Amusing Planet

Ducks Rule at Peabody Hotel, Memphis

2013-05-23T03:29:00.001-07:00

Peabody Hotel is not just another luxury hotel in downtown Memphis in Tennessee, USA. This one has a peculiar attraction – ducks. Every day at 11 in the morning, a parade of five mallard ducks makes its way from their penthouse home on the roof of the hotel down to the lobby via the elevator. Red carpet is rolled out all the way from the elevator door to the hotel fountain made of a solid block of Italian travertine marble. The ducks frolic in the waters the entire day. At exactly 5 in the evening, the ducks are ceremoniously led back to their penthouse.

The unique tradition started in 1932, when the general manager of the time, Frank Schutt, had just returned from a weekend hunting trip in Arkansas. He and his friends thought it would be amusing to leave three of their live English Call Duck decoys in the hotel fountain. The ducks became immediately popular with hotel guests, and since then, five Mallard ducks (one male and four females) have played in the fountain every day.

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Scale Model of the Mississippi River on Mud Island

2013-05-22T04:09:00.001-07:00

Mud Island is not actually an island, it is a small peninsula, in downtown Memphis on the Mississippi River. But it did rose out of mud. What happened was that in 1876, the river shifted slightly about 20 miles south of Memphis, causing the currents that flowed past the city to alter course. Then in 1910, the U.S. Navy gunboat Amphitrite anchored at the mouth of the Wolf River for almost two years, causing a further change in silt patterns. When the ship left in 1912, the sandbar continued to grow, and Mud Island was born.

Initially, the residents disliked the island, since it was ugly and proved to be a danger to river navigation. The poor Memphians, however, found the island a nice place to squat. Beginning in the 1930s, the started building ramshackle homes built of scrap metal and wood. Between 200 and 500 people lived on the island during this time. Development really took off when the island opened an airport in 1959. The airport was closed in 1970 when the DeSoto Bridge was built, and a decade later the Mud Island River Park was opened – an attraction consisting of the Mississippi River Museum, an amphitheater, outdoor activities and a flowing replica of the Mississippi River.

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Extraordinary Camouflage of Walking Leaves

2013-05-22T00:17:00.001-07:00

Leaf insects or walking leaves are some of the most remarkable leaf mimics in the entire animal kingdom. These insects take the appearance of a leaf to hide themselves from predators. They do this so accurately that predators often aren’t able to distinguish them from real leaves. In some species the edge of the leaf insect’s body even has the appearance of bite marks. To further confuse predators, when the leaf insect walks, it rocks back and forth, to mimic a real leaf being blown by the wind.

The creature may have been first documented by the scholar Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew on their voyage to the Indies in the 15th century. He studied and chronicled the fauna on the island of Cimbonbon as the fleet hauled ashore for repairs. During this time he documented the Phyllium species with the following passage:

In this island are also found certain trees, the leaves of which, when they fall, are animated, and walk. They are like the leaves of the mulberry tree, but not so long; they have the leaf stalk short and pointed, and near the leaf stalk they have on each side two feet. If they are touched they escape, but if crushed they do not give out blood. I kept one for nine days in a box. When I opened it the leaf went round the box. I believe they live upon air

Leaf insects occur from South Asia through Southeast Asia to Australia. At present, there is no consensus as to the preferred classification of this group, but they are generally treated as the Family Phylliidae.

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The Beautiful Fukang Meteorite

2013-05-21T11:11:00.001-07:00

The Fukang meteorite, believed to be some 4.5 billion years old, which is as ancient as Earth itself, was unearthed near a town of the same name in China, in 2000. It is a pallasite, a type of meteorite with translucent golden crystals of a mineral called olivine embedded in a silvery honeycomb of nickel-iron. It’s a gorgeous meteorite, and possibly the most stunning extraterrestrial piece of rock man has ever seen.

The Fukang meteorite was found by a hiker. The man had often stopped and had lunch on this giant rock, and he always wondered what the metal and crystals were. He finally took a hammer and chisel and broke some pieces off, which he sent to the USA to confirm that it was a meteorite.

The original meteorite weighted just over a thousand kilogram, but the rock was so brilliant that everybody wanted a piece of it. Since then it has been divided into dozens of thin slices and auctioned or distributed around the world.

