The VICE Guide to Travel

Rio is a mod­el of ur­ban­i­ty gone very, very wrong. The rich live in 20-​sto­ry-​tall seashells on white sand beach­es and the poor live in dense, dirty slums where mur­der­ing your ri­val drug lord is as com­mon a chore as tak­ing out the trash.

Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti shop for dirty bombs in the Bulgarian black market. After you see the relative ease with which they were able to meet a real, in the flesh, black market arms dealer, you’ll be stocking up on gas masks and radiation sickness pills. We know we are.

In 2006, Suroosh Alvi was one of a handful of journalists who was able to get into the massive guns market in Pakistan’s tribal areas – home base for the Taliban since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. He returned to Pakistan this month and found the entire country was a “powder keg ready to explode.”

Beirut can’t win. It had barely recovered from the tragic effects of a 15-year-long civil war and now it is the target of daily bombardments by the Israeli Air Force. Just before the bombing started we met with the notorious al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade in the city’s Palestinian refugee camps. We also sang and danced with the Fateh Boy Scouts, children who are being groomed to be the suicide bombers of tomorrow.

Having a gay old time in China’s capital of consumerism.

Shane Smith hunts for mutant wolves in Chernobyl’s Red Forest – the area that got the highest doses of radiation after the nuclear disaster in 1986.

Sampling some of Manila’s most questionable delicacies. First up: Soup No. 5.

VBS tours the fetid garbage dump Bulgaria’s Gypsies are forced to live in.

South America’s lost Aryan colony.

Mind-altering stroboscopy.

Jeepnys are Filipino hotrods, and there’s no better way to get around Manila.

Everyone in Australia knows about Nimbin. Whether they’ve scored drugs there, gone as a tourist to buy rainbow hippie shit, or read about how it’s a fractured town filled with ageing idealists whose dreams are being trampled under a stampede of smack, speed, and ice, most people hold some sort of opinion about the village. We finally decided to check it out for ourselves, at the peak of its craziness: the annual Mardi Grass Festival.

VICE founder Shane Smith managed to get into North Korea after a year and half of trying and is witness to the craziness of this hermit nation. Crazy is actually kind of an understatement.

VBS travels to Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the mountain gorillas – 200 of the earth’s last 720 — are in a desperate fight for their survival. Under pressure from rebel factions in Uganda and the DRC who massacred gorillas because the conservationists were “getting on their nerves,” our guide tracks the remaining apes – by armpit stench and dung – to keep tabs on their health.

Vice Scandinavia correspondent Ivar Berglin travels to the front lines of the Vodka/Wodka Wars – and discovers that the tortured history of Russian-Polish relations can be saved in a bottle.

Hajj is the world’s largest annual pilgrimage that takes place in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Last year VICE Founder Suroosh Alvi went with his family and shot footage with an old Handicam. His intention was never to make a VBS doc out of it, but lo and behold here it is…shaky camerawork and all. Eid Mubarak y’all!

VICE travels to West Africa to rummage through the messy remains of a country ravaged by 14 years of civil war. Despite the United Nation’s eventual intervention, most of Liberia’s young people continue to live in abject poverty, surrounded by filth, drug addiction, and teenage prostitution.

VICE travels to Casa Xochiquetzal, a residential facility in one of Mexico City’s shadiest neighborhoods that caters exclusively to the area’s elderly sex workers.

The Mexican town of El Alberto lies 800 miles south of the US border in the state of Hidalgo. It’s pretty much like any other town of 3,000 people, except in El Alberto they offer tourists the chance to participate in a simulated illegal border crossing. It all happens at a standard recreational park with swimming pools, river trips, zip lines, and the other typical fare. We took a few cameras and headed for the EcoAlberto Park to spend some late-nights running through underground tunnels on the heels of our personal “Coyote” while being chased by border patrol. While we were there, we crashed a quinceñera party and saw El Alberto from the perspective of the locals. We find that when Mexicans cross the border to pursue the “American Dream,” their real aim is to bring a slice of the pie back home to Mexico. And so they do, provided they can run fast enough.

Legend has it that the last remaining dinosaur lives inside the Congolese jungle. Dave Choe and his team of pygmy guides go in search of the beast, slicing their way through the heart of darkness to visit a reclusive tribe who claims to have witnessed the dinosaur’s existence. After making sure of his intentions, the tribe’s leader offers Dave a ritualistic alcohol that he must drink before setting out to find the animal. Chaos ensues.

