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of salt mine tourism. You should, for example, visit the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland. Over a thousand feet deep, Wieliczka was on the original list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites for the incredible salt statues created by some of its workers. Modern sculptors continued the tradition and the mine is now home to salt replicas of everything from Da Vinci’s The Last Supper to Pope John Paul II. Best is the salt cathedral—a cavernous room lined with friezes whose floors, ceilings, altars, and even chandeliers are all made from salt.

So at first I was excited to hear that there was a Pakistani salt mosque—score one for religious equality! But the real salt mosque is disappointingly small. How small? You can sit on it. Instead of being a soaring saline tribute to one of the world’s largest religions, it’s closer in scale to a gingerbread house.

Of course, since the mine extends about a dozen stories underground, there’s more to see at Khewra than just the salt mosque—for example, an assembly hall with backlit walls and a replica of the Great Wall of China. But be prepared: it too is smaller than the real thing.

Chapter 61

Anywhere on a Yamaha Rhino

Introduced in 2003, the Yamaha Rhino is one of America’s most popular recreational utility vehicles. Reminiscent of a miniature Jeep, the Rhino’s been described as a “tricked-out golf cart,” but that doesn’t capture its true power. What golf cart, after all, can reach forty miles per hour and is recommended for use on sand dunes?

And that’s not all it does.

To quote from the legal complaint for an anti-Rhino class action lawsuit:

The Yamaha Rhino is prone to tip over and seriously injure its occupants due to several defects, including its top-heavy design, dangerously narrow track width, high center of gravity, wheels that are too small to maintain stability, steering geometry that facilitates rollovers and tip overs even at low speeds and on flat terrain, heavy rigid steel roll cage that has no safety padding, lack of doors, leg guards, or other enclosures to protect occupants, lack of handholds or handles for passengers, and defective restraint systems.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rhinos have been involved in a lot of accidents, causing everything from head, back, and neck wounds to severe crush injuries that often require surgery or amputation. According to the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission, at least forty-six drivers or passengers have been killed by Rhinos, including several cases where people were thrown from their RUV and then smushed when the half-ton vehicle landed on them.

In 2009, thanks to pressure from lawsuits and the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission, Yamaha announced a free repair program that retrofits Rhinos with several safety features that lessen the likelihood of a rollover and help prevent people from flying out. For example, doors. But they still haven’t recalled the Rhino—instead they continue to market it as a family-friendly off-road vehicle.

Ride at your own risk.

Chapter 62

Chacabuco, Chile

The tiny town of Chacabuco, Chile, has never been a tourist hotspot—it’s in the middle of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth. Founded in 1924 by the Lautaro Nitrate Company Ltd., Chacabuco started off as a mining town for sodium nitrate, an ingredient in fertilizer that used to be one of Chile’s major exports. But sodium nitrate is also an important ingredient for bombs, and during World War I, Germany perfected a method of creating it synthetically on a large scale. That was great news for Germany, but it devastated Chile’s economy. Chacabuco closed down in 1938, making it one of 170 nitrate ghost towns scattered through the Atacama.

Being a ghost town would have been bad enough. But then in 1973, Pinochet decided to turn it into a concentration camp. For the next year and a half it held between six hundred and one thousand political prisoners, who lived in former mining quarters that had been turned into barracks.

For a prison, Chacabuco’s location is ideal. Stretching some six hundred miles up and down the Chilean coast, the