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Colorful Danxia Landforms of China

2013-05-19T22:34:00.001-07:00

The Danxia landform is a unique type of “petrographic geomorphology” found in China, characterized by strips of red sedimentary rock in steep cliffs. According to Wikipedia, “the landforms look very much like karst topography that forms in areas underlain by limestones, but since the rocks that form danxia are sandstones and conglomerates, they have been called "pseudo-karst" landforms.” A very peculiar feature of danxia landscape is the development of numerous caves of various sizes and shapes. The caves tend to be shallow and isolated, unlike true karst terrain where caves tend to form deep, interconnecting networks.

The word “Danxia” actually comes from Mount Danxia, located in Renhua County of Guangdong Province, where the most famous examples of the Danxia landform is seen. Over the past 70 years, geologists and geographers have identified over 700 Danxia landforms in China, mostly in southeast and southwest China. Today, the study of Danxia landforms has developed into a sub-discipline of geomorphology and Danxia Mountain has become China’s research base for Danxia landforms.

Fire Rainbows: A Rare Cloud Phenomenon

2013-05-19T08:39:00.001-07:00

“Fire Rainbows” are neither fire, nor rainbows, but are so called because of their brilliant pastel colors and flame like appearance. Technically they are known as circumhorizontal arc - an ice halo formed by hexagonal, plate-shaped ice crystals in high level cirrus clouds. The halo is so large that the arc appears parallel to the horizon, hence the name.

Brightly colored circumhorizontal arc occur mostly during the summer and between particular latitudes. When the sun is very high in the sky, sunlight entering flat, hexagon shaped ice crystals gets split into individual colors just like in a prism. The conditions required to form a “fire rainbow” is very precise – the sun has to be at an elevation of 58° or greater, there must be high altitude cirrus clouds with plate-shaped ice crystals, and sunlight has to enter the ice crystals at a specific angle. This is why circumhorizontal arc is such a rare phenomenon.

A colourful circumhorizon arc spans the sky near Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, in 2003.

The position of the observer is also important. Circumhorizontal arcs cannot be seen in locations north of 55°N or south of 55°S. Likewise there are certain times of the year when they are visible. For example, in London, England the sun is only high enough for 140 hours between mid-May and late July. While in Los Angeles, the sun is higher than 58 degrees for 670 hours between late March and late September.

Dietmar Eckell’s Photos of Plane Wrecks With “Happy Ends”

2013-05-19T00:10:00.001-07:00

Airplane wrecks usually denote tragedies, but photographer Dietmar Eckell aims to highlight the rare miracles from the history of aviation where everyone survived.

"'Happy End' is a photo-project about miracles in aviation history - 15 airplanes that had forced landings but all on board survived and were rescued from the remote locations," says Dietmar Eckell a photographer from Dusseldorf, Germany.

For nearly three years, Eckell trekked to extremely isolated locations across the world — nine countries on four continents — from Australia to Iceland looking for abandoned remains of plane wreckage. These planes have remain abandoned from anywhere between 10-70 years and have become part of the landscape. In the forests, trees grow through broken windows. In the desert, piles of sand conform to the shape of the fuselage. In the mountains, their gray metal innards start to resemble the rocks around them. According to Eckell, all wreckage involve stories of survival and sheer luck.

West Sahara

Photographer Tracks Down Abandoned Sets From Star Wars in Tunisia

2013-05-18T23:07:00.001-07:00

New York-based Italian photographer Rä di Martino first discovered the ruins of the sets of Star Wars and The English Patient near Chott el Djerid in Tunisi on Google Maps. Determined to get a first person view of the location, the visual artist and filmmaker travelled to Tunisia in September 2010 to track down the three Star Wars sets.

“With only my Google map as a guide, I struggled at first to find anything,” said Martino to The Guardian. “Then I met a driver who knew the desert well and offered to take me to the sites. We still ended up asking for directions at a police station and they told us it was 15km from the Algerian border – but only accessible by quad bike. Somehow we made it.”

Morroccan desert has long been used by Hollywood and European studios to depict anywhere from ancient Egypt to Jerusalem, Tibet to ancient Rome. There are huge re-creations of ancient Rome and Greece, a fake Mecca and a replica of an American gas station, which a homeless guy has moved into. After the shoot these were abandoned to become almost like archaeological sites.