In Prostitutes of God, VICE travels to the Indian city of Sangli to meet a group of bolshy sex workers selling their bodies in the name of the Hindu Goddess Yellamma. Local sex worker Anitha invites us for lunch in her brothel; shows us her homemade “sex rooms,” and tells us what it’s like to be a religious prostitute in modern India.

Jesco White rambles on...

VBS travels to the vast epic-ness of Khovsgol Province in northern Mongolia to check in on the second annual Yak Festival. Mongolians revere the mighty yak for powering Genghis Khan’s bloody rampage through Asia and Europe. And for their pretty hair. The festival showcased nature’s fanciest cows in an array of yak-related activities including yak wrangling, yak rodeo, yak cheese-tasting, as well as the main event, a balls to the wall yak race across the steppe. The Kentucky Derby this is not.

Libya is the latest nation to experience the violent civil unrest that has plagued North Africa since December. But in August 2010 things were much different.

The Santos Malandros (in English, the Holy Thugs) are an alternative set of saints whose common traits include sideways baseball hats, cigarettes, and guns.

VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi travels to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, accompanied by photographer Ariana Delawari. Together they witness the vicious impact left by the Taliban regime.

Vissarion's church of the last testament is the only reason to visit Siberia.

While most of us were still hung up on grunge, the republics of the former Yugoslavia spent the early 90s hung up on seceding into their own countries and mass-murdering people over infinitesimal ethnic differences. And the mid 90s. And the late 90s. To commemorate 12 years without a major attempted genocide, we decided to rent a Yugo and take a road trip through the Balkans to see what's going on and try to wrap our thinkers around what was up with all that ethnic cleansin'.

VICE heads to Indonesia to visit the Senin-Kamis School, an Islamic school for Javanese transvestites. Our host, Hannah Brooks, meets the school's founder, Maryani, and the rest of the ladies who call this place home. Then Hannah is taken to a local funeral, where Maryani speaks about the difficulties of living as a transvestite and a practicing Muslim.

Once a year around Christmas in the Peruvian Andes, the whole town gets together to dance, drink and beat the hell out of each other.

VICE founder Suroosh Alvi visits Pakistan's ultraviolent metropolis.

We tried to find the best shawarma in Doha but ended up searching for robot camel jockeys (apparently this is a real thing) and drinking in very strange bars.

Where Shamans and warriors worship holy sea worms.

Tourists on India's Andaman Islands are taken by the busload to watch the Jarawa tribe go about their daily lives. The Jarawa are treated like animals in a safari park, with large signs urging visitors not to feed them or give them clothing.

In these difficult times, many Japanese are putting marriage and families on the back burner and seeking recreational love and affection as a cheap escape. We sent Ryan Duffy to investigate Tokyo's cuddle cafes and Yakuza-sponsored prostitution.

The desert may be one of the last places on Earth you'd expect to find a beauty pageant. But on Christmas Day, while you were busy testing the limits of your digestive system, VICE's Charlet Duboc was traipsing through sand dunes in Abu Dhabi's remote Western Region, all in the name of beauty. In the West, we think nothing of beauty contests for dogs, horses, flowers, even women. But the leggy, doe-eyed lovelies on parade here are of the four-legged variety, and are judged on such criteria as having a nice firm pair of ears and floppy lips. Just like supermodels, at the height of their careers camels can command millions of dollars. Who knew? While the super-car or the SUV has replaced the camel as the most popular means of transportation in the modern Emirates, the animal retains an important place in the nation's heart. "Beautiful camel" may strike you as something of an oxymoron. But many a bedouin or sheikh will think nothing of dropping up to $3 million dollars on a so-called prized beauty, in the hope that she'll bring home the coveted Bayraq—the fairest camel in the land. In this episode of The VICE Guide to Travel, Charlet finds herself the only woman in the desert, looking for the elusive beauty in the beast.

In a land far, far away, love flourishes in a kingdom quite unlike any other. In mushroom-shaped homes and old dormitories, a community of dwarfs—all less than 51 inches tall—can be found singing, dancing, and performing on a daily basis for visiting tourists. In this episode of The VICE Guide to Travel, we send VICE magazine's creative director, Annette Lamothe-Ramos, to visit the controversial theme park, Kingdom of the Little People.

Ehime is one of the top emerging travel destinations in Japan! Only a short flight from Tokyo, Ehime is on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands. We sent KTea there to check out the unique sustainable travel experiences of the region, including the historical castle district of Ozu City, as well as the region’s capital, Matsuyama, to see everything Ehime has to offer!