Five Places to Escape to When This Whole Western Democracy Thing Flames Out

Brexit/Trump/Hillary et al. got you down? There are ways out!

June 24, 2016 9:00 am

Britain has left the building!

The Dow is in freefall!

The GOP is imploding like a week-old jack-o-lantern!

Question is, where do we go from here? Fear not, fearmongering brethren, the universe is full of shady refuges untarnished by the perils of democracy and capitalism — and we know where to find ’em.

Just read this, go to your bank with a large duffel bag, tell the bank to put all of the money you can withdraw in that duffel bag, and then get a move on. Here are your potential destinations.

Nauru
Nauru is an 8.1-square-mile sovereign island republic in Micronesia (or WTFO in the middle of the Pacific, for the geographically challenged among you). A couple thousand years of birds sh*tting on its rocky interior once made it super phosphate rich, but it has since been plumbed clean. Now it’s mostly a haven for shady offshore banking (that’s good for a guy in your position) and refugees Australia can’t even with.

The World: Residences at Sea
It’s like that vault in Deep Impact meets Carnival Cruises: “Only 200 make the journey.” The largest residential ship in the world features 165 rooms, six restaurants, a movie theater, a spa and probably at least a couple dozen people who you can’t stand but will be stuck on a boat with for the rest of time.

St. Helena
This tiny island our travel editor once called “kind of like the Cuba of the South Atlantic” used to be reachable only by a British Royal Mail Ship, but they just opened an airport that services round-trip flights to Johannesburg. It’s where Napoleon lived the final six years of his life in exile — can you say fit for a king (or at least a petty tyrant)?

Wherever that guy from Into the Wild went
OK, might not have worked out that well for him, admittedly, but one could argue that he laid down a nice blueprint for exactly how not do it. Where’s your esprit de l’avventura?

Mars
What it lacks in jobs and breathable oxygen it more than makes up for in views and a healthy square-feet-per-capita. Elon Musk says humans will be setting up shop there by 2025. Where do we get in line?

Additional reporting by Dustin Newman

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