Jonestown, JFK and a new poll

This week has been very quiet again, now that we’re back in proper lockdown here in Austria, so nothing much is happening and every day is pretty much exactly the same. I’ve been busying myself with photo editing mainly, also in preparation for returning to writing for and updating my main website. And I really should make that my main priority again, now that work on my book is basically completed as far as my part is concerned. I should, however, contact the publishers about whether we can weave in some changes to the Nagorno-Karabakh and Ethiopia chapters in the light of the dramatic recent events in those regions. In the former, Azerbaijani troops have begun moving into the areas conceded to them in the recent peace deal, and in Ethiopia it looks like we’re heading for all-out war and a serious humanitarian crisis, with some 200,000 refugees expected to flee into Sudan, which is in no way prepared for such numbers. In the Tigray province itself things must be even more horrific, but it remains blocked-off, including in terms of communication, so we’re left with a lot of speculation and few reliable reports. And the worst is that neither side seems interested in any form of mediation and both are committed to fighting this to the end by military means. Things couldn’t be more depressing.

On the blog, a new post went up on Wednesday, as that was the anniversary of the Jonestown massacre of 1978. I made the pilgrimage to that very remote place in the summer last year as part of my trip to the three Guyanas (i.e. Suriname, French Guiana and Guyana itself). That was one of the most extreme dark-tourism endeavours I have ever undertaken, more an expedition than tourism. My guide had to organize a local who had used to work at the Jonestown compound and still knew his way around this by now totally overgrown site. So he hacked a “path” with a machete through the dense jungle undergrowth that has reclaimed former Jonestown – but we still got scratched by thorns and our boots ended up caked in mud. Very little is left to be seen at the former cult’s compound. The wooden buildings are all long gone, rotted away, and only a few metal objects, mainly rusty wrecks of vehicles can be identified. This includes parts of (presumably) the tractor that was involved in the dramatic events back then, when it was used to take armed guards from Jonestown to the Port Kaituma airstrip, where Senator Ryan was shot dead. While hardly anything of Jonestown remains, the airstrip is still in use and that’s where we landed coming from the capital Georgetown. Hence there was quite a dose of place authenticity to be felt there too. So instead of repeating any of the photos from the blog post here, for the above lead photo I picked one taken at that airstrip just after we had landed by light aircraft and disembarked.

Today is another anniversary of an especially tragic day in American history: that of the assassination of president John F. Kennedy in 1963 in Dallas, Texas. And I just uploaded another post about that featuring a few photos from the site I had taken back in 2012, in particular of the former school book depository on Dealey Plaza from where the fatal shots were fired. The window behind which the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had his sniper’s nest on the sixth floor (= fifth in British English counting) is now part of the dedicated museum about this story. It occupies the whole floor after which it is named: the Sixth Floor Museum. It’s one of the classic dark-tourism destinations in the USA.
  

That post earlier today also brought back another instalment of the sort of theme polls we have had before on this blog and newsletter; in the latest one a month ago, in which “dark tourism & clothing” was the winner, two runners-up came very close and will thus be fielded again now; the other two themes to choose from are new. Here we go – decide which of these themes you would most like to see a blog post about in the near future (i.e. the week after next):
  

a) dark tourism & spheres

b) dark tourism & lakes

c) dark tourism & bars

d) dark tourism & coffins

  
Please cast your vote by either replying to this newsletter or by leaving a comment on the blog post itself.
  

Have a good week

Peter