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 in their thousands. From this we're deducing that the general public will be hyped about Atlas Hoods, the new travel column by the same dude. Beneath are some reminders of his previous work, tomorrow Atlas Hoods (it was his choice of name, I think it sounds like some DJ on Ninja Tunes) begins in earnest 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 hits 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 had nuclear war shat all over China, and discovered that there were still people living there.

READ IT HERE

3. NORTH KOREA'S AMERICAN FILM STAR

In 1965 when the young American soldierCharles 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 is a giant Boeing 747, which had been 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.

WATCH IT HERE

Oh and there was an abandoned woolly mammoth.

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 there are a lot more stories, like when he got kidnapped in North Korea and 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.