The flabby mess of a man trudged out of the sparkling lagoon like a lazy yeti loping through thick forest undergrowth. His head was cleanly shaved, his back was carpeted in a fine layer of fuzzy black moss. Sagging love handles drooped indifferently over his tiny swimsuit, a flesh-colored piece of fabric that stopped mid-thigh and clung tightly—much, much too tightly—to a paunchy buttocks defined in horrific detail.

His dimure Russian princess watched expectedly from the bathwater-warm water as he shook himself dry, like a dog, and reached for his camera. He attached the wide-angle lens. A glorious spectacle, shot on location at the Sheraton Maldives Full Moon Resort & Spa, was about to begin for a captive audience comprised of two gawking couples and me, an unassuming voyeur poorly disguising his delight and disgust behind a pair of aviators and a copy of Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar.

With pixie-sized steps she slowly, wistfully, drags her feet across the coral-strewn sand, a beauty slowing marching towards the beast, eyes glazed and empty as if in trance. Her bleached-blond hair is pulled back into a bun, her sunglasses hang low on the crown of her nose. She hikes her black-and-white, leopard-print bikini bottom higher up over the curves of her bony hips, then stares down at her chest and shakes her shoulders from side to side until she’s satisfied that the shimmering gold sequins that hang from her necklace are sitting just right.

The stage is set. Everything is in its right place. Lights, camera, action!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Twenty minutes before the show began the star performers were swimming about 50 feet from the lagoon’s shore. The water was about shoulder-level high when she stopped floating and stood up. Like a walrus in heat, he snorkeled in her direction until his forehead was suggestively pressed again her stomach. He stayed there for a few minutes; she giggled, then laughed, as his hands, hidden below the surface, groped… the sandy bottom in search of colorful sea shells.

Ten minutes to go. The snorkeling gear has been abandoned as they wade towards the thatched-roof bungalows that stand in rows atop stilts of cement. A tall, lean Japanese man walks out onto his deck in a white bathrobe and white slippers, slowly sipping a cup of coffee as he pensively looks out on the spectacular horizon. All around him, around me, around the other couples, is the hypnotic natural beauty of the Maldives.

If he looks down and peers through the cracks of the bungalow’s wooden floorboards, however, he’ll see another sight: a burly man and a dimunitive woman, wrapped atop one another like a pig in a blanket, lips locked in sloppy soft-porn passion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She lays down on the shore, undoes her bun, and flips her hair back once, twice, a third time before tying it back up again. (Snap, snap, snap) Back precisely arched and hands firmly planted in the sand, as if she’s practiced for this moment for months, she bends her knees and throws her head back as he quickly circles and crouches like a photographer shooting the cover girl of next year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

Snap, snap, snap. Click, click, click.

He motions; she arches her back even further. He motions again, this time towards the water, so she stands up and slowly picks her way back into the lagoon. Suddenly, dramatically, she stops and pirouettes (snap snap snap) to face his camera, neck craned, chin up, arms raised like a triumphant ice dancer bowing to the crowd at the end of a gold-medal routine.

The bizarre water routine goes on for about 5 minutes (or, roughly, 100 photos) before she makes her way back onto the shore for the dramatic curtain call: on all fours now, she’s vamping her way through the sand like Tawny Kitaen crawling across the hood of David Coverdale’s Jaguar in “Here I Go Again”. Here’s a picture set to show the grandkids one day!

Snap, snap, snap, click, click, click, snap, snap, snap.

He hands the camera over and dutifully marches into the water himself, chest puffed out like a 1920s strongman and that teensy-tiny, flesh-colored swimsuit of his further disappearing into the nebulous void of his crack. He poses for a few shots before clamboring out onto a 30-foot long cement platform that juts out into the water. She assumes the position on the sand, he carefully adjusts the lens, then starts the timer and jumps down next to her for a couple’s session.

Here they are casually laying side by side on the beach, gazing back up at their camera without a trace of ironic self-awareness creeping across their stoic expressions. There they are sitting back to back, elbows on knees like Rodin’s Thinker. Here now they’re standing, his meaty slabs of arm draped over and squeezing her like an infant suffocating its favorite teddy bear.

Finally, the grand finale: laying shoulder to shoulder on their stomachs, they turn their heads to face one another, lean in, and hold an extended kiss, one which starts innocently enough but quickly devolves into a full-blown makeout session. I’d be appalled if I wasn’t so mesmerized by the absurdity of it all.

Bravo, guys, bravo. Encore! Encore!

And we got one.