Art and Decor of Moscow Metro Stations

2013-05-18T08:50:00.001-07:00

The Metro began operating in Moscow in 1935 with a single 11 km line connecting just thirteen stations, but it has since grown into the world’s fourth busiest transit system, spanning more than 300 kilometers and offering 188 stops along the way.

The Moscow Metro was one of the USSR’s most extravagant architectural projects, with stations constructed as luxurious “palaces for the people”. Built under the command of Stalin, the iron-fisted leader ordered the metro’s artists and architects to design a structure that embodied svet (radiance or brilliance) and svetloe budushchee (a radiant future). He directed his architects to design structures which would encourage citizens to look up, admiring the station’s art, as if they were looking up to admire the sun and—by extension—him as a god. With their reflective marble walls, high ceilings and grandiose chandeliers, many Moscow Metro stations have been likened to an “artificial underground sun”.

The art includes bas-reliefs, friezes, marble and bronze statues, stained-glass windows and countless mosaics made with glass, marble and granite in good Byzantine fashion. You can find the images of the former revolutionary and historical characters, their victories, sports, industry, agriculture, and warfare, as well as of common Soviet people such as workers, soldiers, farmers, and students.

Waitomo Glowworm Caves, New Zealand

2013-05-15T10:38:00.001-07:00

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves, located just outside the main Waitomo township on the North Island of New Zealand, is a famous attraction because of a sizeable population of glowworms that live in the caves. Glowworms or Arachnocampa luminosa are tiny, bioluminescent creatures that produce a blue-green light and are found exclusively in New Zealand.

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves were first explored in 1887 by local Maori Chief Tane Tinorau accompanied by an English surveyor Fred Mace. Local Maori people knew of the Caves existence, but the subterranean caverns had never been extensively explored until Fred and Tane went to investigate. They built a raft of flax stems and with candles in hand, floated into the cave where the stream goes underground.

As they entered the caves, they came across the Glowworm Grotto and were amazed by the twinkling glow coming from the ceiling. As they travelled further into the cave by poling themselves towards an embankment, they were also astounded by the limestone formations.

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Wadi Al-Salaam: The Largest Cemetery in The World

2013-05-14T23:39:00.001-07:00

Wadi us-Salaam, which literally means the Valley of Peace, is an Islamic cemetery located in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq. The cemetery covers an area of 1485.5 acres and contains millions of bodies, making it one of the strongest contender for the title of the largest graveyard on earth. Najaf itself is one of Iraq's biggest cities, with a population of nearly 600,000. But the adjoining city of the dead holds the remains of millions, stretching for up to 10km along the valley. Wadi Al-Salam cemetery is also the only cemetery in the world where the process of burial is still continuing to day since more than 1,400 years.

The graveyard holds importance in Shiite belief as it has been said that the souls of all faithful men and women shall be moved there, no matter where their bodies have been buried. Many prophets, kings, princes and Sultans lie in this cemetery including that of Prophet Hud, Prophet Saleh, and Ayatullah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, as well as the remains of the prince of faithfuls, Ali Ibn Abi Talib.

Impressive Artwork Made Out of Denim by Ian Berry

2013-05-11T08:22:00.001-07:00

Ian Berry is a British born artist currently based in Sweden, who creates artwork solely from denim. Using old jeans, jackets, and other denim clothing, Berry creates monochromatic portraits, urbanscapes and other unique works. Berry even adopted the name Denium, the Japanese phonetic spelling of denim, to further emphasize his obsession with blue jeans.

To produce the works of art, Berry would cut pieces of denim into precise shapes before painstakingly gluing them all together. To achieve different looks, he sometimes uses bleach, either with a stencil and spray, or experiments with different color jeans.

“I was about 14 and we were going to a family party”, recalls Berry. “I wanted to wear my favorite pair of jeans, but my mum had other ideas. Out instead came the corduroy. I still remember feeling so self-conscious and uncomfortable, and not myself. How I wanted to be in my beloved denim, just like my cousins were wearing. A few years later I came across the very same pair, now unique through wear, on top of a pile of cast offs ready for the charity shop. I found myself staring at them, wishing I could still fit in them remembering the times when I could. I was transfixed by the ripped, faded beauty of the fabric.”

Bunda Cliffs in Australia: Is this the End of the World?

