The Stans, book reviews, interviews

Hello subscribers!

A new blog post entitled “Trouble in the Stans” went up on Thursday morning. As you will probably all know, the “Stans” is a common reference to the five ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, now independent states, that all end in “-stan”.

The largest of these is Kazakhstan, and that was recently in the news for the violent protests and even more violent crushing of those protests with the help of Russian troops flown in on 5 January specifically for this (under the CSTO agreement). Over 200 people lost their lives and thousands were arrested.

So right now may not be a good time to travel to Kazakhstan even if you could. But in terms of dark tourism, the country has fantastic potential (ranging from Gulag memorials to the nuclear test site of the STS and much more). I visited Kazakhstan in the summer of 2011, and that included a few days in the country’s largest city, the former capital Almaty, where most of the recent protests and violence played out. So in the post I provided a selection of photos I took there.

The post then continued with a series of photos from the unique and spectacular Darvaza flaming gas crater in the Karakum Desert of another “Stan”, namely Turkmenistan. This falls under the heading “Trouble in the Stans” in a different sense. Darvaza (pictured in the photo above) is now the country’s No. 1 attraction for foreign tourists and often their main reason for considering a trip to that difficult country – yet Turkmenistan’s autocratic president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has recently been reported to have “ordered” the extinguishing of the gas fires at the Darvaza crater. This wasn’t the first time such an announcement has been made, though. It was already made back in 2010 – and that was my main reason for quickly signing up for a tour of Turkmenistan with Koryo Tours in November that year as it seemed that it would be the last chance to witness this fiery spectacle. But the crater was not filled in and the flames have kept roaring away for over 11 years since then.

Whether the renewed announcement that the president wants the flames put out is to be taken seriously this time around is also doubtful. For one thing it would be technically difficult and very expensive. Simply filling in the crater wouldn’t do, as the gas would still find a way to seep through and ignite. And what’s the point anyway? The argument that it is environmentally bad is rather flimsy, also the health argument (given that the site is in the middle of a desert far away from any sizeable settlements) as is the “loss of resources” argument. Compared to Turkmenistan’s vast reserves of natural gas, and how much of it is flared away on the rigs in the Caspian Sea and along its shoreline, what burns away at Darvaza is a miniscule amount. So why destroy the country’s top tourist attraction just for that little drop more in the country’s ocean of gas? All this makes me cautiously optimistic that Darvaza will survive … though with someone as wacky as Berdymukhamedov you never know (and if you want to see just how wacky a character he is, watch this fabulous piece by John Oliver!).
  

Promo for my book Atlas of Dark Destinations continues and there are a few new reviews out, on Goodreads, and in the media, while ratings on Amazon have stalled at a meagre six. If any of you have the book, ordered from Amazon, and you like what you got, then maybe consider adding a review on that platform (if you haven’t done so already).

One review has been published in the E & T Magazine (the letters stand for Engineering and Technology – so it’s a rather unexpected media outlet!). The review is largely positive but the author takes issue with the “dark ratings” for each site. This is based, however, on a misunderstanding: he sees it purely as “tragedy rating” and says it’s “tactless” to weigh up tragedies against each other and give e.g. Auschwitz a dark rating of 10 while Babi Yar (where the author says he lost “distant relatives”) gets only 6. But it’s not just the level of tragedy that these dark ratings are meant to indicate, but more importantly how much of that is palpable for a visiting tourist today. It’s supposed to give readers an indication of how impactful, emotionally, a visit might be. And in that sense there’s no doubting that Auschwitz has a much weightier impact than the site of Babi Yar, where so far there is little more than a few monuments, but hardly anything authentic or directly linkable to what happened there (very much unlike at Auschwitz with its expansive grounds, original buildings and masses of artefacts). Maybe I should have made the nature of the dark rating concept clearer in the book’s intro, like I did for the “darkometer ratings” on my website.

The review author also complains that the number of victims at Babi Yar is given 50% too low in my book, at 100,000 rather than 200,000 – as if that was an agreed fact. It is not. When you go to one of the most trustworthy resources for this subject matter, the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the USHMM, then you find exactly the same figure that I quote in the book. Where the review author’s 200,000 figure is supposed to come from is not disclosed, no source is given.

One of the Goodreads reviewers actually appreciated the presence of the star and dark ratings, but would have liked a much wider coverage, thematically and in terms of the timescale. But how could I have crammed so much more into the given 350 pages? Generally, reviews try to find things absent in the book, like one Amazon review from the US whose author wonders why there are no American Civil War sites in the book. Well, the book’s intro actually explains this: because only the modern era is covered, i.e. from ca. the late 19th century onwards. The Civil War was before that time.

I know of at least three more book reviews on media platforms that are in the pipeline and will provide links as soon as I have them.
  

I’ve also submitted one written interview and on Monday morning had a ten-minute interview live on TV – a first for me, but it wasn’t as nerve-racking as I had feared. It was with a German channel (BILD TV) and focused on a subsection of DT, namely abandoned places, on which the channel ran a multi-part documentary series. Since it was live, I have no link nor a recording I’m afraid. This coming Thursday I’ll have another live TV interview, this time with a news station in the US. It has been organized through the publishers and thus I expect this one to be more specifically about the book. I hope so. Fingers crossed.
  

But with that enough for this time.

Have a good week and stay safe.

Best

Peter