Abandoned Japanese Islands and Beyond

If you've been reading Viceland for a while, you'll remember the absurdly popular blog that Alex Hoban wrote about Battleship Island, the abandoned island of high rise buildings which was once the most densely populated place on earth. Well, that was about two years ago, and people are still leaving comments on the article and visiting it by the thousands. From this we're deducing that the general public will be psyched about Atlas Hoods, the new travel column by the same dude. Beneath you'll find some of Alex's previous work. Atlas Hoods begins in earnest tomorrow with part one of a visit to Transnistria, Europe's fake nation.

ATLAS HOODS HITLIST

1. BATTLESHIP ISLAND

The internet megalith. Who knew paying a fisherman to take you to an illegal, crumbling metropolis in the middle of the ocean was all you had to do to get your uniques up?

READ IT HERE

2. CHAIRMAN MAO'S UNDERGROUND CITY

We broke into the secret underground city built beneath Beijing, large enough to accommodate six million people in the event of nuclear war. During our visit, we discovered that there were still people living there.

READ IT HERE

3. NORTH KOREA'S AMERICAN FILM STAR

In 1965, when the young American soldier Charles Jenkins was captured by North Korean authorities, they forced him to become a film star, making him act as an imperialist American baddy in hundreds of flicks. We found him working in a gift shop on the small island of Sado.

READ IT HERE

4. THE SOVIET TERROR HEAVY METAL PRIEST

Father Sergiy is Moscow’s first Holy Father of Fury, and not someone to fuck with. In his teenage years, before God found him, Sergiy Rybko led a grassroots anti-Soviet terror unit against the old communist government. Now he hangs out with biker gangs.

READ IT HERE

5. SEOUL'S JUMBO PIECE OF JUNK

Abandoned in the middle of Seoul there's a giant Boeing 747. The plane was dumped inexplicably on the doorstep of a housing complex out in the suburbs and is now slowly wasting away. This didn't seem all that interesting, but once again, the internet loved it.

Oh and there was an abandoned woolly mammoth.

READ IT HERE

And some other stuff in a fake Russian town, which you can read about here.

Anyway, as you can tell, Alex likes to travel round the East a lot--and he's got tons of stories. Like the time he got kidnapped in North Korea, or when he hung out in Venezuela's skyscraper slum. They'll be up weekly from now until when he starts writing about bungee jumping and we cut him off.