Imagine taking a nose-dive from the top of a 75 foot bamboo tower, plummeting to the ground with nothing but vines attached to your feet. Hundreds of your fellow tribesmen stand patiently in awe and expectation, jeering at your demise. Well, that’s exactly what happens during the Naghol festival on Pentecost Island, Vanuatu.
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Image via Wikepidia user John Hill
Tribes in the East Sepik province of Papa New Guinea to this day still practice an ancient initiation ceremony. A way of testing and introducing adolescents into manhood, the ceremony is a strenuous and painful process, that leaves the men’s skins scarred all over; the effect resembling the crocodile scales.
The meaning behind this ceremony has deeply spiritual and symbolic connotations. The tribe’s people believe that the scars are crocodiles teeth that have swallowed the adolescents and morphed them into ‘crocodile men’.
Militias and gangs are common across Central and South America. Image via Cambio.com
A group of U.S. and Guatemalan archeologists have found themselves surrounded by flames in the depths of the Guatemalan jungle, as part of a warning attack from drug trafficking jungle gangs.
The group had entered the Laguna del Tigre Park, an area comprised of 800,000 acres of dense forest and wildlife, unaware that they had set foot in an area ridden with networks of illegal residents and drug gangs.
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