NPPs, Heart Mountain, Radio

Hello subscribers!

Last Wednesday the final themed post from our most recent winner-less poll went up on the blog: “Dark Tourism & Nuclear Power Stations”. It featured ten different nuclear power stations (NPPs) in eight different countries. Despite my fascination with all things nuclear, I haven’t actually visited so many NPPs, have seen only three from the inside and only one of those was in fact in operation. NPPs tend to be difficult to access, as security is usually very tight (for good reasons, mostly).

Naturally featured in the post were the biggies with special relevance to dark tourism, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and also others that had seen accidents, such as Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, USA, or Sellafield in the UK.

The NPP featured in the photo above is probably not so familiar to most readers. That’s Lemoniz in the Basque Country in northern Spain. It’s an uncompleted (though nearly completed) industrial ruin that was abandoned for rather dark reasons that have nothing (directly) to do with radiation, but with politics and terrorism!

So there are some interesting stories in that blog post – do go and take a look!
  

On my main website, the final chapter about those WWII Japanese American Relocation Centers in the USA went up, namely the one about Heart Mountain near Cody in Wyoming. In several ways, this seems to me to be the best of these sites from a dark-tourism perspective. Not only does it feature more original structures still in place, its “Interpretive Center” also has the most elaborate exhibition (maybe together with Manzanar) of any of the visitor centres at or near these historic sites. And I was very, very close once, namely in 2015 when I drove from Yellowstone National Park all the way to Wall, South Dakota. Had I not taken Highway 14 but Highway 14A from Cody I would have driven right past it – and maybe I would have taken note and slotted it in (it was a very long driving day, though). But as it was, at that point I hadn’t even heard of Heart Mountain so didn’t know it would have been an option. Oh well.

Now that these camps are covered, I can turn my attention back to writing up about places I visited recently on my summer travels. I’m currently dealing with Hamburg, the city of my birth in Germany. When I was there for a few days in August I discovered one all-new place (well, new to me, that is), for which I now have to create a new entry, and revisited a couple of other sites so that I now have to update their chapters and make new photo galleries.
  

And on Friday I did yet another radio interview, this time with Matt Chorley for Times Radio. It had come about rather spontaneously during the course of the morning. What had triggered their interest was the news of a case of a few British tourists who defied security restrictions put in place by the police o n La Palma in the Canaries and explored the currently erupting volcano there from too close up in order to take spectacular selfies. They were also “musclemen”, so it’s perhaps a case of more brawn than brain.

The interview was, however, sadly cut short because of some technical glitch at their end, but at least I got as far as mentioning the fact that I do not consider such antics dark tourism and think it’s irresponsibly dangerous behaviour. Don’t get me wrong, volcano tourism does overlap with dark tourism and I fully understand the allure of an erupting volcano and would love to see flowing lava and Strombolian fountains of fire myself – but safety has to come first, so all viewing has to be from a sufficient distance. The rules put in place by the volcanologists monitoring these volcanoes are there for a reason – and that’s not to annoy tourists but to keep them out of harm’s way.

Well, I did not get the chance to say all that in the interview or explain what dark tourism really is, but at least my book was mentioned early on in the intro, so as far as book promotion is concerned it wasn’t a complete failure.
  

Have a good week and stay safe!

Best,

Peter