Places alessandralee Wants to Go

Thousands of well-dressed mummies below a monastery.

This huge pile of volcanic boulders hides a stunning network of secret grottoes.

An 80-year-old house built out of newspapers.

A nearly 500-year-old sculpture depicts a man eating a sack of babies, and no one is sure why.

A faithful reproduction of Al-Jazari's enormous water clock.

China's very own Atlantis is an ornate dynastic city resting at the bottom of a lake.

Space-age monument to an early 20th-century uprising.

Paris' fabled purveyor of exotic taxidermy and natural history curios.

An alien landscape of chalk-rock in the Egyptian desert.

Deep in the Thar desert, a temple crawling with thousands of holy rats.

The most alien-looking place on Earth.

Collapsing castle on the Hudson river was once the storage site of military surplus business.

A marvel of Byzantine engineering under the streets of Istanbul.

The earliest known map to show America, discovered by accident at a Paris bookshop.

A sacred lake composed of over 300 separate pools of highly concentrated minerals.

Roadside collection of 65,000 signs.

Russian Orthodox church built on an Antarctic island.

Lost subway station nestled beneath Toronto's busy commuter line.

More than 200 statues filled with cryptic symbols give this park spot an aura of horror vacui fantasy.

Each spring, a dreamlike carpet of bluebells overtakes the forest floor.

A castle built by an eccentric medieval enthusiast in suburban Ohio.

The central mosque of this Mali town is entirely built from mud.

The origin of this mechanical boy was a mystery until he revealed his maker by writing it in perfect cursive.

This golden temple is surrounded by hundreds of stone tablets that comprise the "world's largest book."