Mining, Ethiopia, KGB, Xmas

Hello Subscribers!

On Wednesday I uploaded another Blog post, and again it was a themed post: Dark Tourism & Mining (as I had indicated in the previous post and as was requested in a comment in response to that post).

It’s a rather substantial post featuring as many as twenty photos from various mining-related dark sites around the world, from Butte, Montana, USA – as seen in the featured image above – to copper and saltpetre mines in Chile, iron ore mines in Scandinavia, a tin mine in Britain, a uranium mine in the Czech Republic, coal mines in Germany, Kazakhstan and the USA, gold mining in the jungle of Guyana, but also salt mining operations in Bolivia and Ethiopia. Do take a look. There are some cool images there.
  

Speaking of Ethiopia. I’ve given updates on the increasingly dire situation in that ethnically divided African nation several times on this blog before (see e.g. here), so I thought I’d keep it up and give another. There are now reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch about the various atrocities committed in Tigray and neighbouring provinces. Here’s the link to HRW’s account – it doesn’t make for cheerful reading, but it’s important to keep such records, especially given that the Ethiopian government has so tried to keep the whole region under a media blackout.
  

On my main website, I’ve now finally uploaded the new full-length chapter about the KGB building in Riga, Latvia. Of the four such sites in the Baltics (the others are in Vilnius, Lithuania, as well as Tallinn and Tartu in Estonia), I found the one in Riga the most impressive, especially as the cell tracts have been left almost entirely unadulterated, just as they were found when the KGB had moved out in 1991, with only the most minimal museum commodification added, hence visitation is by guided tour in small groups. The permanent exhibition in the anterooms, in contrast, is rather small (it’s an outpost of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, which is currently moving to its new and refurbished location) and can’t quite compete with the KGB Museum in Vilnius. But the guided tours in Riga offer the most in terms of place authenticity.
  

This is the last Newsletter before Christmas. And I still can’t be sure where I am going to be then. I still have flights booked to go to the UK on Wednesday, but the increasingly worrying situation in the UK with the new Omicron variant throws the plan into more and more doubt. If I’m still going then I won’t send a DT Newsletter out next Sunday (Boxing Day), but if I cancel/postpone then maybe I will. I can’t say yet. The Sunday after that will already be in the new year.

So just in case, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all as Merry a Christmas as can be under the circumstances, and I definitely wish all of us a Happier New Year less dominated by never-ending bad news regarding this pandemic and its knock-on effects (including on travel). It just has to be finally over at some point, doesn’t it?
  

But so much for now (and possibly this year), stay safe!

Best,

Peter