Travellers' Checks | The places every daring traveller should visit, unveiled in new book Atlas of the Unexpected
- An abandoned train station in Spain and Japan’s Aogashima Island are just some of the unusual destinations listed
British author Travis Elborough’s new Atlas of the Unexpected: Haphazard Discoveries, Chance Places and Unimaginable Destinations features dozens of locations with potential to excite the interest of even the most jaded traveller.
From the spectacularly palatial but abandoned Canfranc International railway station, in Spain, to the remote-but-reachable volcanic island of Aogashima, in Japan, it offers inspiration for travels beyond the usually safe and unsurprising annual travel lists that start appearing around this time of year. Some places, such as Madeira and Pompeii, are better known than others, and the writer’s nose for detail and knack for storytelling make for first-class armchair travel.
This book is a follow-up to Elborough’s Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners (2016), which features engaging tales about a similar selection of offbeat places, such as the grey, forbidding Hashima Island (also known as Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, and less than a day’s travel from Hong Kong), in Japan, and the abandoned former celebrity jet-setters’ resort of Varosha, in northern Cyprus.
Origin of the ... stays? Charles Darwin-themed hotel to open in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Charles Darwin might seem like an unlikely theme for a new luxury hotel anywhere in the world but it is especially so in Vietnam – a country he never visited. A property dedicated to the British naturalist is, however, on the way, and will be the forerunner of a new brand concept called Fusion Originals.
Vietnamese hotel group Fusion, which also operates Fusion Resorts and Fusion Suites around the country, plans to open more Fusion Originals paying similar homage to “a pioneering artist, inventor, scientist or social leader”.