The Strangest Methods of Travel Around the World

When most people thing about "strange transportation" these days, they think about futuristic innovations—and namely, Elon Musk's Hyperloop. The items on this list, to be sure, are not as paradigm-shifting as the Hyperloop, even if a couple of them probably seemed quite modern in their day. They're nonetheless some of the strangest ways to travel around the world. And the best part is that you can ride them today—no waiting required!

Most of the examples of strange transport around the world on this list are local or regional. If you want to use an odd form of transportation to make an international journey, look no further.

Traveling by cargo ship isn't glamorous, and it isn't particularly fast or efficient. It requires a level of flexibility that makes it unrealistic for anyone who has a full-time job, at least one that requires them to be in a set destination most of the year, or to have consistent internet access.

On the other hand, it's probably one of the remaining few truly avant garde ways to travel around the world. And it's yet to be romanticized like other slow trudges, including the Trans-Siberian Railway and United's "Island Hopper" flights in the Pacific, which bloggers and other prominent travelers have made seem glamorous, in spite of the fact that they're inconvenient.

The good news? There aren't chickens aboard so-called "chicken" buses in Central America, and they therefore incur passengers no risk of contracting Avian influenza or any other bird-borne virus.

The bad news? You'll be packed as tight as a slaughterhouse-bound chicken as you sit inside a camioneta de pollo, the Spanish name for the colorful de-commissioned school buses that run long- and short-haul routes within Central America, mostly in countries such as Honduras and Guatemala.

If you've ever watched the Amazon series "Man in the High Castle," you've seen futuristic technology from Germany's alternate past, among it a Berlin monorail. While you'll have to travel a bit beyond Germany's capital to see the country's only current example of single-rail mass transit, you'll gain an unexpected reward for your travails.

That's because the railway system of Wuppertal, in western Germany's North Rhine-Westaphalia state, is suspended, and appears more like a rollercoaster at first glance than a people mover. It's one of the strangest ways to travel not only in Germany or Europe, but indeed in the entire world.

Think Manila's oft-maligned Metro system is the most packed way to travel through the Philippines? Think again.

To be sure, you needn't be in the heart of an Asian megacity to experience the chaos of traveling by Jeepney, which as its name suggests is a modified Jeep vehicle. Open to the elements and hollowed out to accommodate as many passengers as possible (Filipinos are constantly testing the limits of this), Jeepney have achieved infamy but are also rather practical, from the mountainous rice terraces of Ifugao province in the north, to tropical beach islands like Boracay and Palawan.