‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ to the left, ‘Mud Wrestling’ to the right.  Faced with this kind of choice taken from Weird World, Bradt’s new travel compendium of bizarre images co-published with Wanderlust magazine, there’s only one possible conclusion…  Wherever you are in the world, no matter how remote or how undiscovered, at all times you’re never more than a camera shutter click from profound weirdness.

Feeling at a loose end today?  Why not pierce your face with the entire haul from a Moss Side knife amnesty.  Frustrated by attempts to insert ships in bottles?  Stuff snakes in them instead.  Stuck for that all-important 102nd use for a dead cat?  Page 140’s image of a Pussy Willow says it all.  Left in the dark about how best to honour your ancestors?  Build a chandelier from their bones  – it’s obvious.

As Wanderlust’s Editor-in-chief Lyn Hughes comments, ‘This book is a fascinating insight into the world’s quirks and oddities waiting to be discovered on your travels. Our readers have captured images so diverse, and in many cases arresting, the only thing to do now is get packing and shoot the next edition!’

Entries in a joint Wanderlust and Bradt Travel Guides photography competition have furnished Weird World with a wealth of original images, capturing in full colour the surprising, the quirky, the eccentric and the downright odd.  As we’re increasingly lectured about an apparently unstoppable process of globalisation, Weird World celebrates diversity and the individual character of nations and their citizens.  Ultimately, these are the differences that catalyse our curiosity, they are the reasons why we travel, and what validates stepping beyond the comfortable threshold of our own back yard – sod the ‘staycation’, weird travel rocks.

Title: Weird World
Author: Bradt/Wanderlust
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
Publication: October 2009
Price: £14.99
ISBN: 978 1 84162 318 4