Later that night, as we headed back to our room after a few mugs of Tiger beer at the resort bar, we spot our two friends near the pool, which is fed by a man-made waterfall and illuminated at night by a few pairs of underwater lights. She’s traded her leopard-print bikini for a tightly fitted hot-pink dress, but is posing and preening and arching and vamping just as she was on the beach.

He casts a nearly imperceptible, mostly indifferent glance our way as we walk by, then gets back to the business of the photo shoot. It looks like he’s waiting on his camera flash to recharge; I don’t have my camera with me this time.

I look down at my watch.

It’s 11:24pm.

Every year thousands of tourists visit St. Martinville, Louisiana, not far from Lafayette. They come in to steep in Cajun culture, to hear French spoken on the street, and to visit the town’s several museums, but most of all they come to visit the places associated with Evangeline. There is an Evangeline state park, there the Evangeline Oak, and, in the town’s graveyard next to the Catholic church, there is Evangeline’s tomb, topped with a bronze metal statue of her likeness.

Evangeline first captured the attention of the nation in 1847, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow told her tale in his epic poem. The story starts in 1755, in Acadia, or modern-day Nova Scotia. Longfellow describes Evangeline as “a maiden of seventeen summers, black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the way-side. Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses.” She is also modest and kind.  Her true love and fiancé is Gabriel, son of blacksmith. The couple are separated during “Le Grand Derangement”, when British authorities expelled thousands of French speaking Catholic citizens in one of North America’s lesser known acts of ethnic cleansing.

At first, the Acadians resettled in small numbers in cities across the Eastern seaboard, and Evangeline searches each for her love. She eventually gives up, settles in Philadelphia, becomes a nun and works at a hospital.  After many years, she finally encounters Gabriel once again—now a sick old man.  He dies in her arms, she soon follows him to the grave. This fact is noted on a brass plaque mounted to the Walnut Street building that still stands today in Philadelphia–the same kind of plaque that gives information about the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Longfellow’s poem was a smash hit, well known in the 19th century, and as much a fixture on school children’s required reading lists as Romeo and Juliet is today. More than that, his poem brought national attention to the plight of the Acadians, most of whom settled in Louisiana in much diminished circumstances, and became known as Cajuns, says Carl Brasseaux, director of the Center of Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

Now, Longfellow’s poem had nothing to do with Louisiana, in fact, he never set foot in the state. So how did Evangeline’s remains come to rest in Louisiana?  Was there some sort of exhumation, a movement of her remains from Philadelphia to her people’s new backyard by the bayou?

Not exactly. In 1907, Judge Felix Voorheis, a St. Martinville resident, committed to the page stories told to him by his grandmother. Grandmere Voorheis said that she was the adoptive mother of a girl named Emmeline Labiche –whose story that Longfellow heard, and who renamed her Evangeline, presumably for creative effect. In his version, the lovers reunite not in Philadelphia but in St. Martinville, under a Live Oak tree that stretches its branches towards the chocolate brown waters of the Bayou Teche. They embrace passionately and all was well until Gabriel (actual name: Louis) suddenly remembered that he had remarried in the years that passed. Evangeline later goes insane and dies.

Voorheis’ book, entitled Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline, was a huge hit in Southern Louisiana, says Brasseaux.

At that time, Cajuns were decidedly second-class citizens, the word “Cajun” itself was considered an insult, and their unique culture was disparaged. When Voorheis connected the immensely sympathetic Evangeline’s story with local Louisiana soil, her determination and good womanly behavior, was a rallying point of pride for Cajuns as a group. A folk heroine was born. “Evangeline provided the first outside validation of Cajun culture and became an important icon,” says Brasseaux. (This is true even though her story didn’t end well. Her story functioned in much the same way that the Diary of Anne Frank functioned for Holocaust survivors.)

Evangeline became and remains a common girl’s name in the area, her story became and remains a popular trope in local art and music, and  her name is affixed on everything from a state parish, to a particular blend of local coffee, to expressways, to dozens of car repair shops throughout Southern Louisiana.

The oak tree where Emmeline and Louis reunited still stands today, and is called The Evangeline Oak. It is the most visited spot in St. Martinville. Both versions of the story, Voorheis’ and Longfellow’s, are recounted on the sign near the oak, and both are retold dramatically by the tour guide who operates out of a nearby museum.

So which story is really true, a visitor asks? The tour guide shrugs and smiles and says no one knows for sure.

Surely, then, the grave would provide some evidence that the Voorheis version was correct? (The grave bears both the name Evangeline and Emmeline Labiche.) Who exactly is buried next to the church?

As it turns out, no one is. The grave is empty. The model for the statue that sits atop the empty grave was Dolores Del Rio, a Mexican movie star, who played Evangeline in the silent movie that was made from Longfellow’s poem.  The statue, a gift from cast and crew to the people of St. Martinville after filming on the movie wrapped.

