After the past few more topical posts here comes a current-affairs one once again. Just a shorty, though, as I have to carry on preparing for my upcoming Iceland trip (see previous Blog post!).
For one thing Cyprus, where I went in January this year (see especially this older Blog post), has been in the news again last week, repeatedly in fact, in close succession and for very different reasons. The most important
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
Another cause for celebration: yesterday I uploaded the One Thousandth Destination Chapter to my main website. What a breakthrough! I think it’s fair to say that this has to be the biggest milestone in the history of dark-tourism.com. It certainly sounds more momentous than one hundred destinations, and even if I make it to two thousand that won’t sound quite so momentous as hitting four figures for the first time … and I
The crisis in Ethiopia has featured on this blog twice before (here and here), so an update is due. That’s because there have been significant and, for me at least, unexpected developments. The federal government forces have retreated from the northern province of Tigray that they
As promised in the previous theme post, I now bring you the other one of the joint winners of our latest theme poll.
So in what ways can pianos be associated with dark tourism? A pretty unique example is this, a piano-shaped tombstone:
The Thornton grave used to have an open lid on the stone piano too, but that got destroyed by vandals. Maybe it’s
The war and humanitarian crisis in northern Ethiopia (Tigray) have been a topic on this blog before (in this post). Things have hardly improved since then, if anything they’ve got even worse. It’s one of the most dire situations anywhere in the world at the moment, with hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people living in shelters that can’t cope with the numbers, sanitation is extremely poor and there’s scarcity of water and food. Moreover,
About a year ago we went into the first lockdown here in Austria. Corona was still very new, and back then we had no way of knowing that it would continue to have such a grip on the whole world for so long.
Anyway, I thought this was a good point to look back and go on a little time-travel excursion here. So I’ve lifted the series of Corona-related posts I had on my DT page on FB at the time of the first lockdown from the Facebook-posts archive that I
Today, 3rd of March, is World Wildlife Day (as proclaimed by the United Nations in December 2013). So I decided to make today’s post one on the theme of dark tourism and animals!
Now, in what ways can animals be ‘dark’? Well, for one thing it could be because a kind of animal may be dangerous to humans. And indeed quite a few animals are
Our latest theme poll had a clear winner so today I give you the requested one of broken glass (DT & bullet holes came second, and I may field that again in a future theme poll).
The photo above is what I consider one of the most appealing images of broken glass in my archives. It’s a close-up of a large war ruin I discovered in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina, in 2009. Here’s a
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
As promised, I’ll try to do my bit to brighten up the Christmas period that for so many of us will be very different this year, much reduced in terms of gatherings with family and friends, due to the pandemic.
In previous years, when we were not visiting our respective families, my wife and I often went travelling at this time of year. Hence we saw Christmas decorations in a wide range of places, including some where you wouldn’t normally expect them at all. It goes to show how
There have been significant developments elsewhere while most of the world’s eyes have been almost exclusively on the US elections and the COVID-19 pandemic. Remember my post from early last month about military conflict breaking out again over Nagorno-Karabakh? It now appears to have ended with a partial victory for Azerbaijan, who’ve retaken the second city of the region, Shushi, or ‘Şuşa’ in Azeri, some territory around it, as well as the