Page 21 - Exotic | April 2025

Chand Baori
In the heart of India's state of Rajasthan, there is a curious place called Chand Baori. I am...pretty sure...it's pronounced the way it is spelled. While it might not be one of the absolutely deepest places on Earth, it has a very unique quality: it is the world's deepest stepwell. What is a step- well? It's a place carved into Earth and stone, in this case, completely by hand in the 8th century and probably well into the 9th. It is a series of stairwells sculpted from solid rock and leading down, way down, to water. It was built so that people might take a fucking slog down all these fucking steps to get a bucket of water to make some rice or something. How deep is it? Only some 100 feet deep, but that's 13 stories, or 3500 steps, to go from top to bottom, then back again with a full bucket of water.
It's on here because it gets points for design. "How many steps?" "ALL OF THEM!"—a square block hewn out of the ground and covered on all sides by stairs and stairs and, oh! More stairs! You'd think they'd have put a bucket on a rope and hoist or something, but I could not find any records of them having done so. Bummer.
The Denman Glacier is the deepest non- underwater place on Earth, but they sorta cheated on this one. It is the deepest natu- ral location on land not covered by liquid water. It's a fucking glacier. The concept of it not being under liquid water seems like a dodge or hustle. Nevertheless, it is some 2.25 miles deep. It's in Antarctica, which should surprise nobody, and while discovered in 1912, not a soul had figured out what the fuck it was about, until a research project, sadly named the "Bed Machine Antarctica Project," run by the University of California, Irvine, decided to map it all out in 2020.
Bed Machine sounds like those "magic fingers" in motel rooms from the past, where they had a box that looked like a parking meter on your bed but, for a quarter, would vibrate the bed like one of those plastic kiddie horse rides in the parking lots of grocery stores. The down- side is that the room itself would give you herpes just by opening the door to it.
1989, reaching an astonishing 7.75 miles in depth. It was supposed to be for very dubious scientific purposes, but once they got so deep, the drills started melt- ing.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, nobody really had an interest in digging the hole any further, as the requirements to continue the project left the new Rus- sian government saying, "Wait. Why we dig hole? What does hole do, Dmitri?" "Eh, hole exists to be hole, but best, most deep hole!" "No more hole," and so it was sealed up and not thought of again. The hole itself, while nearly 8 miles deep, is only 9 inches wide. You can even visit it if you're in the mood to go to the middle of West Bumblefuck, Russia, and bring a very large wrench with which to undo the seal. Then, you could hock the most epic of loogies, which, given physics, would take roughly a whole minute to get to the bottom, assuming a straight trajectory and good phlegm.
Denman Glacier
I said I wasn't gonna do things undersea, but this is kind of a weird in-between.
Kola Superdeep Borehole
The Cold War was a really weird time. The USA and the Soviet Union constantly tried to flex on one another with various achievements. Never mind the nuclear arms race or the space race, there was another race going on, too: The Race to Do Stupid Shit. In essence, both coun- tries would pick some dumbshit project to undertake and then be like, "YEAH, WE SHOWED YOU FUCKERS!" The USA notoriously tried to do jetpacks and hu- man-mounted backpack helicopters. The Soviets, however, were like, "We're go- ing to dig a really deep hole, and go fuck yourselves." Which they did, for...reasons? The Kola Superdeep Borehole project was started in 1970, using drilling equipment normally reserved for oil rigs and the like.
Allegedly, not just "drilling a deep hole for the fuck of it," the project continued until
Ya Mama Pussy
It's so deep...they don't have scientific in- struments to measure it.
All joking aside, these things exist and are real places one could visit. Not sure how easy it is to go to Antarctica, but if you do, leave your Hawaiian shirts at home.
Stay safe, and don't go too deep.
-Wombstretcha
Wombstretcha the Magnificent is a step climber, guy who pees on glaciers, not bored borehole enthusiast, writer, and retired rap- per from Portland, OR. He can be found at his website, wombstretcha.com, on Twitter/X/whatever as @wombstretcha503, and on MeWe and (begrudgingly) Facebook as "Wombstretcha the Magnificent."
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