JUICE: No-Go Zones

badplacestop

Landmines, gang wars and toxic waste—Dominic Cadden reveals the world’s seven worst places to live

Norilsk, Siberia
NORILSK began as a Siberian slave-labour camp in 1935, and it’s gone downhill ever since. The Soviets made nuclear weapons here, and today the area is still filled with toxic waste. Then Russia replaced the weapons factory with the world’s largest heavy-metal smelting complex. Today, polluted water and air have reduced life expectancy to about 40, and there’s not a single living tree within 45km of the city.

In winter, it’s dark for six weeks, so at least you don’t have to see how awful the place is. Norilsk is so far north that it’s situated on continuous permafrost. There are snow storms 110 to 130 days each year, and the average temperature is -10°C, but thankfully the smelting factories give off some heat.

Fucking, Austria
IT IS a mistake to move to Cockup, England. The Bruce Willis jokes get a bit old when you live in Diehard, NSW, and if you’re born in Frog Suck, Wyoming, it just plain sucks. Mind you, if your hometown’s Fucking, you’re screwed.
Every trip to the shops is like a Tourette’s outburst. You go to the Fucking bakery, the Fucking newsagent, then the Fucking juice bar. You can’t even check anything out online—try typing ‘Fucking dentist’ into Google and see what you get.

Tourists steal every Fucking sign installed by the weary council, and even when you travel there’s always some smart-arse sleaze who asks, “How do we get to Fucking?” as he spikes your drink and pulls out his cock. However, residents of Fucking are so clearly Penthouse’s kind of people that in 2004 they voted against changing the town’s name.

North Korea
NORTH KOREA is the most boring place in the world. Unless you’re a top government official, there’s no access to the Internet, mobile phones, cars or foreign TV and movies. The closest contact you’ll have with a foreigner will be when a South Korean moons you during the 10 years you spend guarding the border on compulsory military service. You can’t diss the government and you have to bow to all statues of the leaders or the secret police will stick you in
a gulag. How very Stalinist Russia of them.

Locals are so brainwashed that they believe their Dear Leader controls the weather, but Kim Jong-il’s too busy injecting himself with the blood of virgins, building $2 billion hotels no tourist will ever visit, and spending millions on premium cognac and Disney movies while the rest of the nation starves.

Sudan
SINCE 2003, Sudan has shot to number one with a bullet on the African genocide charts. It was no overnight success—more than two million people have died during two civil wars over the past 50 years. Some of the world’s most famous killers have earned their stripes here (including senior Al-Qaeda operatives and Osama himself), matriculating with degrees in car bombing, rocket launching and mass murder.

It’s not a top place to raise a daughter, though. For 13-year-old girls, life choices usually consist of becoming a soldier or a sex slave to soldiers, or both. Leaving would be difficult, too, since the national airline, Sudan Air, is so bad that 100 countries have banned the carrier from their airspace.

Khyber Pass, Afghanistan
THIS place isn’t a euphemism for ‘arse’ just because it rhymes so well with it. Since 1980, the local people, the Pathans, have been fighting Russians, various other Afghans, American and Allied forces, the Pakistan Army, and each other. Now they’ve hooked up with the Taliban, those zany funsters who have a policy of abducting foreigners.

For kicks, Pathans have been known to walk across the border to Pakistan and blow themselves up. You could join the local cricket club instead, but the 12 million landmines in the region make fielding a bit iffy, as do the snakes, spiders and scorpions. Also, if Osama bin Laden is alive, this is where he is most likely hiding, and you know what that
can do to local cave prices.

Dzerzhinsk, Russia
FOR 68 years, Dzerzhinsk was a dumping ground for almost 300,000 tonnes of waste from chemical weapons production. The World Health Organisation found human milk in the region’s mothers to be so toxic that they may as well bottle-feed their bubs insect spray.

Inhaling the air gives you headaches and the fishing’s not flash, either. A sludge-pit called The Black Hole is littered with empty toxic-waste barrels and the smell of phenol, acid and acetone burns your windpipe. Another lake has been dubbed The White Sea because cyanide gives the water a white glow. Locals have a defensive Soviet-era mindset, but you won’t have to put up with it for long; the death rate exceeds the birth rate by 260 per cent.

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
THIS city on the Texan border has officially overtaken Caracas as the murder capital of the world, thanks to the tireless efforts of drug gangs shifting cocaine and amphetamines into the US. But if beheaded bodies and daylight slayings aren’t enough to put you off your tequila and fish tacos, there’s a wave of kidnappings, torture, rampant corruption and intimidation of non-gang residents. In September 2009, gangsters executed 18 patients at a drug rehab clinic because they were stuffing up the cartel’s profit-loss statement by choosing to go cold turkey.

And there’s no use going there for the sexy Latin women, either, as more than 400 fell prey to sexual homicide this decade—and that’s just the number that have turned up in shallow graves.

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