Have you ever seen a place that was straight lost in time?

[Cid_B]

Some of the posts about Korea and China made me think of my last deployment...

It was weird because you knew for an absolute fact that 95% of what these folks did on a daily basis, they had been doing that way for centuries. This was especially true when you weren't in a "city"

Stacking rocks, cooking bread, building houses etc.. etc.. etc.. Coulda plucked em up, dropped em back a millennium and they would be good to hook. Weird

Anyone else know places like that?

[WinkyDink]

1. Morocco. Straight outta Biblical times.

[FSogol]

2. I was out in the sticks in Bolivia last year and saw towns where people made and sold mud bricks.

So desolate.

[SmileyRose]

3. Appalachia

[mdmc]

4. As I drive further away from NYC I notice the towns seem to go back in time

some of them still have Main Street and lack box stores! Can ya diggit?

[Sonoman]

5. Was that Afghanistan?

I have encountered pretty much the same in some parts of Mongolia, Nepal and Tibet.

You have to get there before the fucking missionaries arrive.

I could tell some great stories about Amazon basin, but I would just piss myself off.

Sonoman

[Cid_B]

7. It was...

[Sonoman]

10. Yeah

I was in Burkina Faso, Niger and Tunisia last year, and, if you can get into the countryside, you feel as if you are in a very far-away land.

I would have loved to have been in Afghanistan in the 60s.

Sonoman

[Webster Green]

19. Afghanistan in the 60s

That would have been amazing.

I know folks who went in the mid '70s & brought the skunk seed back to Humboldt. :hippie:

[Sonoman]

29. Come on over, dude...

I am easy to find.

Sonoman

[KittyWampus]

6. Anthony Bourdain did a few shows on "No Reservations". One place in Africa had people

with absolutely no food except for a fruit that grows in thorny vines. They prepare it many ways. But that's all they have. Period. It was in Namibia. These people do have someone working with them to try and get kids some education.

Same episode he visits Bushman near Kalahari Desert. They are living in stone age.

In school I studied the textiles made by the Kuna in Panama.

[bluedigger]

14. Don't knock the Kalahari!

They spend a lot less time "working", and way more time story telling and dancing, than we do.

[Canuckistanian]

8. Albania

They missed most of the 20th century. Some say they never left the 19th.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

13. It borders on the Adriatic. nt

:D
(sorry-- Cheers was on right when I read your post)

[Canuckistanian]

21. Cliff Claven, right?

Sam (with a big leak on his hands): "Hey, Cliff! What do you know about plumbing?"

Cliff: "It was invented by the early Romans"

[Gidney N Cloyd]

33. Actually a mnemonic thing Coach came up with.

Sung to When the Saints Go Marching In

Al-ban-i-a
Al-ban-i-a
You border on the A-dri-atic

[izquierdista]

9. Crimea

They have this light rock that can be cut and quarried with a metal saw and used just like modern day concrete block is. In fact, after the building is stuccoed, you can't tell which was used to build it. I understand it has been done like this for 2500 years, but that is only because some visiting Greeks wrote down what they observed when a building was going up. Could have been going on even earlier.

[NYC_SKP]

11. Central part of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.

Pretty pre-industrial revolution, roadside huts, low-tech foods and fuel and such.

But never far from one project or another.

I didn't take pictures but one shocking sight was the use of a machine cutting a swath through the jungle, for what I do not know.

Anyway, if industrialized people and cities and such all went "poof", away in a act of un-creation, these people would carry on, happy as can be and, apparently, quite healthy, too.

:patriot:

[htuttle]

12. Sure -- Waukesha County, Wisconsin

I grew up there.

[valerief]

20. Bwah!

[Skittles]

15. I felt like rural Iowa/Minnesota was that way, in 1971

I moved there from England

[rurallib]

23. High Amana, Iowa - one of the Amana Colonies

While the others have some modern conveniences, High Amana was left in the 1930s or was when we visited about a decade ago.
No cars, one general store that had products from - yep - the 30s or so it seemed.

[pitohui]

16. plenty of places in rural madagascar still in the stone age when i visited

you could see how they would make little mud huts by shaping the mud into bricks over fires, with the fire being made from charcoal created by burning eucalyptus trees, so they start w. sticks and mud and eventually have a house, a shitty house with palm leaves for a roof, but a house

i don't romanticize this crap, that's for sure, yeah, you could drop em back in the stone age and they wouldn't notice a thing different, but it wasn't exactly an enviable lifestyle

the life expectancy is what? mid forties?

[Cid_B]

18. Don't get confused...

Nothing romantic there.. that is a hard dirty filthy life...

[Brickbat]

17. Rural Russia. Nothing like it.

[Sonoman]

28. Tell me more

I'll go, but I want to do it right.

Sonoman

[Brickbat]

34. What do you mean, "Do it right?"

Are you looking to travel in a rural area? Do you speak the language?

