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Wikitravel:Discover Travel Guide

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Discover is Wikitravel's heading for strange but true trivia about destinations and events.

Contents

Criteria

  • Keep it short and snappy: no more than twenty words, please.
  • [[Link]] any place names.
  • '''Boldface''' the fact of interest.
  • The articles don't need to be perfect, but should have a status of "usable" or higher.
  • The article linked to must contain the fact in question.

Now displayed

  • The town of Hot Springs, New Mexico, USA was renamed Truth or Consequences so that a TV show of the same name would be filmed there.
  • In the original version of HG Wells' War of the Worlds, the outskirts of Woking, England were the location for the aliens' attacks on Earth.
  • On the Grecian island of Rhodes, which has over 300 sunny days a year, umbrellas are often sold as a "gag" souvenir.

This selection is updated every day automatically by DiscoverBot at 01:00 EDT. Older entries can be found in the archive.

Last updated on 04 Oct 2006 01:00:06

Upcoming

Add your entries to the end of this list. The list is read by an automated bot, which simply reads lines off the top, so please do not leave any space or other commentary between entries. However, feel free to rearrange the list, because geographic variety in what's displayed is good (e.g. if the next three items are all from Asia, it's good to put something in from Europe or the Americas).

  • A fixture on the Greek island of Mykonos is Petros the Pelican, successor to a tradition started after a 1950s-era storm stranded a pelican on the waterfront.
  • Bar Harbor, Maine, USA is served by "The Cat," an automobile ferry that transports cars across the water at highway speeds.
  • Would-be bicyclists in Frankfurt, Germany cannot rent bikes from private companies, but must rent from the official Deutsche Bahn, which offers bikes with electronic locks and rental rates by the minute.
  • Mustamakkara, the blood sausage of Tampere, Finland, is traditionally eaten with a mix of mustard and cranberry sauce.
  • In Quebec — but not in France — Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is known as Poulet Frit Kentucky (PFK).
  • The town of Uwajima, Japan is known for bull sumo tournaments and a sex museum run by a Shinto shrine.
  • The most expensive trip described on Wikitravel is a $100 million trans-orbital flight into Space, available as early as 2010.
  • You can see professional-quality baseball at the amateur Cape Cod Baseball League, as over an eighth of the athletes there go on to pro baseball careers in the United States.
  • The Sydney suburb of Manly is so named because Captain Arthur Phillip was impressed by the manliness of the native inhabitants.
  • The favorite dish of Finnish national hero Field Marshal Mannerheim was Vorschmack — a mix of minced lamb and herring.
  • You can buy a passport granting citizenship of the Alcohol Republic in the hamlet of Mano on Sado Island, Japan.
  • San Jose (California) hosts an annual convention dedicated to "filking" -- folk singing with a science-fiction theme.
  • If you get hungry on your trip to Montreal, drop by the Montreal Insectarium; they might offer you a chance to sample insect-based dishes from around the world.
  • Since Congress never set a date for Ohio's admission into the Union, in 1953 it took the step of retroactively declaring that Ohio had officially became a state on March 03, 1803.
  • Visitors to the Iya Valley of Japan can cross the river on any of several vine bridges.
  • Route 66 passes by the Cadillac Ranch, an example of modern art consisting of ten old Cadillac automobiles with their noses buried in the ground and covered with graffiti.
  • The Warsaw Stock Exchange in Warsaw, Poland used to be housed in the former Communist Party headquarters.
  • Citizens of Porto (Oporto), Portugal are called "tripeiros" (tripe-eaters) after the city's characteristic dish of tripas.
  • In Slovenian, the letter R is considered a vowel, leading to words like vrt (garden) and cmrlj (bumblebee).
  • The train station at Naruko, Japan rents out wooden clogs for clip-clopping around this hot-spring town.
  • Palo Alto, California, USA derives its name from a 1061-year-old Coast Redwood tree that figured prominently in the history of the city and still stands today.

Slush pile

The articles linked in from the entries below need to improved before they're ready to go.

  • Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia speaks superlatives: it is not only the the deepest and oldest lake in the world, but also the largest body of freshwater on the planet.

Archives

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