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Easter Island escapism

Easter Island can be regarded as a dark-tourism destination only in a more symbolic way, making a link between its dark past of environmental overexploitation and the current threat to the whole Earth’s global biosphere – to quote my own book’s final chapter, which is about Easter Island: “[the islanders] had to learn the hard way that there was no other island they could evacuate to, just as the people of planet Earth must learn – to quote an often-used slogan at climate-change demonstrations – that there is no planet B.”

9 March 2022 1 Comment

Dark Tourism & Flames

As indicated at the end of last week’s blog post about the “Stans”, I now give you a themed post next, namely DT & Flames. It’s a topic that ran a couple times in the theme polls over the past 18 months (here, here and here) but never won. Now I’m just posting it anyway. And that’s because it follows on so neatly from the parts about the Darvaza flaming gas crater in Turkmenistan that was featured in last week’s post, and included photos like

19 January 2022 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Mining

This is another theme post, and again not the result of a poll but half promised in the previous blog post and then requested in a comment in response to that post. So here we go.

In terms of dark tourism, one of the prime places associated with mining has to be Butte in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, USA. It became a boom town in the 18th and 19th century thanks to its rich deposits of

15 December 2021 2 Comments

Dark Tourism & Ash

This is a theme that featured a couple of times as a candidate in theme polls on this blog (namely here and here) but failed to win on both occasions. I decided to feature it now anyway – inspired by the latest news and dramatic images from Indonesia, where there’s been a major ash eruption of Mt Semeru volcano on the populous island of Java (see e.g. this article from Sunday, more on Volcano Discovery).

I’ve been to Mt Semeru,

7 December 2021 2 Comments

Atlas of Dark Destinations promo

It’s now nearly a month since my book came out internationally. So here’s an update and some promo material I received from the publishers. I would also like to urge you, my readers, to help spread the word. In doing so you’d help to support the upkeep of this blog and my main website. On the latter I’ve also expanded the book entry. For that I used the publishers’ promo images.

They had some beautiful taster photos taken specifically for

25 November 2021 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Reflections

And here comes the third of the four themes of our most recent poll (which didn’t have a winner, hence all four are fielded). So now for reflections – and I mean that literally, mostly, though a little bit of reflecting in the figurative sense will also feature. But this is primarily a visual blog post.

I like photographing reflections! I’m always on the lookout for reflections wherever I travel. Hence I have loads of such photos that accumulated over the years. So the

13 October 2021 4 Comments

4th of July

This is a date mostly associated with Independence Day in the USA. So I decided to dip into my archive and put a cluster of 4 July posts together here, plus some extras. Note, though, that US Independence is not the only historical event marked on this date – there are also other, and darker, incidents that fell on it, such as the one

4 July 2021 2 Comments

Poll Result & this Day in History

Today’s date features repeatedly in the history annals, and some of that has relevance for dark tourism too.

On this day in 1915, Italy joined the Allies in World War One. While The Somme, Ypres and Verdun on the Western Front are household names in this context, Italy’s contribution to the “Great War” is less well known, at least in the anglophone world. Much of the fighting took place in the mountains, such as on the Isonzo front. Some of this is now in Slovenia and parts of

23 May 2021 No Comments

Falklands War

On this Day, 39 years ago, on 2 April 1982, Argentina launched its invasion of the Falkland Islands, a small British overseas territory in the South Atlantic that the Argentinians refer to as the Islas Malvinas and have long claimed should be theirs. In 1982 they tried to take it by force.

Amongst the first targets of the landed troops was Government House in the Islands’ capital Stanley, which you see in the photo above (I took this in

2 April 2021 2 Comments

Dark Tourism & Lakes

As announced in the previous post and the latest newsletter, today I bring you the other one of the joint winners of our latest theme poll, after DT & spheres. So, now to lakes.
This is Lovatnet in Norway. It looks just very scenic and serene, but this lake has been deadly, twice, in the 20th century, namely when huge rockfalls/landslides from the steep slopes of Mt Ramnefjell crashed into the water, creating massive tsunamis that washed away entire villages on the lake’s shores

18 January 2021 4 Comments

DT & New Year’s Eves

As a kind of follow-on from last Thursday’s post about dark tourism & Christmas, I now give you another photo essay composed of photos from my archives that were all taken on a New Year’s Eve, mostly when travelling abroad. Of course, the New Year’s Eves themselves were not the dark elements here, but took place in countries with a dark reputation and/or where we had undertaken dark-tourism fieldwork during the day.

I’ll do it in reverse chronological order and begin with last year’s New Year’s Eve – when

31 December 2020 No Comments

Dark Tourism and Bars

The topic of this blog post was decided by the most recent theme poll, where it sailed to a clear victory over all the other options by a huge margin (as reported in last Sunday’s newsletter). So here we go.

As a couple of commentators noted, the word ‘bars’ is of course lexically ambiguous, and exploiting that double meaning had been my intention all along. So let’s begin with the darker side of bars – those you sit behind in prisons and similar institutions.

The first

4 December 2020 No Comments

A Former Republic’s Ex-National Day

On this day, 7 October, the former GDR (in the West aka ‘East Germany’) used to celebrate the anniversaries of its founding on that date in 1949. It managed to get to its 40th anniversary in 1989 – but that was at a time when severe cracks in the state’s regime were already more than apparent. A few weeks later the Berlin Wall fell and just days before it would have been the 41st anniversary of the GDR’s founding, the state had ceased to exist on 3 October 1990 (see this recent post).

I used to mark this day, “Tag der Republik” in GDR parlance (literally ‘day of the republic’), on my former

7 October 2020 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Cars

As decided in the latest poll, the theme of this post is ‘dark tourism and cars’. It won by two votes ahead of ‘dark tourism and clothes’, so that will be entered again in the next poll. And since several people said that their second choice (and close contender) was ‘dark tourism and spheres’ I’ll give that another chance next time too. NPPs will have to wait a little longer, but as that is one of my personal favourites it is bound to pop up at some point as well (whether in another poll or independently I can’t say yet).

But now to cars. Searching through my archives I found

4 October 2020 2 Comments

A Dark Anniversary and a bit of Time Travel

On this Day it’s the 19th anniversary of 9/11 – i.e. the terrorist attacks in the USA by means of hijacked planes, two hitting the Twin Towers of the WTC in New York, one the Pentagon near Washington D.C. …

The photo above was taken at the former “Tribute WTC” visitor centre in New York (now relocated, reworked and renamed “9/11Tribute Center”) and shows a projection in the exhibition part of the old centre, involving iconic images of those spiky steel facade elements that remained upright after the collapse of the towers.

This date was also always

11 September 2020 No Comments
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