2013-05-11T03:16:00.001-07:00

Located on the Great Australian Bight in Southern Australia, is the vast, featureless Nullarbor Plain - the world’s largest single piece of limestone, covering an area of 270,000 square km and extending some 1,000 km from the east to the west. The area is so flat that the Trans Australian Railway runs across its surface for about 483 kilometers in a completely straight line. On the surface of the plain there are areas of slight depressions where sparse rainfall has slowly dissolved away some of the limestone. There are also places where underground caves or sinkholes have collapsed to form dents in the surface. But mostly, the plain is horizontally flat and devoid of trees, as its Latin name suggests. The Nullarbor Plain ends abruptly at the spectacular Bunda Cliffs, comprising a 200-kilometer-long precipice curving around the Great Australian Bight.

Tabletop Mountains or Tepuis of Venezuela

2013-05-10T23:06:00.001-07:00

Tepuis are flat table-top mountains found in the Guayana Highlands of South America, especially in Venezuela. In the language of the Pemon people who live in the Gran Sabana, Tepui means ‘House of the Gods’ due to their height.

Tepuis tend to be found as isolated entities rather than in connected ranges, which makes them host to hundreds of endemic plant and animal species, some of which are found only on one tepui. Towering over the surrounding forest, the tepuis have almost sheer vertical flanks, and many rise as much as 1,000 meters above the surrounding jungle. The tallest of them are over 3,000 meters tall. The nearly vertical escarpments and dense rainforest bed on which these tepuis or mesa lie make them inaccessible by foot. Only three of the Gran Sabana's mountains can be reached by foot, among which the 2,180m-high Roraima is the most accessible.

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Tepuis are the remains of a large sandstone plateau that once covered the granite basement complex between the north border of the Amazon Basin and the Orinoco, between the Atlantic coast and the Rio Negro, during the Precambrian period. Over millions of years, the plateaus were eroded and all that were left were isolated flat-headed tepuis. Although the tepuis looks quite barren, the summit is teeming with life.

Ferrari World Theme Park in Abu Dhabi

2013-05-09T22:56:00.001-07:00

Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi is the world’s largest and the only Ferrari branded indoor theme park that sits at the center of a 2,500 hectare Yas island. Typical of UAE, the island is entirely dedicated to leisure, entertainment and lifestyle, and Ferrari World is its central attraction. Opened in 2010, the park features more than 20 Ferrari inspired rides and attractions, in addition to a wide variety of Italian delicacies and shopping malls, and is reportedly a must-visit for all Ferrari enthusiasts.

However, one of the theme park’s iconic attraction can only be experienced from the air – the enormous roof inspired by the classic double curve side profile of the Ferrari GT body, spanning 200,000 sq meters and carrying the largest Ferrari logo ever created. The theme park, measuring 86,000 sq meter is located under this 50 meter high roof. The perimeter of the roof is more than 2 km in length. More than 12,370 tonnes of steel has been used to support this roof. At the center, there is a 100 meter glazed funnel. The Ferrari logo that adorns the roof of the building measures 65 meters across.

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Karst Mountains And Paddy Fields of Tam Coc, Vietnam

2013-05-09T04:33:00.001-07:00

Tam Coc is located about 90 km from the city of Ninh Binh, and is considered one of Vietnam's most spectacular sights. Tam Coc means “three caves” – which are Hang Ca (the first), Hang Giua (the second) and Hang Cuoi (the smallest). A visit to Tam Coc basically consist of a three hour boat ride along the twists and turns of the Ngo Dong river beginning at the village of Van Lam and proceeding through a scenic landscape dominated by rice fields and karst towers. Undoubtedly, the most impressive of Tam Coc are the rice fields and when at its best, they are bright green with yellow, that extends all the way from the water’s edge to the foot of the rock formations.

The route also includes floating through the three natural caves, the largest of which is 125 meters long with its ceiling about 2 meters high above the water. The boats are typically rowed by one or two local women who also carry embroidered good for selling. The otherwise peace and harmony of the place can be overshadowed by the pushy vendors.

Katrin Korfmann’s Aerial Photos of People

2013-05-08T09:26:00.001-07:00

German-born and Amsterdam-based artist Katrin Korfmann loves taking photos of human life, from a height. But unlike many aerial photographers who fly on small planes, Korfmann’s techniques are modest. She shoots from cranes, and when cranes are not possible, she sends her camera up in a remote-controlled helicopter.

Katrin Korfmann takes multiple images and then blends them together to produce the final image, a task that can take two to three months working with 500 to 2,000 shots. Since the pictures are often taken at different times, Korfmann has to manipulate the shadows and exposure to create an image that appears to have been taken at one point in time.

