It got me thinking and researching for our next trip, maybe to an island.
Well, Stephanie is a terrific planner. She comes up with great places to get away. I am much better at finding the worst of the worst.
So, here are a few islands that I will never vacation with Stephanie. Or anyone for that matter.
Ilha de Queimada Grande. AKA Snake Island.
A deserted island where the forest floor writhes with the world's most venomous vipers. Off the coast of Brazil, the breed of snake known as the Golden Lancehead reside on the island. It has one of the worst venoms in the world which literally causes your flesh to rot off your bones.
But there's snakes all over the world, right? Why is this island so bad? Let the nightmare begin. The snake only lives on this one island and it is forbidden from anyone to visit by the Brazilian Navy. And that's not to protect the snakes. Conservative estimates range from spine-tingling one snake per square meter to change-your-undies FIVE snakes per square meter.
Not a chance in hell we'll be visiting.
Poveglia Island. Island of the Dead.
We are not going here. Located in a lagoon in Venice, the island gets its scary start when the Romans decided the best thing for society was to round up all the plague victims of the era and stick them all on one island. Poveglia Island.
Several thousand people were gathered and quaratined on the island where they all died together. Now, that is probably believable from a group of people that thought the sun was a chariot, but not a few centuries later the same thing happened.
The Bubonic plague tore through Europe and the island was once again put to use as housing plague victims. As the plague got worse, they lowered Poveglia's requirements from "plague sufferers" to "anyone with any sign of sickness at all". They also changed the policy of "let them die peacefully" to "throw them in a large pit (atop already-dead bodies) and set them on fire". Quite a leap. Estimates put the death toll at 160,000 on the island. By the way, charred bones from the island STILL wash up on shore.
As if that wasn't scary enough, in 1922, a mental hospital with a scary bell tower was built on the island. That hospital was where everyone sent the allegedly insane members of society. This was before the days of the DSM I. (We are currently on DSM IV, a diagnostic criteria for mental disorders.) Anyone could be thrown into an asylum, wherein anything could be done to them. According to legend, this particular hospital featured a doctor who routinely experimented on his patients with such things as lobotomies (performed with a hammer and chisel. He liked to do this in the bell tower where patients screams of seeing the ghosts of plague victims were ignored.
But wait! There's more. Legend has the doctor fell from the bell tower (some say was thrown by the ghosts) and choked to death on the ground after having survived the fall. Today, it's uninhabited. I wonder why...
Ramree Island
This island is off the Burmese Coast and played a part in World War II. See, back in 1945 a 900 man cadre of Japanese forces on this small island were being outflanked by Allied Forces. With only one side open to them, they made a dash towards reinforcements. Unfortunately, this way to salvation crossed through a swamp complete with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, blowflies and scorpions. It also harbored the saltwater crocodile. Lots and lots and lots of saltwater crocodiles.
500 of the men didn't make it through the swamp. The survivors were badly wounded, but technically alive. The massacre of Japanese troops is credited as "The Greatest Disaster Suffered From Animals" by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Izu Island
Like the air your breathing now? Chances are it's mostly full of oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and some other stuff. Ideally, it probably doesn't have a lot of sulfur in it.
Not so with the Izu Islands off Japan! The volcano-related incidents make it the highest concentration of the gas on the planet. At least no one lives there.
Oh wait. People DO live there. In fact, most of the pre-volcano population still lives there. And since the volcano never stopped spewing the eggy gas, they live day and night with a gas mask on their face or at their sides. In the middle of the night, air raid sirens routinely go off because the gas levels get high and people would die.
But, there is a silver lining. People living there get a very small amount of money from scientific researchers as they investigate what happens from breathing in trace amounts of sulfur and the effects of a gas mask.
This is also the spot where three massice tectonic plates converge. The last time the pressure got too much, the ensuing earthquake removed Tokyo from the map. Completely.
The North Pacific Gyre. The Garbage Patch.
This is too devistating to be funny. It's happening right now.
Whenever China or the United States dumps plastic in the water, it ends up in the ocean and the currents drag it to the same spot. It's the size of Texas, though there is enough plastic there to cover the land area of America.
An island made of trash. That's bad, but it gets worse. Since plastic doesn't biodegrade, it breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces. Pieces the size of plankton. This means fish are eating this constantly thinking it's food. The last sample of the water shows an average of 6 times more plastic than plankton in the area.
Think about that next time you have fish for dinner.
Oh, and it's not even a real island. If you try to step on it, you would immediately fall through the layer of trash and then, like ice diving, it would almost fill instantly. So there you are trapped under the surface of garbage, drowning. And if you survived the fall, you are left in a stew of dead fish marinate with sharks circling you.
That's right. It's also in shark infested waters.
Fiji
Not a beautiful island paradise, but an island with a history rich in horror.
I won't describe everything I found in research because it's too freakin' horrible. How horrible? Cannibals. And not just run-of-the-mill cannibals either. They tortured people for fun and used living children as decorative flags that later died as a result of sea-sickness.
You can read the accounts here if you really really have to know more. They are from some missonaries.
I'm not going to Fiji and risk being being part of a main course.
So that ends my look into these terrifying islands (complements of Cracked).
Like I said, I'll leave the planning to Stephanie.
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