sculptures, salt rivers, and huge salt megadomes.

This steamship has been beautifully rusting off the coast of an Iranian island since the 1960s.

Mongolian Buddhists believe this monastery in the Gobi desert to be the center of the world's spiritual energy.

Atop this former dutch railway office sits an interstellar work of art.

'The Letters of Utrecht' lays out a ribbon of poetry one letter at a time, with no final verse in sight.

A historic observatory now an astronomy museum beautifully situated at the moat of the Middle Age city centre.

This Netherlands museum holds a gloriously mechanical collection of ornate musical automata.

A Zoroastrian funerary tower where excarnation rituals are carried out is threatened by the area's dwindling vulture population.

This elegant carving of the Buddha guards a small Buddhist temple within a cave.

A Buddhist shrine in a cave protected by macaques next to dark passages lined with creepy paintings.

The Thai Army has dug deep trenches along the Thai/Myanmar border to prevent drug smuggling.

Luxurious devotion and 500,000 images of Buddha in Myanmar.

Amazingly, this centuries-old wooden monastery is still standing today.

Bizarre dirt trail winds a narrow path above the tree line.

Gigantic unfinished stupa and the world's 2nd largest bell.

A mile-long navigable cave adorned with stalactites and stalagmites reaching up to 65 feet tall.

These serpents are considered holy and pampered accordingly.

A deserted 20-lane highway runs through Myanmar's empty capital city.

A vast, otherworldly collection of Buddhist stupas.

This unique temple complex remains off the typical tourist trail.

This astonishingly geometric cave has inspired everyone from Jules Verne to Pink Floyd.

Countless stories attempt to explain Poland's mysterious J-shaped trees.

A natural gas leak provides a flickering flame beneath a waterfall.

A historic cave in Scotland once served as a hiding place for a famous Covenanter.