Book, Animals, Gdańsk, Chernobyl, China

Hello subscribers!

In the previous newsletter I announced that I’d be able to show you some previews/teasers from my forthcoming book, The Atlas of Dark Destinations, but I still haven’t been sent the finalized title page by the publishers (and I want that to be the very first teaser), so I’m afraid that will have to wait a little longer.

Last Wednesday was World Wildlife Day, so I prepared a blog post on the theme “Dark Tourism & Animals” to mark the occasion. It’s a rather long post featuring 21 photos and 17 animal species, from rattlesnakes to hyenas, from hippos to crocodiles, from rats to bats, and from mountain gorillas to Komodo dragons … and more. Well worth a look. It’s one of my posts that I am personally most pleased with myself. The photo above was picked from that series and shows some members of the clan of hyenas you can see (and feed!) in the old town of Harar, Ethiopia. That was one the most amazing animal encounters in my personal travel history.

Other than on that post I’ve been working much of the week on photos from Gdańsk, Poland, because that’s the destination I will next write up new chapters for (and updates of existing ones) to go on my main website. I had been on a return visit to that great Polish city in the summer of 2019, but because soon after that I was travelling on to the three Guianas in South America, I didn’t get round to working my way through developing RAW files from my pro camera and finalizing all the photos I’d taken in Gdańsk. And then it kind of got left on the shelf, as it were, as first the Guianas and then finishing my book took priority. So it was only this week that I got back to it. And it took a funny turn.

I finished on Friday, having a complete set of new photo galleries ready to be uploaded to the server. Then just as I was preparing to transfer them via FTP, I found on my older PC a full set of photo galleries for exactly the same places in Gdańsk already waiting there. I must have prepared them at some point between my return from the Guianas and the proofs for my book coming back to me and then completely forgot about it. And since they were neither on the server yet nor in the DT website photo folders on my new PC, I didn’t see them again until just now. How come they didn’t get transferred to the new PC when I downloaded all my files from my backup hard drive is a mystery to me. Either I failed to back them up on that drive (which would be an almost unforgivable oversight) or they failed to download from the hard drive. The latter would be a bit worrying because that could mean other files may also not have made it over to the new PC. And in fact I once before had a case of the content of a folder missing from where it was supposed to be. Checking every single folder manually for anything else missing would be too tall an order (that would be over 3 TB of material!), so I have to trust that there are no other such cases or that I discover them as long as my old PC survives so I can rectify such gaps.

Anyway, preparing these supposedly “new” photo galleries again was not all for nothing, as the ones I’d prepared this week were larger and much better and made from developed RAW files, not their jpg.-equivalents off the camera, which the older galleries must have come from. So I simply overwrote them and now also uploaded them to the website server. So you can already see quite a few of these new photos there. But I still have to write up the new/updated chapters. That’ll be my task from tomorrow. I’ll let you know when that’s completed.

In the previous newsletter I mentioned a new book about Chernobyl and linked to my very positive review of it. A few days later one subscriber to this newsletter alerted me to a new British TV programme about Chernobyl featuring Ben Fogle. If you have access to Channel 5 online (and can play “catch up” videos on the site), you can watch it there (external link). I haven’t got round to watching any of it yet, but will hopefully start later today. I’ll report back when I’ve watched the lot.

Chernobyl remains at No. 1 on my personal top-10 dark destinations list, at No. 2 of my overall top-20 (after Auschwitz) and at No. 3 on the list by degree of darkness. I also often get asked what I regard as the world’s darkest country overall. When looking at dark destinations and history, quantitatively that’ll have to be Germany, for which my website has well over a hundred individual chapters, far more than any other country. But with regard not to history but to contemporary affairs, the darkest country on Earth I would say now has to be China, even ahead of “rogue” nations such as North Korea or “failed” states such as Venezuela or “no-go” countries such as Libya, Yemen or Somalia. Why China? Because of the level of all-pervasive surveillance. What’s currently going on in China in that respect makes George Orwell’s 1984 look like a lame joke. The newest thing I read (here – external link) is that on top of face recognition and tracking they have also begun installing “emotion-recognition technology”. Now, since President Xi Jinping emphatically stated that he wants “positive energy” in his country, this basically means that in China you have to smile and convincingly feign “positive” emotions or else you might get into trouble.

That’s a kind of maximum surveillance, control and repression that very much reminded me of an episode of the science-fiction series Doctor Who, namely episode two of the tenth series, which is entitled “Smile” (here’s the Wikipedia entry for it). In short: it’s about an off-Earth human colony far in the future where little robots have “emoji faces” and are apparently programmed to ensure the colonizing humans are happy, but then when there is a death amongst the humans the robots take the resulting human expressions of grief as a “fault”, which they rectify by pulverizing those humans who show the “wrong”, i.e. not happy emotions. So everybody who wants to survive has to permanently wear a sufficiently convincing smiley facial expression, no matter how actually scared they are. The episode was first aired in April 2017 and of course was supposed to be far-fetched science fiction. But now China is basically making it a reality in this day and age already! OK, they haven’t started pulverizing people for not being “positive” enough, but still; it’s scary, scary stuff!!!

I’m glad I live in a country (Austria) that hasn’t gone to such lengths of surveillance (yet), even though the smartphone dictatorship under the mantle of ‘digitalization’ is sometimes getting on my nerves here already, and I expect it to only get worse. But hopefully not the full China way for as long as I’m still around …

On that “happy note”, bye for now and stay safe!

Best,

Peter