Change of Plans – More Travel – Poll Extended

My wife and I have another final week of this summer break left and spontaneously decided on our return from Venice (see previous post), to spend it in Switzerland. I wouldn’t have thought of Switzerland as a travel destination so soon, but – as with Venice – this may be a good time to go there, what with the absence of large international (esp. Chinese) tour groups. So we quickly booked our train to Zurich and a few hotels. In the country we’ll use the Swiss Travel Pass for maximum flexibility.

There’ll only be a few dark elements lined up, the main thing is to see the Alps, esp. the Matterhorn, which I have so far never seen in the flesh … Looking forward to that. Hope the weather plays along …

This change of plans also means that there will be no blog posts until after my return. But then you can expect something brand new yet again.

 

Because of this hiatus I’ve also decided to extend the poll for the next themed blog post by another week. If you haven’t voted yet, please do so (by leaving a comment below) over the next nine days. I’ll reveal the winning theme on Sunday 30 August.

Here are the four options again:

a) dark tourism and ash

b) dark tourism and flames

c) dark tourism and cars

d) dark tourism and villas

 

 

 

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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

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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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Back from Taiwan

On Thursday I returned from a 19-day trip to Taiwan. It was a fabulous trip in all manner of ways, and not least in terms of dark tourism. The material I gathered on this trip will provide content and photos for several new Blog posts and a few dozen new and/or expanded chapters for my main website.

I took thousands of photos and it will take me weeks to develop all the files in RAW format and process them. So here’s just a little pre-teaser with images taken only by smartphone, so not the best quality, but hopefully good enough for a first impression.

The dark-tourism subcategories covered on this trip included

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