The world's wackiest museums.
Socks, chooks, tiles, fish-cakes and intestinal parasites
Ben Hills
YOKOHAMA, Friday: This is a city that really doesn't have a lot going for it. Its famous harbour is a rich broth of effluent, its history was bombed flat during the war, its scenery is a featureless swathe of concrete stretching to Tokyo, an hour's train-ride to the north. So what do you do to attract visitors to such an unpromising venue? A few years ago, 24 companies that have factories in the region banded together to make the best of a bad job and capitalise on the one thing grimy Kanagawa Prefecture does best - smokestack industry. The result, unintentionally, is the finest collection of truly whacky museums to be found anywhere in the world.
An unspoilt onsen in the Japanese Alps - the ultimate indulgence
Ben Hills
'Local people have been bathing here (naked) for hundreds of years, so if you want to wear a swimsuit please go somewhere else."
The simple sign sits beside a steaming rock pool of milky-white mineral water in a ravine in the forest above the village of Tsubame, deep in the Japanese alps. Swallows flit overhead, and the scent of wild white hydrangeas perfumes the air.
The stones of Aran - Europe’s last Celtic redoubt.
Ben Hills
We have our priorities right here," chuckles Owen Hernon as he threads our mini-bus between the dry-stone walls bordering the narrow streets of the fishing village of Kilronan. "One grocer's shop and six pubs."
And, St Patrick knows, a tot of poteen beside a peat fire could save a man's life on a wild winter's night on Europe's westernmost fringe, when the Atlantic gales howl in at 150 kilometres an hour and huge black seas smash against the cliffs.
Tricked and taken for a ’namba one’ ride
Ben Hills
AFTER a while living in Japan, you drop your guard. You get used to leaving your front door open so the deliverymen can drop the groceries inside, to bicycles parked all day at the train stations without a padlock, to waiters chasing you with 10 yen of change you forgot to take.
The last thing you expect is to be conned by a large official-looking gent in a grey uniform standing in front of the booking office of the airport Skyliner express at Ueno station.
The Paris of small things. Pet cemeteries, bricolage, and Burgundy
Ben Hills
Diane yips with joy as she spots a small opening in the densely parked traffic right across the street from my flat. She jolts her little red coupe to a halt in the miraculously convenient space, which turns out, on closer inspection, to be a pedestrian crossing. Noticing my raised Sydney eyebrows, she shrugs and says, "C'est Aout," as she opens the boot and helps unload my bags.
Paris in August. Midsummer madness grips the city.
Rainbow country - Byron Bay’s beautiful hinterland.
Ben Hills
'Awesome, mate, awesome," says my newfound friend Mario, all 100-plus kilos of him, tattoos bulging out of his leather jerkin, as he surveys the smoky white plume of Protestors Falls plunging down a jagged cliff in the rainforest.
We have trekked an easy few hundred metres from the road, through a green wonderland of mossy logs, giant gums dripping with epiphytes and palm trees stretching up for a glimpse of daylight. Crimson fruit squelch in the mud underfoot and, not far away, you can hear the splash of Terania Creek rolling down its rocky highway.