“In the bird’s-eye view people look alike,” Korfmann said in an interview to Slate. “The idea is to create two dimensions: one when you see it from far away and another when you zoom in and see it from very close. Then you see all the differences: in the clothes they wear, the things they carry.”

50 Years of NASA’s Space Food

2013-05-08T07:24:00.001-07:00

NASA’s Advanced Food Technology Project is responsible for providing space flight crews with a food system that is safe, nutritious, and acceptable to the crew, while balancing appropriate vehicle mass, volume, waste, and food preparation time for exploration missions. For the past 50 years, the methods involved in the preservation process have evolved from pilots eating seed and crackers to allowing for gourmet diets like freeze dried shrimp and meats to be eaten.

John Glenn was America's first man to eat anything in the near weightlessness of Earth orbit. Before that, Yuri Gagarin, the first man on space, experimented by eating three 160 g toothpaste-type tubes serving puréed meat and chocolate sauce for lunch. Glen found the task of eating fairly easy, but found the menu to be limited. Many Mercury astronauts had to endure bite-sized cubes, freeze dried powders, and semiliquids stuffed in aluminum tubes. The astronauts found it unappetizing, experienced difficulties in rehydrating the freeze-dried foods, and did not like having to squeeze tubes. Moreover, freeze-dried foods produced crumbs which could foul instruments.

The Majestic Tufa Towers of Mono Lake, California

2013-05-07T08:28:00.001-07:00

Mono Lake is a shallow salt water lake located in the high desert on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in California in the United States. The lake has no outlet to the ocean causing high levels of salts to accumulate in the waters. As a consequence of its high salinity, no fish live in Mono Lake, but there are plenty of brine shrimp that thrive in its waters. Over two million annual migratory birds use Mono Lake as a stop over and resting place as they fly to South America or the tropical oceans. They feed on the shrimps, lay eggs and hatch their young ones here.

The most unusual feature of Mono Lake are its dramatic tufa towers emerging from the surface. These rock towers form when underwater springs rich in calcium mix with the waters of the lake, which are rich in carbonates. The resulting reaction forms limestone. Over time the buildup of limestone formed towers, and when the water level of the lake dropped the towers became exposed.

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The Katskhi Pillar, Georgia

2013-05-07T00:20:00.001-07:00

The Katskhi pillar is an imposing limestone monolith, 40 meters tall, located in the village of Katskhi in western Georgian region of Imereti, about 10 kilometers from the mining town of Chiatura. In pagan times, before the advent of Christianity, the towering Katskhi Pillar was thought to represent a local god of fertility. With the arrival of Christianity in Georgia in the 4th century, the rock came to represent seclusion. The locals call it the Pillar of Life.

At the summit of the Katskhi pillar, are the remains of a small church built between the 6th and 8th centuries. The church was probably built by the Stylites, who were early Christian ascetics who stood on top of pillars and preaching and praying. The only written record of the Katskhi pillar occur in the text of an 18th-century Georgian scholar, who noted the church for its inaccessibility. There is however, a number of local legends surrounding the pillar, one of which says that the top of the rock was connected by a long iron chain to the dome of the Katskhi church, located at a distance of around 1.5 km from the pillar.

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The Green Belt Along The World’s Longest Desert Highway

2013-05-05T10:20:00.001-07:00

The Tarim Desert Highway across the Taklamakan desert, in China, links the cities of Luntai and Minfeng on the northern and southern edges of the Tarim basin. The total length of the highway is 552 km, of which approximately 446 km is built across uninhabited areas covered by shifting sand dunes, 20 metes tall, that frequently bury the highway.

To prevent the highway from getting buried by the encroaching sand dunes, rows of vegetation were planted on both sides of the road to anchor the sand with their roots. A massive irrigation system was constructed that pump water from underground reservoirs to sustain the artificial ecosystem. Hundreds of workers were employed, housed every four kilometers along the road who tend to the short, small-leaved rose willows, sacsaoul and buckthorn and make sure they do not die. The water comes from wells, bored 100 meters deep into an aquifer which sits under the desert, which in turn is fed by the rivers that flow down from the surrounding mountains. Despite the high saline content in the water, the green belt continues to thrive.