The Live Oak, the site of their meeting, is actually the third such oak designated in Louisiana, and when I visited in 2006, the oak was scheduled to be retired because the parking lot around it is killing its roots. A new oak was to be designated, with full historical pedigree, as The Evangeline Oak.

Carl Brasseaux, who has exhaustively researched the history of Evangeline and has concluded that despite the naming of historical monuments and oak trees and brass plaques from Louisiana, to Philadelphia, to Nova Scotia, neither Evangeline nor Emmeline nor anyone else with a name that started with an E ever existed. Evangeline, the core cultural folk heroine of the Cajuns, was a composite character.

Many Southern Louisiana locals, including the former mayor of St. Martinville, passionately disagree. They believe that Longfellow, who never set foot in Louisiana, heard the true story of Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux and fictionalized it for his poem.

I don’t want to wade into waters as muddy as the Bayou Teche, but it seems to me that these arguments aren’t mutually exclusive.

“Come with me, and you’ll be, in a world of pure imagination. Take a look, and you’ll see, into your imagination. What we’ll see, will defy explanation.” – Willy Wonka

Unlike Mr. Wonka’s devilishly delicious Chocolate Room, everything you see in Don Quijote, Japan’s bizarro chain of discount stores, isn’t edible. Check back in 10 years, though: considering the company’s braintrust has already built a rooftop rollercoaster half-pipe at one of its locations in the heart of Tokyo’s Roppongi district, lickable wallpaper and rivers of chocolate might not be totally out of question.

Don Quijote stores are spreading like wildfire across the country. Debuting in 1980 as the Just Co. before changing its name in the mid-90s, Don Quijote now has over 120 branches around Japan, including almost 40(!) in Tokyo alone. With its popularity soaring there are almost certainly more on the way, and it just might be the next big Japanese import to hit the States, too: there are already a few stores open in Hawaii.

It’s easy to get lost in these shopping funhouses, which are stuffed with an amazing hodgepodge of useless junk, everyday practicalities, food, electronics, designer handbags, sex toys, you name it; think .99 Cent Store meets Wal-Mart in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Perhaps best of all, branches in Tokyo stay open really late—like 2 – 5am late—and many are open 24 hours. A few sips of soju at the hotel, fresh pieces of gently blowtorched salmon at a stand-up sushi bar in Shinjuku, bar snacks and a few bottles of Kirin somewhere in “Piss Alley“, and a stagger around the nearest Don Quijote before calling it a day: that’s my idea of a quality night on the town in Tokyo.

A Store of Pure Imagination

Like most Japanese storefronts, the signange on Don Quijote stores is only in Japanese. Look for for the company’s distinctive logo, a blue duck (penguin?) with big, googly eyes and a red cap; addresses and maps are also found on the English website.

There’s little rhyme or reason to what’s stocked across the four or five levels that make up most branches. Ground floors usually function as mini-markets: all kinds of candy, snacks, cheese, dried foods, canned foods, instant noodles, packaged fish, gourmet imports, cold beer, boxed wine, top-shelf liquor… it’s insane, and actually one of the more affordable options in Tokyo for stocking up your hotel room.

Elsewhere it’s an offbeat clearinghouse of anything and everything under the sun packed into an unforgettable shopping labyrinth. One aisle might be filled with common household goods like vacuum-cleaner bags and waste baskets, the next with dildos of all shapes and sizes and pornos of every imaginable variety. Need a refrigerator, set of miniature Dragon Ball Z figures, iPod, or cheerleader/maid/schoolgirl costume? Browse and ye shall find.

But my favorite item of all, one we have way too many pictures of and way too many ridiculous poses with, was the g-string butt pillow. Priced at just US$10 or so, we were tempted to haul a few of these appropriately soft and impossibly classy finds back home for birthday presents friends and family would forever appreciate; sorry, guys, maybe next time.

We found those pillows during a late-night shop at one of the Shinjuku outlets, which was a short walk away from the straight-laced Hotel Sunroute Shinjuku-Higashi, our home for the last few days in Tokyo. Back in our cramped little room, cold and dripping wet from a steady springtime drizzle that made the city feel somewhere between cozy and miserable, we flipped through our latest round of Don Quijote photos and caught up on our journals.

On TV, talking Japanese cartoon dogs taught must-know English phrases to the audience such as “why don’t you give me a nice smile?” and “how do you feel about me going shopping with her?”

Who needs Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory when we have Japan?

