In the latest theme poll – at the bottom of this previous Blog post – the theme garnering the most votes in the end was ‘DT & Shadows’. So that will be this post’s theme. Let’s kick off with an example of shadows that are an almost symmetrical “mirror image” of what’s casting the shadow, in this case a set of fire escape stairs outside a warehouse in the harbour of Riga, Latvia (which is a prime
Yesterday I returned from my two weeks’ long trip to Bosnia & Herzegovina. I had been before, but that was back in 2009 and only for a few days in Sarajevo and Mostar. On this trip I had a lot more time and also went on several tours that took me out of the cities and to some quite off-the-beaten track locations.
As before, I give you a quick photo essay Blog Post based mostly on photos taken with a
This is the theme that in the latest theme poll came second in the vote, and, as indicated in the winning theme’s post, I’ll now bring you the runner-up without a new poll.
Here’s a photo of one of the most gruesome places involving beds, namely a bed frame in a torture room of the infamous Tuol Sleng (aka S-21) prison in Phnom Penh in Cambodia. It was on beds like this that the decaying and ghastly mutilated bodies of the final victims of the Khmer Rouge were found by the liberators (the
Maralinga was a dark-tourism highlight of my recent long trip to Australia, so much so that it deserves a separate longer post of its own. So here we go:
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There are two ways of visiting Maralinga, a) overland, with overnight camping or accommodation in Maralinga Village, and b) day return trips by small plane. Since driving all the way to Maralinga through the remote Outback is both demanding and time-consuming I opted for investing in a fly-in tour. For this
Today is the 31st anniversary of the official reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990. I already marked this last year on the 30th anniversary with a special post that recycled four posts from my purged Facebook DT page taken from my archived version. Today I won’t repeat that. Instead I’ll give you a few photos from different corners of Germany that illustrate the diversity of the country and its dark-tourism portfolio.
I’ll begin with
As decided in our recent poll, this blog post’s theme will be villas. You’ve probably been wondering how something as nice as a villa can be dark – but just read on …
Let’s start on a grand scale. The photo below shows Villa Grande.
This grand pile, more a stately mansion than a mere villa, really, was the oversized home of Vidkun Quisling, the right-winger who assumed power in Norway during World War Two as Germany’s Nazis invaded, with whom he happily collaborated. That’s what’s given the English language the expression “a quisling regime”!
Today the building houses
This week I resumed a little bit of travelling, for the first time since January in fact, namely by going to Brno in the Czech Republic, which is only a 90-minute train ride away from where I live (Vienna). Brno (Brünn in German) had long been on my to-do list but had been too easy to postpone given its proximity. Now, with all those pandemic-induced restrictions it had become a more immediate option to test the waters of travelling during these COVID times. So I travelled with my wife by train on Tuesday and came back the same way on Thursday.
I managed to tick off all four significant dark-tourism attractions of Brno during that time: the