What’s the worst place on Earth you’ve been?

26 comments

1. Blackpool

   I’m a bit cockney and all the street vendors and con artists pounced on me.
   It was scary.

   Maybe it would’ve been better if I sounded less like adele 🤷🏼‍♀️

2. i’ve been to 42 states and I still really don’t care for Missouri.

   I often can find beauty in ugly places. like I loved Nebraska, South Dakota, Alabama and rural desert towns.

   but Missouri is somewhere I’d never wanna go back

3. Luton

4. Camp Shelby, Army base in Southern Mississippi close to Biloxi. I went there for combat training and combat lifesaver training before my deployment. Disgustingly hot and humid. Mosquitos the size of humming birds, brown recluse spiders everywhere, fire ants etc etc.

   I have been to Kuwait, Iraq, and Qatar. I’d gladly go back to any of those if it meant avoiding Camp Shelby again. Gross

5. Douglas, WY. Worked there for 6 months in the oil field. Got treated like absolute trash, lost a toe nail, shat my pants & hated my supervisor.

6. A shantytown in Namibia. No electricity. No plumbing. You get 300 square meters of sand, upon which you can build your shack out of whatever you find. Scrap wood. Tarps. Tires. For water you bring a container or roll an oil drum to the pump, fill it up and bring it back home.

   A hutong in Beijing. Before the communist revolution, it was a nice home with a small courtyard. After the revolution, it was a home shared with others, and the courtyard had even more homes built within it. There’s a community bathroom down the street, with smells I shall never forget.

   We in the western world have got it real good. Even Missouri.

7. I rode my bike through Camden NJ once.

8. Been to some real dumps in Djibouti and Nigeria. I’ve never been but I’d venture that Central African Republic is hell on earth.

9. Desaguadero, Bolivia

10. Port of Jebel Ali, Dubai, UAE

    It was bad because I was in security. So I had to stand outside in 110+ degree heat with a thick uniform and a gun on. Everything you touched got you dirty, and when you rotated inside you got yelled at for being dirty.

    I had to inspect vehicles sometimes, so I’d literally have to climb up on top of the CHT trucks that were there to pump shit out of our ship. We all ended up smelling like shit after being around those trucks.

    We also got little training, so our watches were essentially to stand there and get yelled at for something we were told to do two hours ago (again, by someone yelling). The disorganization was so bad, the idiot woman in charge of the second shift was an hour late and decided to rewrite the entire watch bill when she showed up. Our first day there was 15 hours on post.

    I was there because I was stationed on an aircraft carrier that pulled in three times that year.

    There are many things in Dubai that are nice, but not when you’re part of an organization that punishes positive life experiences with 10x the amount of despair because they can’t have people being too happy.

11. Skid Row in LA, it looks like hell on earth especially at night

12. Gary indiana

13. A reservation in Northern Manitoba, beautiful land but very poor community.

14. Flatonia, TX.

    Broke down there on the way to Houston from San Antonio (second on my list of worst places to exist) and it was the middle of the night. There were train tracks where I heard eerie ethereal circus music playing, there was a full on moving in or out of going down a block away, where they offered no help, and I honestly think now looking back at it, they were just ransacking the place.

    There was an invisible line of stink that if you crossed it smelled like death. And a hole, which I believe lead to straight to a deeper part of hell.

    ​

    Fuck you Flatonia.

    ​

    Honorable mention to Indianapolis, IN. Most boring, mundane, uninspired big city I’ve ever been to. Just no.

15. The Permian Basin in Texas. It’s basically a sacrifice zone for gas and oil. That pond isn’t water, it dissolves any bird that lands in it. Filled with GWT, generic white trucks owned by oil field workers who litter the entire countryside because why not, it’s already hell on earth. A large number of the trucks have been fitted out so they can “roll coal”, that is spew huge clouds of black smoke.

16. Djibouti, Djibouti.

    It was, by pretty much every definition, a shithole. Pulling into the port, you could smell it as you were approaching. Walking down the road, on your left is dilapidated housing, on your right is a trash field, and I mean that literally. A large field just covered in trash, not a proper trash dump, just garbage strewn about in a field. Had my life threatened more than once.

17. Killing fields/S-21 in Cambodia. Pure evil

18. Beijing on a particularly polluted day. I remember standing on a footbridge over a road and I couldn’t see 20 feet in front of me because of the yellow smog.

    Its not a bad city in some parts, but the pollution is fucking disgusting.

    Also, Moldova. Miles of villages full of muddy, rusty shacks and the capital, Chișinău, looks like nothing has been built since the fall of Communism, and what is left is just rotting.

19. Slab City California.

20. The Salton Sea. It’s a gigantic, accidental saltwater lake in CA. It stinks horribly, it’s 110 degrees outside, almost deserted and generally just feels like the setting of a horror movie.

21. Georgetown Guyana sometime between 1993-95. Only stayed a night, creepy, like voodoo creepy. Hotel door didn’t close, nearly got stabbed crossing the street.

22. Kensington, Philadelphia.

    It’s a bunch of opioid zombies in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Look it up on YouTube if you haven’t seen it.

23. Bosnia in 1996. This was just after the “ethnic cleansing” after the collapse of Yugoslavia. Bombed out buildings, active mine fields, lack of basic infrastructure (roads, electricity, clean water), constant smell of human waste and garbage. It was a humanitarian catastrophe.

24. I’ll limit it to large cities, but probably Houston, Texas. The worst example of urban sprawl I’ve ever encountered, with an embarrassingly small downtown for a metro of 6 million.

25. Juarez, just across the border from El Paso. Stay on your toes. Pay attention to what is going on around you, keep your head down, mouth shut, eyes open. Do what you’re there to do and get the fuck back over the border, and do it well before nightfall.

26. Djibouti.

    Think of it like this… if a shithole’s shithole had a shithole, Djibouti would be it’s shithole.