Don’t get me wrong. I love Hanoi and most of Vietnam but in the old quarter of Hanoi, the sewage tends to seep up into the gutter due to ancient broken pipes.

When a waft hits you in +30c heat and high humidity I’m not sure there’s much worse than that.

Clovis, New Mexico. It permanently smells like cow sh*t there

Roswell, NM. It was a bucket list destination for me, but the town was such a disappointment. The Alien museum felt lackluster and the whole area gave me sad burnt-out vibes. Bottomless Lakes State Park just outside of town was beautiful, though.

East St. Louis, Illinois. I worked on a project there for over a year and most of the town is a post-apocalyptic landscape. Abandoned factories and houses, packs of wild dogs, and extreme poverty. We found a bloody clever in our porta potty one day. Witnessed numerous violent interactions with prostitutes, pimps, and John’s. The soils around our worksite were contaminated with lead, gas, benzene, and just about any noxious chemical, you can think of.

The worst was the smells. On top of the usual garbage/burning garbage smell it alternated between a confection bakery and a dog food factory. So depending on the direction of the wind it was either a sickly sweet smell or a smell we affectionately called “horse bacon”.

The pyramids.

Despite the impression TV gives you that they are in the middle of a beautiful unspoilt desert, they are actually in the worst part of Cairo. Dirty, full of litter and polluted to buggery.

Getting off the coach you will be absolutely mobbed by beggers, scam artists and thieves. They will hound you every step of the way to the pyramids. I had one literally put his hand in my pocket and try to steal my smokes saying "my cigarettes! Mine!" They will beg anything off you on principle: if you are carrying a bottle of water they will beg you for it.

I thought Port Siad was bad because it looked like a bomb had hit it but The pyramids were something else.

I am sure Egypt is a lovely country with lots of natural beauty but Cairo and the pyramids left a really bad impression on me.

Definitely the fast-food capital of Australia ....Dub Vegas or more commonly known as Dubbo. I know the locals will take umbrage at this but essentially it is a low joint with not a lot going for it apart from a great Zoo called the Western Plains Zoo. The crime is high and brain cells are low. It is a dusty, hot shit hole full of young red necks in hotted up utes with big driving lights and a lot of chubby girls in pink shirts and denim jeans. It has more McDonald outlets per capita than any other place in Australia. The best part of Dubbo is the Newell Highway going out of it.

Tashkent - Uzbekistan about 30 years ago. Was on a stopover flight from London to Delhi. There was literally piss and sh*t all over the floor in the toilets of international airport, and the whole area Was horrble, filthy, stank. Flew via Tashkent (unwillingly) 20 years later and was pleased to find everything was modern, clean and nice.

Gary, Indiana. Apologies to those who live there, but it’s kinda like the armpit of America. It reeks of a town that was once a cool place to be but has just been left to the wayside.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Went in late March, but was still very cold. Half the homes there are warmed by coal fires inside their gers (yurts). Every morning you could literally taste the pollution. Traffic was terrible, took an hour to go a mile during rush hour. Every car is at least 10 to 15 years old, and is imported from Japan, but they drive on the right side so the steering wheels are wrongly placed.

Getting out into the suburbs or the ger district, terrible conditions, I felt so bad for them. Do plan on going back, but this time in the summer when it's not so cold. However, I've never met a friendlier people than Mongolians.

Fresno California was pretty shitty when I was there in the early 2000s. I'd swear half the businesses in what I think was the downtown area were bail bonds places. Coffee shop, bail bonds, yarn store, bail bonds, record shop, bail bonds.

Qatar. S*itty slave state with no culture of their own.

My dad wanted to visit Death Valley in July just to see how hot it was once. It was horrible.

The Tenderloin in San Francisco. I've visited and grown up in some extremely sh*tty places but that area was the only place where I didn't want to make eye contact with anyone and walked as fast as I could to get out. People lying down in the middle of the street with needles sticking out of their arms, eating garbage, etc. It was another planet.

Skid Row, downtown LA. NEVER go there after dark.

Duqm, Oman. Two hotels, a pizza hut, and a DFC (Duqm Fried Chicken). Also can't forget the hundreds of miles of new roads that led to... more sand and dirt.

Sh*t was built like the first five minutes of a Sim City 2000 game.

I live in New Zealand, and to get from my city to the country's biggest city Auckland you used to have to drive through a town called Huntly. I don't care how nice the locals might make it seem, it is the ugliest, dirtiest most feral place I've been in this country. Thankfully, they put in a highway about 1-2 years ago so you can now bypass it.

The Salton Sea made me sad.

There was so much hope around this place. Now if you visit: it’s a very poor town, the sand sucks your shoes off and smells awful, and the stench of dead fish permeates the air.

Now their only bar presents as a David Lynch nightmare if you go.

Barstow, CA. Imagine if an entire town was one big sketchy ass truck stop.

I was helping friends move across the country and I called my husband one night when we stopped. He said, "Where have you gotten to?" and I said, "I don't know but it's the ugliest place I've ever seen in my life," and he said, "Oh, you've gotten to Midland Odessa," and he was correct.

I have seen a lot of the world and Midland Odessa, Texas, is by far the most terrible place I've ever looked at.

Zinc, Arkansas.

It felt like I stumbled into the movie set for House of Wax, Children of the Corn, and Deliverance all in one place. They had a hair salon/mechanic/courthouse/ jail all in one building. The judge's wife was the hairstylist, the judge was also the mechanic and the sheriff was his son.

F*ck. That. S*t.t.

The solids removal room of a waste water treatment plant.

Oklahoma County Jail. I’ve spent some time in a few other jails for various misadventures, but that place may have well as been a prison camp in a third-world country. Computers were down for 36 hours so everyone was crammed into holding cells awaiting processing, there were lice crawling everywhere, some asshole threw his lunch bag in the toilet (not that I blame him, the green bologna sandwich isn’t very appetizing) so it backed up all over the floor, the entire staff looked like the My 600-pound Life All-Star Team, and you were lucky to get a 6 oz. styrofoam cup of water once every six hours. Absolutely disgusting, especially when my crime was a 6-year-old failure to appear charge for a speeding ticket. Go f*ck yourself, OKC.

Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, 1985. I think my Mom and aunt went to buy cheap liquor. Great idea. Take three kids under five to what seemed like a war zone for booze. Ahhhh, the 80’s.

Slough. Where the U.K. office is set. It’s grey. The mood. The city. The sky. The type of place where 12-year-olds will be drunk on the high street at 4pm. A very depressing city.

It was a gas station about an hour from Myrtle Beach. We had to pee and get just a little bit more gas. (Me and my husband) We both walked in and it was super crowded. Which didn’t really shock us as much as overwhelm.

But what really got us, was the bathrooms. Both toilets had fecal matter on the lids and seats. And not just a smear, like if someone accidentally got it there or didn't realize they left a streak from their cheek. There were actually little clumps left on the seats. Pee on the floor, no paper towels, or soap. The walls in the women were covered in fecal matter and menstrual blood.

I ended up hovering over the toilet because a part of me still felt bad peeing anything on the floor. The toilet paper had poop on it so after I was done I pulled on my pants and left. Didn’t care. My husband did the same. He said he had to aim father than normal. The toilet was already full and he was not planning on flushing when he saw fecal matter on the handle.