#26: Close Enough
It’s easy to fall down a Google Maps rabbit hole, exploring corners of the world we will most likely never visit in person. If you don’t think you’ll ever make it to Paris, there’s somewhere else you can visit to see the Eiffel Tower. We’re not talking about Vegas. We’re talking about the Eiffel Tower replica in Inner Mongolia, which is an autonomous region of China.
Satellite images discovered this replica of the Eiffel Tower built in the middle of the Gobi Desert alongside other to-scale replicas of well-known buildings. We were joking when we said you could visit this replica instead of the actual Eiffel Tower. You can’t. In reality, this isolated replica lives on a military training base and caused quite a stir when it was discovered in 2015.