Every city and town has at least one weird or oddball place – a museum of gross artefacts,  weird sculptures, or landmarks dedicated to a bizarre historic event.

However, with these weird and wonderful sites often missing from traditional guidebooks, trying to find the bizarre, the eccentric, and the oddball isn’t always easy.

But it looks like that’s about to change with the recent launch of  Altas Obscura, a  Wikipedia-style user generated website,. Suddenly, finding the “the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica” is a whole lot easier.

Using social media networks such as facebook and twitter, Atlas Obscura has rapidly attracted the interest of readers and travellers throughout the world who are contributing to this ever expanding compendium of “the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica.”

With information catalogued by continent and catagory,  this easy to navigate website is guaranteed to keep even the most curious and jaded traveler occupied for hours  – a perfect antidote to a long airport layover or delay.

Utilizing it’s ever growing social network, this last weekend (March 20th) Atlas Obscura held the first Obscura Day. Volunteers around the world set out to create  “expeditions, back-room tours, and hidden treasures in your own hometown”. The  result – 80 events in 20 countries attended by more than 4,000 people.

Encouraged by this, Atlas Obscure promises more Obscura Day’s to come.

Related posts:

1. It’s a Weird, Weird World.
2. Armchair Travel with the Atlas of Remote Islands
3. A Wine Atlas of New Zealand
4. Oddball Events: The Tarantula Festival in Coarsegold, California

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Liz projects, travel blogs, weirdness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.