Recent Articles in Quirky Guides

Cattlemen's Steakhouse, Oklahoma City, USA
Dec 1, 2007

The Cattlemen’s is where the cowboys go. It’s all Stetsons and boots, lean legs in jeans, and buttocks so hard you could bounce bullets off them. The customers here are sun-baked and sinewy: when they’re not sipping a cold one at the Cattlemen’s long counter or in one of its dark-red booths, they can usually be found back on the ranch, roping cattle and wrestling steer. Shake their hands and you’ll hear your own bones crunch...

Pickled Thumbs, Waihi, New Zealand
Dec 1, 2007

Many people don’t consider Waihi to be the centre of the universe. It’s a small town on New Zealand’s North Island, at the foot of the Coromandel. In its heyday, in the early 1900s, Waihi was one of New Zealand’s most prosperous gold-mining towns. The mine is still operating today though, frankly, there’s not a lot to see. There is one really good reason to visit Waihi, though, and that’s the museum.

Eating Roadkill, Pukekura, New Zealand
Dec 1, 2007

Pukekura is a small place: it has a population of two. This couple, Peter and Justine Salter, claim to be ‘mayor and mayoress, law enforcement officers, cook and cleaner, gardener and rubbish man’ of their tiny township on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. ‘Some days you may catch us stressed out, most days we're worn out, occasionally we pass out,’ they say...

The Sourtoe Cocktail, Dawson City, Canada
Dec 1, 2007

The Sourdough Saloon is famous for a drink more lurid by far than beer: its sourtoe cocktails are the drink of one’s choice garnished with a genuine, severed human toe...

Statue Park, Budapest, Hungary
Dec 1, 2007

A short bus ride out of Budapest, in a field surrounded by nondescript apartment blocks and electricity pylons, lies one of the oddest testaments to Hungary’s socialist past...

The Embalmed Horses of Aimé Tschiffely, Luján, Argentina
Dec 1, 2007

Aimé Tshiffely was Swiss by birth, but in the early part of the 20^th century, he lived in Buenos Aires, where he worked as a teacher. In April 1925, he set out with two Argentine criollo horses, Gato and Mancha, to ride ten thousand miles from Buenos Aires to New York...

Evita's Tomb, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dec 1, 2007

A visit to the tomb of Eva Perón is not exactly an offbeat travel experience: enter the gates of Buenos Aires’s Recoleta cemetery and you can almost follow the crowds along the well-trodden path to her door. But Eva Perón’s cadaver definitely deserves a place on this site – for it was one of the quirkiest travellers ever...

The End of the World, Ushuaia, Argentina
Dec 1, 2007

'Bienvenidos al fin del mundo,’ say the signposts in Ushuaia. Welcome to the end of the world. Presumably the town’s first inhabitants thought the place apocalyptic enough, for it was founded as a penal colony...

Lobbing Turnips for Fun, Piornal, Spain
Dec 1, 2007

Some festivals in Spain are famous. There’s the running of the bulls at Pamplona, and that one in Valencia where everyone hurls tomatoes at each other. Those crazed antipodeans that chuck themselves in front of grumpy bovines have probably never even heard of tiny village of Piornal, though...