Some people like their travel how they like their coffee – dark and stimulating. These brooding dark tourism destinations offer intrepid lads a chance to take a break from the ordinary, discovers Steven Bond.
Do you really wish you were here? The concept of dark tourism, which was coined by Glasgow University lecturers John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, maybe a little baffling to some – the desire to travel to places associated with death and destruction – but it’s probably more commonplace than you’d first think.
From New York City’s “Ground Zero” memorial and museum to the myriad defunct concentration camps strewn across Europe, we’ve been fascinated with the morbid and the morose for countless generations, and that’s not to mention the niche travellers who dress up and role-play history’s most gruesome battles.
Here are five of the most popular dark tourism destinations that are currently safe enough to visit without a bulletproof vest and an elaborate insurance policy.
The Killing Fields
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Cambodia’s vicious Khmer Rouge regime wreaked havoc on the Southeast Asian country from 1975 to 1979, under the rule of its reclusive leader Pol Pot. A state-sponsored genocide, combined with a subsequent, ravaging wave of disease and starvation, led to approximately 2.5 million deaths – out of a population of roughly eight million.
The 8,000 human skulls placed in a glass shrine at Choeung Ek, one of the many sites that make up the ‘Killing fields’ isn’t a typical “attraction”, but it’s sure to have a profound effect on the psyche. You can also visit Pol Pot’s cremation site in Anlong Veng, or the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former school-turned-torture centre and prison. However, the number of tourists visiting Cambodia’s genocide sites has increased threefold within the past decade, raising red flags that commercialism is hampering the preservation of the memorials
Chernobyl
Russia
Shortly after nuclear power sent Marty McFly back to the future, it also led to the world’s most famous and catastrophic power plant explosion, which wrecked the nearby town of Pripyat. The 1986 event happened during a late-night safety test at the Chernobyl facility that simulated a station blackout power-failure – so safety systems were deliberately turned off.
Today, travellers can access a ghost town frozen in time. The city of Pripyat – population of 50,000 before the accident – was evacuated after the accident, and still delivers a snapshot of the USSR before the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was estimated in 2015 that the area around Chernobyl now has around 10,000 visitors per year, enjoying excursions into the Exclusion Zone – an almost 50-kilometre contamination radius.
Auschwitz
Austria
The recent Christopher Nolan epic Dunkirk reminded us of the horrors of war, but while the events in Normandy unfolded, a network of Nazi concentration camps was in full swing, as part of the regime’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” At least 1.1 million died in at Auschwitz and around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed during the Holocaust died at the camp.
The facilities at Auschwitz included prison camps, labour camps, and later, the construction of a purpose-built extermination camp designed for ‘processing’ vast numbers of victims with machine-like efficiency. Guided tours are available at the sites and many nearby towns and cities will offer door-to-door tour experiences.
Pompeii
Italy
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius isn’t exactly recent history, but the AD 79 explosion certainly left its mark. The volcano spewed a deadly cloud of tephra and gases to a height of 33 kilometres, ejecting molten rock, pulverized pumice, and hot ash at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second – 100,000 times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings two millennia later.
Pompeii is 240 kilometres south of Rome but is relatively close to Naples and Sorrento. There are actually five archaeological sites and it’s incredibly vast. If you arrive with a tour group you won’t have much control of your itinerary but it’s the best way to learn about the disaster and discover the many remnants of those who never escaped the blast.
Alcatraz
San Francisco
Not quite as morbid, the world’s most famous jail was located on Alcatraz Island, two kilometres offshore from San Francisco. A military prison first opened there in 1868 and became a notorious federal prison, operating from 1934 until 1963. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1986.
These days, “The Rock” and its buildings are operated by the US National Park Service and a multitude of tour providers and “sail and jail” cruises are available, notching up around 1.7 million visitors every single year.
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