A lone pumping station by the side of the Tarim Desert Highway. Photo by George Steinmetz

Larung Gar Buddhist Academy in Serthar, Tibet

2013-05-05T06:18:00.001-07:00

Larung Gar Buddhist Academy, also known as Serthar Buddhist Institute, sits in the Larung Valley at an elevation of 4,000 meters, about 15 km from the town Sêrtar, in Sertar County, Garze Prefecture in the traditional Tibetan region of Kham. The academy was founded in 1980 in an entirely uninhabited valley by Jigme Phuntsok, an influential lama of the Nyingma tradition. Despite its remote location, Larung Gar grew from a handful of disciples to be one of the largest and most influential centers for the study of Tibetan Buddhism in the world. Today it is home to over 40,000 monks, nuns and lay-students.

The campus of Larung Gar is enormous. Houses for monks and nuns sprawl all over the valley and up the surrounding mountains. A huge wall through the middle of Larung Gar separates the monk side from the nun side. Monks and nuns are not allowed out of their designated areas except in front of the main monastery assembly hall which is common to both nuns and monks. The houses are all built in a wood style that is traditionally found in this region, and built so close together that they appear almost on top of each other.

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Crude Oil Spas of Naftalan, Azerbaijan

2013-05-05T00:09:00.001-07:00

In the Azerbaijan city of Naftalan, 320 kilometers north-west of the capital Baku, crude oil is found in such abundance that people literally bath in it. During the Soviet era, Naftalan’s famous crude oil baths used to draw tourists from all over the Soviet Union. It is believed that Naftalan crude oil has medicinal properties and is good for treating skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis, easing joint pains and generally calming the nerves. At their peak in the 1980s, Naftalan spas had 75,000 visitors a year. This reduced to a trickle when war broke out between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenians in nearby Nagorno-Karabakh in 1988, and many resorts were converted into camps for housing refugees. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, petroleum baths closed down entirely. Now nearly two decades later, crude oil spas have started opening up again.

The qualities of Naftalan oil has been known since ancient times. In the 13th centaury AD, the famous explorer Marko Polo who was passing through Azerbaijan on his way from Venice to China mentioned about Naftalan oil which he saw being loaded on to camels. He noted the oil’s therapeutic properties and how it could treat humans and animals with skin diseases. Modern use of the oil started during the 1870s under Czarist Russia. By 1912, a German joint-stock company was founded to export and trade the oil, which was used as a treatment in the Russo-Japanese War.

Photo by Chloe Dewe Mathews

Dark Surreal Paintings by Lisa Adams

2013-05-02T00:03:00.001-07:00

Queensland based Lisa Adams is a self-taught, realist artist who lives remotely on a bush property in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Working 6 hours a day, 6 days a week in her isolated studio downstairs, she produces surreal paintings depicting arresting views with occasionally improbable imagery. Although a painter for over twenty-five years, she has had only three commercial shows, as a result of her slow rate of production. Despite painting daily, she may produce only three or four paintings in a year, five during her most prolific years. It takes months to produce a single painting. Often, she would overpaint an image two or three times to get it right.

In 2009, Lisa Adams began to suffer from “a bad bout of RSI”, a product of painting with “fingers pinched around a paintbrush” every day for twenty years. But some three years later, after making modifications to her brushes and her chair, and learning to have short breaks, she is back to painting six hours a day.

The Living Residents of Manila’s North Cemetery

2013-05-01T22:57:00.001-07:00

Housing is such scarce in the Filipino capital of Manila, that thousands of residents have found an alternative to their housing woes by making the cemetery their home.

Metro Manila is a bustling city with a population of around 12 million. It ranks as the world’s eleventh largest metropolitan area and the fifth largest urban area by population. It is also ranked as one of the most densely populated cities in the world. But the vast majority of the city’s residents are poor. As much as 40% of the population lives below the poverty line, often squatting in shantytowns, unable to afford anything better.

Manila's North Cemetery, the oldest and the largest in Metro Manila with an area covering 54 acres, provides the city’s bottom rung dwellers ample space to live undisturbed. Wooden and corrugated iron shack perched on top of hundreds of stacked tombs against the back wall forms their living quarters. Stone and marble sarcophaguses inside the mausoleums became beds. Electricity is supplied from a nearby street, while drinking water comes from one of a dozen wells dug around the cemetery grounds.

Photo by Kate McGeown for BBC