On the island of Java, Indonesia, stands a mountain of a thousand statues. Borobudur is surrounded by volcanoes such as in this photo of Mt. Merapi erupting from the Borobudur horizon. Borobudur shrouded in mystery. In 1814, 200 men set out to search for this legendary mountain near the small village of Boro. For six weeks, they slashed through wickedly thick vegetation and then cleared away tons of volcanic ash. Hidden beneath the debris, they uncovered strange figures carved in stone and they discovered thousands of them! This is beautiful Borobudur. Photo #1 by ctsnow

Fengdu Ghost City is about 110 mile (170 kilometers) downstream from Chongqing Municipality on the north bank of the Yangtze River in the People’s Republic of China. Fengu Ghost City is a tourist attraction featured along a Yangtze cruise. Fengdu Ghost City is a place to learn about Chinese ghost culture, the afterlife, and to see what the Chinese would call a “model of hell.” Fengdu became known as Ghost City in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) when two Imperial court officials married and settled on Ming Mountain to practice Taoist teachings. The couples’ surnames combined, Yin and Wang, sounded like “King of Hell” in Chinese. They supposedly became immortals. Thus was born Fengdu City of Ghosts – the hell theme and ghosts culture stuck. This photo is of cool Ghost City architecture and a freaky scene on the roof. Photo #1 by Tennessee Wanderer

Karni Mata, the Rat Temple, at Deshnoke, Rajasthan, India. Rats are inside the temple and crawling outside too. In fact, rats are everywhere at Karni Mata! Here, at the Rat Temple, rats are sacred and people consider themselves lucky to get close to hordes of rats. Photo #1 by Enric Bach

The caves in Meteora, Greece, had inhabitants for fifty millennia, but due to raids, “hermit monks” moved to the safety of sandstone rock pinnacles in the 9th century and began building monasteries. More monks and nuns came, building more monasteries perched high upon the cliffs. Wikipedia reports, “Access to the monasteries was originally (and deliberately) difficult, requiring either long ladders lashed together or large nets used to haul up both goods and people. This required quite a leap of faith — the ropes were replaced, so the story goes, only ‘when the Lord let them break.'” UNESCO World Heritage says, “The net in which intrepid pilgrims were hoisted up vertically alongside the 1,224 ft. cliff where the Varlaam monastery dominates the valley symbolizes the fragility of a traditional way of life that is threatened with extinction.” Photo #1 by Vaggelis Vlahos