[H2O Man]

22. Some towns in

upstate NY.

[Odin2005]

24. My hometown, Ulen, Minnesota.

[kenny blankenship]

26. The rest of the country is rapidly catching up.

[Poll_Blind]

25. There (or were, before Katrina) some amazing places in Southern/rural Louisiana...

There were some places where you'd go and it would be like 1950 never stopped, if you could put your finger on the time period at all. This was a long time ago, admittedly, back in the early/mid 80's before I moved. The farther you'd head South...the present would just bleed away leaving a world which had long-since passed.

I actually yearn to visit some of those places again, if they remain. Also, I know there are many parts of the country like this. I'd like to visit those places. It's about as close to time travel as one is likely to get.

And there's a feel, a certain musty smell crossed with the faintest hint of licorice or anise. Those distant places and their bare 60-watt bulbs swinging over a diner's lunch counter twice as old as I am. Cheap wood-paneled walls, formica tables in whose glittery reflection one can almost make out a black and white TV with President Kennedy on it. Like a time machine.

PB

[riverwalker]

27. Bhutan

they only had television since June 1999.
Timeless, isolated. Like entering a different dimension.

[stevedeshazer]

30. Dufur, Oregon

[Spike89]

43. Weird, just spent a weekend in Mitchell, Oregon...

It could have been 1960 or 2010 maybe even 1920 if you looked a certain way. The one and only working gas station still has a cage where they kept a real live black bear. Pretty much everything in the "downtown" area is 100+ years old or from the late 50s...they had devastating flash floods in ~1905 and again in 1960. Basically, no one seems to have had the energy to rebuild after the 1960 flood. Weird town, weird vibe.

[stevedeshazer]

44. Yeah, I've been there too.

Exactly as you described!

[nadinbrzezinski]

31. Yes, a few fishing villages in Mexico.

Especially among native people.

[RebelOne]

38. I saw shacks outside of Mexico City.

But they all had TV antennas.

[nadinbrzezinski]

47. Yep, our coursers perdidas

The tv runs on a car battery many a times.

[lpbk2713]

32. Freepville.

They're stuck in the McCarthy era.

[BOG PERSON]

35. many parts of rural india have a pre-modern quality to them

in terms of their social relations (semifeudal) and infrastructure (nothing). you will encounter actual peasants - semi-proletarians - who spend part of their time working for a wage, and another part of their time as tenant farmers. the rest of thir time they dissolve into the surplus population, they return to the immense indian sub-proletariat.

[Cid_B]

36. Saw that one big time in Afghanistan too...

Social structures required a whole new way of thinking and rebuilding that infrastructure was a nightmare (often because of the social issues)

[BOG PERSON]

37. the only reasonable starting point is comprehensive land reform

but that requires ability and inclination that the indian government simply doesn't have.

[tuckessee]

39. We should bomb them into modernity. n/t

[a la izquierda]

40. Erongaricuaro, Mexico.

A P'urhepecha town. THere are conveniences there...and then you hit the outskirts. Whew. It was crazy to see.

[BlueIris]

41. Yes, but not to that extreme. A small town in Southern Oregon

that had clearly stopped developing, at least economically, in the 1970s. I visited in 1999 and it was weird. I half expected people to be walking around in bell bottoms and platform sandals.

[jmowreader]

42. Rural South Korea

The big cities like Seoul, Pusan and Taegu are modern and cosmopolitan places, but go twenty miles from Tongduchon or Pyongtaek (it's 60 miles south of Seoul; the capital of North Korea is PyongYANG) and they might not know what year it is.

[slackmaster]

45. My mom grew up in a small town in Iowa.

She graduated from high school in 1952. When she went to her 50th class reunion, it had been over 20 years since she'd set foot in the town.

As she walked down the main street, several people came out to greet her. Some of them hadn't seen her since she was about 20.

[Cid_B]

48. Doesn't surprise me a bit...

[sufrommich]

50. I've driven through Iowa, many of the towns I saw looked like

they were from another era,of course, that's a plus as far as I'm concerned, I love old towns that don't look like every other cookie cutter town in the U.S.
Lots of towns like that in the U.P. of Michigan too.

[FLPanhandle]

46. I was talking to a couple of Indian colleagues who had just visited Amish country

There reaction was, "What's the big deal? Most people live and farm like this in India."

[KittyWampus]

49. an interesting exchange.

[logosoco]

51. Not on a "large" scale...

but as a house cleaner, there were a few houses that were just the way they furnished them in the 60s or 70s. Flooring, furnishings, everything. After a few hours cleaning in a house like that, it was nice to get outside and see the new cars and listen to some new music to remember "when" we really were!!

[TheWraith]

52. I live in a town which hasn't changed substantially since probably 1950.

The cars are different, a lot of the small shops have gone out of business, and now there's a Walmart off the north end of town. But in the ways that count, it's the same.