Places Seeking the Edge Wants to Go

Abandoned museum from the last days of Soviet domination, with a unique Brutalist design.

Hot springs monkey spa in the middle of Hell's Valley.

This famed Silk Road oasis was one of the largest cities in the world before it was destroyed by a Mongol horde.

Few people have ever heard of, let alone visited, one of Turkmenistan’s most impressive natural attractions.

A memorial to the thousands of Turkmen soldiers and civilians who died in a bloody 1881 battle.

The remains of a medieval city loom in one of the most isolated desert regions of Turkmenistan.

A cave covered with bizarre stalactites of cloth.

Human ancestor’s 3.6 million year-old footprints.

This beautiful, all-in-one museum, private residence, and bed and breakfast houses a rich collection of African art.

Strolling through these vintage locomotives offers a surprising amount of insight into the history of Kenya.

This cavernous swimming spot doubles as a home to the largest known colony of bats in Central Asia.

A huge monument to a bizarre book written by Turkmenistan’s longstanding dictator.

A dictator's gold statue once rotated to face the sun on a 75-meter high marble tower.

A cemetery with goat-horn bedecked gravestones.

A fiery crater has been burning in the Karakum Desert since 1971.

A former imperial sea-fortress and Soviet prison.

A secluded art gallery hidden within the cellars beneath Tallinn’s medieval monastery.

A monument commemorating the 852 lives lost in the sinking of the MS Estonia.

This striking memorial is one of Estonia’s most controversial Soviet leftovers.

Disused seaplane hangar gets a second life as the jaw-dropping home of Estonia's museum of maritime history.

The farmhouse owned by the Danish author who wrote "Out of Africa" is now a museum honoring her legacy.

Life and death are on parade at the most reliably perilous site of “the Great Migration.”

Located in Nairobi National Park, this animal orphanage is the oldest of its kind in Kenya.

Get tall with nature's lankiest beasts and their warthog friends at this Kenyan preserve.