101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [41]
If you decide to visit, you’ll get a warm welcome from the town’s sole resident, Pedro Barreda, who has devoted the past few years of his life to protecting and preserving the town. With a daily schedule that consists mostly of tending to a few plants and tidying up his living quarters, Barreda loves showing people around. He doesn’t charge anything for the tours, but if you feel like bringing a thank-you gift, he’d certainly appreciate some water.
Chapter 63
The New South China Mall
Located in the muggy, smoggy city of Dongguan, the South China Mall opened in 2005 to much excitement: with 7.1 million square feet of retail space, it’s one of the largest shopping centers in the world. Replete with an amusement park, IMAX theater, and hotel complex—not to mention a full-size Arc de Triomphe—it was built in anticipation of seventy thousand visitors a day.
Alas, those shoppers never came. As of June 2008, there were fewer than a dozen stores operating in a shopping complex built to accommodate fifteen hundred. Instead of bustling with shoppers, its long hallways were quiet, abandoned except for a few bored salesclerks and the occasional security guard. Escalators stood still, their railings covered in dust-coated plastic. From the very beginning, business was so bad that some of its monuments weren’t even finished. “The mall entered the world pre-ruined,” wrote one reporter, “as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay.”
But if the mall itself is depressing, its marketing material is aggressively cheery. “Do you want to take a dreamlike journey?” it asks in a description of the Amazing World, an indoor/outdoor amusement center—and one of the mall’s only functional features—that is supposedly “full of excitement, scream, fashion and joy.” There is a roller coaster. There is a log flume ride (though it sometimes lacks water). There is a free fall ride that asks visitors whether they would like to “experience the feeling of ‘death.’ ” As if that’s not enough, “there are other peculiar amusement activities suitable for the old and the young.” “Bumping car, Wizard of Oz, Self-enjoyment”—there’s even a “special area for naughty children.”
If only some would visit.
An empty store in the South China Mall
Swoolverton/Wikipedia Commons
LISA MARGONELLI
Sumqayit, Azerbaijan
Oh! Sumqayit, Azerbaijan! Once, you made all the petrochemicals the Soviet Union could consume. Once, your massive factories, your lurching cooling towers, your python-esque pipes must have gleamed in the wintry sun of the Caspian! Your workers walked in throngs, carrying the extra rations of milk and cheese they received to prevent bone loss. But all that ended, and now you are rusting. Workless, people dig holes in the ground, hoping to sell the dirt. What remains is the pollution, enough to put little Sumqayit on both Time magazine’s and Scientific American’s lists of the top ten most polluted places on earth in 2007. Given that, the absolute saddest place on earth can be found in the city cemetery, which is crowded with tiny graves that are the result of Sumqayit’s horrendously high infant mortality rate. Azeri graves often have photographs of the deceased, and here they are of well-dressed children with birth defects, obviously much loved during their short lives. There are restaurants in Sumqayit, but the longer I stayed in town, the more terrifying the idea of consuming local food became—so I recommend bringing snacks and water with you from Baku, thirty kilometers