Oh, the Places You Won't Go!

Feel like taking a nice vacation (or, holiday for you foreigners) this year? Maybe you want to bring the kids along and go camping, or bring the significant other on a romantic spa getaway. Maybe you are just so tired of your monotonous and vapid existence that the next town over seems like an exotic dreamland (I’m looking at you, Tustin). Well, pack your bags and/or backpacks and get going! But remember to avoid a few places. Seriously, even Tustin, CA is better than these places. Below are (in my humble yet accurate opinion) the worst possible places to be in each continent.

North America - Juarez, Mexico:

Just across the Rio Grande from El Paso lies Juarez, Mexico, a desiccated hellscape of poverty, rape, murder and disappearances. Juarez is a place where pollution is masked by a constant barrage of bullets in the air. That’s the good part. Sort of. There isn’t really a good part about Juarez. It’s a city completely controlled by drug barons who bribe, bully, and kill their way to power. And the police only make matters worse because they resemble people who should have responsibility or maybe a conscience. Unfortunately, the police just got paid to dump the body of your son into the desert because he looked like he was thinking about not cowering enough to a drug lord. So that’s Juarez. It needs to be bulldozed.

Australia – Directly Inside a Swarm of Box Jellyfish, Australia:

Sorry to disappoint anyone, but Australia just doesn’t have a town or city or region full of enough abject horror to include on this list. I’m sure there are some lame places, don’t get me wrong. But these lame places are just not high up enough on the terror scale to list. I might be bored and uncomfortably warm in Goodooga, but at least I won’t have the constant fear of being kidnapped, chopped into pieces, and sent back to my family over the course of a year in a gesture of warning from the local genocidal leader. Box jellyfish are scary though, but Goodooga is inland.

South America – A tie between Columbia and Venezuela:

Sure, Columbia is probably the first bad place you think of when you think of bad places in South America, but Venezuela is up there too! I understand that when people think of Columbia, they think of cocaine plantations, child labor, and children working on cocaine plantations, but Venezuela has bad stuff also. I mean, Venezuela has managed to increase its poverty rate by 300% since the 1970s! That’s no small task! I think Venezuela deserves a little more consideration. Just don’t go there. Not to either country. Not even for cocaine.

Europe – Albania:

According to The Onion, Albania is the Haiti of Europe. I wouldn’t want to go to the Haiti of Anywhere, so I won’t be going to Albania. I suggest you avoid it as well. Another place to avoid would be Dagestan, which is apparently a federal subject of Russia…so I guess that makes it part of Europe in a roundabout way. This place has been having a lesser-known Islamic insurgency complete with suicide bombings, Sharia Law, and dead public officials for the past twenty years. So it’s like a lesser-publicized Chechnya.

Asia – Afghanistan:

Well, Afghanistan is at an advantage on this list because there is a big war going on there. But even before the war the place sucked, especially if you were female. It had a HUGE female suicide rate. Probably because they were forced to observe Sharia Law x 1,000. Women were covered head to toe, uneducated, received little to no medical care, had no rights, couldn’t go out of the house without a male escort, forbidden from work, forced into marriages, and probably couldn’t sneeze without permission from their husbands. Then it got worse. Or better, since war creates excellent opportunities for suicide.

Africa – The Democratic Republic of Congo:

This place takes the misery cake. The DRC (which is neither Democratic nor a true Republic) makes Somalia look good by comparison. The only comfort the souls of the damned receive in Hell is the knowledge that they aren’t in the Congo. It’s like the apocalypse already happened over there – starvation, roving gangs, children with machine guns, babies on spears. It’s the rape capitol of the world. There is no economy because the various militias destroy everything in an almost locust-like manner – if locusts raped, maimed, and killed people for sport. Getting shot in the head is considered lucky over there. As if that weren’t enough, it is also home to the Ebola virus. F***.

Antarctica –Meh:
So…Antarctica is a continent, but there isn’t much going on there. It’s cold. You can go there if you want to though. Chill with some Norwegian researchers, say hello to The Thing, smell penguin poop. No big deal.