Places Tom Peeters Wants to Go

A magical and peaceful ruined Cistercian abbey in what is now southern Belgium.

A statue of the Soviet leader still stands in a quiet corner of Estonia’s most Russian city.

A series of concentric circles represented a bold new experiment in socialist urban planning, and it notoriously difficult to get around.

Troublesome students were detained in this tiny graffiti-covered university jail.

Man-made mineral caves house massive bat colony.

The eccentric midcentury home of a suspected mafia gun-runner.

More than 20,000 salt and pepper shakers from across the globe call this museum home.

This no man's land slicing through the island is strewn with abandoned relics of another time.

A 1970s resort city now stands abandoned, caught in the middle of a divided island.

Sex curse discovered on ancient tablet in Cyprus.

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

This gem-encrusted temple is said to contain some of the Buddha's hair which can make the deaf hear and the blind see.

A mostly desolate bar on a remote island hosts hundreds of sailors for a few days each year.

A wooden statue of an Estonian pagan god and King of the Setos stands atop a sacred hill.

A former imperial sea-fortress and Soviet prison.

A trio of giant wooden megaphones turn up nature's volume in this Estonian forest.

This stoic bronze soldier stands as a symbol of Russian sacrifice or Soviet oppression, or maybe both.

A clerical error gave rise to this imaginary micronation in the southwestern corner of Estonia.

This disappearing geyser has been attributed to witchcraft, but really it's all about rainfall.

Rusted cars, trucks, and buses form a fascinating collection of Soviet-era machinery.

Two well-hidden huts let animal lovers spend the night among the bears, wolves, and other predators of the forest.

Legend has it that not even Stalin could pull down the 2015 European Tree of the Year.

The highest point in Belgium is a staircase to nowhere.

Someone left a Boeing 737 in a field in southern Bali.