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Dark Tourism & Beaches

This is the winning theme of the poll at the bottom of the previous Blog post: beaches (won with a two-thirds majority!). Now, as I remarked below the poll, beach holidays are of course more or less the opposite of dark tourism, and I for one despise them. I was dragged along to beaches as a child and I put up with it, but as soon as I was old enough to choose my own travel destinations, beaches have never been much on my radar. That is: holiday beaches, beach resorts, that sort of thing. The reason: beaches packed with people are an absolute horror for me. For example, to

Dark Tourism & Doors

This time I’d like to revive a tradition that somehow got lost on this Blog over two years ago (well, they’ve been two quite troubled years, so maybe that explains it). What I mean is the “themed posts” we used to have on here quite regularly between mid-2020 and until early 2022. These themes added an often unexpected and occasionally even light-hearted angle to the topic of dark tourism. Today I’ll pick up that tradition again and give you a similar post – now one that is all about doors. And as before this will mostly be a photo essay.

How can doors be dark? Well, the first thing

Krakow in Winter

As Europe is heading into summer, and before long quite probably into another series of heatwaves, I thought I’d post something about my visit to the great city of Krakow, Poland, where I was in mid-January, i.e. in the depths of the southern Polish winter.
After visiting Auschwitz I also had a few days in Krakow itself and managed to fill a number of significant gaps in terms of dark tourism that I’ll present in the course of this Blog post.

The biggest of these gaps was probably the

Hamburg & Berlin revisited

Around the Easter period I travelled to northern Germany once again. Primarily this was to visit family and to see to some bureaucratic things that needed doing. But I also managed to squeeze in a touch of dark tourism here and there.

Hamburg is the city I was born in and where I grew up (mostly), went to school and studied. Since I left in the mid-1990s I’ve been back numerous times, yet there still remained things I had never managed to slot in before. One thing I had long wanted to do was going back to my former primary school in Hamburg on Kielortallee. When I

Wanli urbexing

Since the previous Blog post about Auschwitz was topically about as dark as it can get, I decided to offset that with a post about something at the lighter end of the dark-tourism spectrum: urbexing (from ‘urban exploration’, visiting abandoned structures for fun if you, like me, enjoy the aesthetics of dilapidation and decay – in fact on my website I say that urbex only overlaps with dark tourism, but as it’s one of the least touristy categories it’s one I often enjoy a lot).

Wanli is a largely abandoned beach resort park on the north coast of Taiwan. Officially it is a district of New Taipei City, but is actually far from being ‘urban’ in the literal sense; instead

Return to Auschwitz

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, aka “Auschwitz Day”, as it was on this date, 27 January, that in 1945 the Soviet Red Army arrived at Auschwitz and liberated the camp, after the SS had largely “evacuated” it already and sent most of its inmates on death marches, to camps further away from the westward-moving front line in a WWII that was already de facto lost for Germany.

It also so happened that a little earlier this month I revisited the memorial sites at Auschwitz as part of a six-day trip to Kraków and Oświęcim, planned at short notice. So I decided to do another Auschwitz Day post (see also

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