Photos © Brian Spencer

You’ve heard that Savannah, Georgia, is haunted. You’ve also heard that its idyllic downtown district, one of the biggest National Historic Landmark Districts in the US, is defined by its Southern Gothic mansions, compact squares of green park, and lilting Spanish moss that canvases downtown with feathery, cobweb-like wisps of grey.

(The moss, by the way, is best seen and not touched, unless you don’t mind dealing with the chiggers that live in it.)

My first visit to Savannah revealed a city that felt every bit the gracious “Hostess of the South” it’s sometimes billed as. Its reputation as one of America’s most haunted cities felt warranted, too, when after a late lunch at the opulent Olde Pink House I hopped aboard an old, retired funeral hearse, popped open a bottle of beer, and went hunting for ghosts.

John McNulty was our tour guide and driver. He’s been wheeling around Savannah by open-top hearse for the past 5 years for Hearse Ghost Tours, regaling visitors with tales of public beheadings, wrongful executions, graphic murders, and Civil War apparitions restlessly wandering local cemeteries in search of their headstones, which over time have been defaced and defiled.

As much an entertaining lesson in Savannah folklore as it was macabre, what some might write off as a campy tourist activity ended up a real highlight of the weekend. McNulty’s affable personality and quick-witted sense of humor kept the 45-minute spin around the city light, and in addition to passing on ghost stories that have made the rounds for decades—some of them more believable than others—he swears by one of his own supernatural encounters.

“The spookiest thing I ever saw in Savannah was a disappearing man in the Colonial Cemetery,” he later told me over email. “He was dressed in clothing I would guess dates back to sometime in the 19th century. He was inside the cemetery, and I was on the other side of the fence. After I saw him I happened to glance over and notice that the gates were locked, and when I looked back, he was gone. There was absolutely no way he could’ve moved without me seeing it.”

Believe it… or not?

Later that weekend I found myself face to face with two horrifying sights more ghastly than any Civil War-era spookster: spring breakers, and generic Thai food!

Gasp!

A little over a month ago our own Alison Stein Wellner aptly summed up my shared thoughts about Spring Break: “I try to avoid any occasion in which there is an expectation that I may at any moment wave my hands wildly in the air and emit ‘woohoohooo!’”

Me too, Alison, which is why I would have skipped a colleague’s well-meaning recommendation for frozen daiquiris at Wet Willie’s, located on Savannah’s revitalized waterfront, had I known that hundreds of college-aged partiers had descended upon the area and set up camp, plastic cups of beer and mixed drinks in hand and MTV beach party atmosphere well underway.

With many of them dressed in St. Patrick’s Day green—Savannah hosts one of the country’s largest, and longest, celebrations—I carefully picked my way around the crowd, every step of the way feeling like an old, humorless curmudgeon who just wants to get home and watch Love Boat reruns. After securing a 20-ounce cup of Wet Willies’ “Call a Cab” (read: it’s pretty damn strong), I retraced my steps and beelined my way back towards the city that up until that point had so successfully seduced. Quaint, laid-back Savannah, yes, party-hardy Savannah, not so much.

The next morning, fearing the worst on the riverfront and with a taste for something spicy, I ventured down Broughton Street and took a chance on Saigon, a Thai/Vietnamese joint rated an acceptable 3 ½ stars by Yelp users in Savannah. Note to self: when in Japan, you eat Japanese food; in Italy, you eat Italian food. In Savannah, you eat seafood.

Empty at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon, Saigon would do well to receive a visit from Gordon Ramsey and his Kitchen Nightmares crew. The six-page long menu aims to be everything for everyone; there’s not a trace of local ingredients anywhere on it. The atmosphere is, well, as anonymous as a rest-area snack shop, and though the eerie quiet of the place had me wondering if I’d actually stumbled into a ghost restaurant and would later have my own tall tale to tell, I actually preferred the silence to the vaguely alternative rock the hostess optimistically switched on after I ordered.

The starter, Vietnamese spring rolls topped with healthy slices of fresh tuna and served with a side of thick peanut sauce, was strangely bland, while the Bai Ka Pao Tofu, marked as one of the menu’s spiciest dishes, barely registered a hint of heat. Doused in that secret, brownish-colored sauce favored by hole-in-the-wall Chinese takeouts in New York (sauce that’s delicious in its own way, don’t get me wrong), this salty mess of onions and mushrooms left me second-guessing my decision to forego homemade pralines at famous River Street Sweets in favor of a real meal.

After just three short days in Savannah, I left with so much to still experience. Someday, I’ll be back, and though I’m anything but an expert on the city, next time I’ll at least know to stick to the leafy-green squares, the fresh seafood, the sugary sweets, and the open-top hearses.

Photos © Brian Spencer

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.