A Peak Milestone, Developments, Chernobyl

Hello subscribers!

Earlier today I uploaded a new DT Blog post, which was mainly about the Matterhorn in Switzerland – the reason being that on Sunday I uploaded the chapter Matterhorn & Zermatt on to my main website. And that was a momentous milestone insofar as that was the final chapter I still had to finish before – for the first time since I started working on my dark-tourism project – I fully caught up with all the material I had gathered from my own travels. Before, over all those years, I had always been behind with my writing … at times well behind, several years in some cases. But now (partly “helped” by the pandemic, of course,) it’s all done!

So that new Blog post celebrates the fact that I have (provisionally) crossed the finishing line, as it were. Above, to mark this occasion, I give you one of the most atmospheric photos I was able to shoot of the Matterhorn from Zermatt one evening, with the sickle of the moon up and a hang-glider soaring overhead. (As to why the Matterhorn can be regarded as a dark-tourism site, read the Blog post, and especially the website chapter!)

Of course, as soon as I go on new DT travels (and that will be very soon, if plans work out), I will gather new material and then the race continues. But for now I can enjoy a certain feeling of achievement.
  

It’s also a good moment for having caught up with my writing for the website, because I have to draft my contribution to an academic conference that I am signed up for, which is to take place in early May in Prague. I have all the photo material for illustration already prepared, and an abstract I submitted with my application, so I roughly know what I’ll want to say, but the conference organizers also requested some sort of “full draft” to be submitted within the next two weeks. They say it doesn’t have to be fully formulated prose, but I’ll see what’s easier, just bullet points or actual full text.
  
Anyway, I’d better get that out of the way before setting off to Britain this coming Saturday (or else I will have to slot in some work while there).
  

Furthermore I am awaiting news from the publishers of my book Atlas of Dark Destinations regarding whether or not there is to be a German version, which it would be my job to prepare (it’s in my contract). If so, that will keep me very busy, of course. It won’t be a difficult translation job as such, given that I’m the author myself and thus know exactly what I want to say. But it’s the sheer volume of typing alone that will take time (the original is some 120,000 words … and German always comes out longer!). On the one hand I would love to see a German edition, on the other I dread the amount of work it would involve.
  

An then there’s been another development recently that may mean a little different strand of professional work for me … but it’s too early to reveal any details of that yet …
  

Finally, you may have heard that the Russian military has retreated from Chernobyl. That way the IAEA should also be able to regain access to the site, and hopefully work on the decommissioning of the NPP can resume as normal. It’s also significant news from a dark-tourism perspective, of course, though I doubt tourist tours to Chernobyl can restart any time soon. The guide I had on my latest two longer trips to the Zone posted some triumphant posts on social media, so I have been informed (I can’t see them myself, as you will know – if not cf. here). But I think it’s a little early to speculate about when this top-notch dark-tourism destination can become accessible again for foreign travellers. After all, this war is far from over, despite the Russian retreat from the north.

There have also been reports of Russian soldiers developing radiation sickness while in the Zone. Perhaps they dug trenches within the Red Forest, the Zone’s still most irradiated area by far (and if they did they must have been irresponsibly ignorant of where they were; and if they’d not been informed about this that’s gross negligence on the part of their superiors!). Otherwise it seems impossible for anybody to pick up acute radiation sickness anywhere in the Zone these days – except perhaps by the reactor debris inside the old sarcophagus, but that’s a place no one can “accidentally” just stumble into.

The IAEA also reported ambient radiation measurements at and around Chernobyl being more or less at “normal” levels, even though dust kicked up by tanks and other military vehicles may have temporarily increased radiation levels in the atmosphere in the Zone.
  

But so much for now. Whether I will be able to send any Newsletters over the coming two or three weeks remains to be seen. Probably not, or maybe just a shorty at some point.

Until next time.

Stay safe.

Best wishes,

Peter