You hear the description 'dark tourist' a lot when you spend your travels exploring famous cemeteries, nuclear disaster zones and wartime sights. It's usually said with a whiff of suspicion. Why would anyone spend their holiday time visiting locations connected with tragic events, inhuman acts or morbid mysteries? And moreover, doesn't dark tourism teeter on the brink of voyeurism and disrespect?
To me, history and human behaviour are light and dark. For every splendid medieval church, there's a story of religious oppression and poverty. Like it or not, practically every modern city harbours a history of pain or misery, whether it's a wartime legacy, the plague or infamous crimes. Should you bypass that aspect of a destination when you visit? I prefer not to - and I'm fascinated by what I have seen and learned along the way.
That depends what you do at the destination. Most visitors to tragic sites do so with sensitivity and respect - although travellers posing for a grinning picture in Auschwitz does happen. For me and many others, the urge to travel darkly originates in a spirit of open-mindedness. I want to hear the truth of a destination, even if it's upsetting to hear. I want to understand history's darker moments, because it feels important to learn from them. And I want to acknowledge tragic events and be part of the activity that commemorates awful happenings. Being faced with dark tourism sites is confronting, and it forces you to question yourself. What would I have written on the walls of this prison? My own problems are dwarfed by the magnitude of others, and it shames me into wanting to live a better life.
Aside from how much there is to learn from these places, they can also be astonishingly beautiful in their own right. And the contrast between the beauty of the scenery and an awful event that occurred there - take Chernobyl in the rolling Ukrainian countryside - also fuels a traveller to consider what they are seeing.
For me, the single most important thing you can do is attain a balance. When I visited Hiroshima, like most visitors I spent a lot of time at the peace museum and A-bomb dome, learning about the shocking experience of the people.
You know what else I did? I hung out.
I shopped, feasted on the local speciality of grilled oysters, checked out the castle, went on a bar hop and met some of the friendliest people I've encountered anywhere in the world. Because doing dark tourism badly is failing to see past the morbid history to what the destination is today. In Hiroshima's case, it is one of the most vibrant and uplifting cities I've ever visited.
I hope to explore a lot more of this paradoxical territory in this blog, feature some fascinating destinations and look at the rise of dark tourism along the way.
Thank you for reading, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions, leave them in the comments or join me on Twitter @travelsdarkly.
Why be a dark tourist?
To me, history and human behaviour are light and dark. For every splendid medieval church, there's a story of religious oppression and poverty. Like it or not, practically every modern city harbours a history of pain or misery, whether it's a wartime legacy, the plague or infamous crimes. Should you bypass that aspect of a destination when you visit? I prefer not to - and I'm fascinated by what I have seen and learned along the way.
Isn't there something exploitative or wrong about dark tourism?
That depends what you do at the destination. Most visitors to tragic sites do so with sensitivity and respect - although travellers posing for a grinning picture in Auschwitz does happen. For me and many others, the urge to travel darkly originates in a spirit of open-mindedness. I want to hear the truth of a destination, even if it's upsetting to hear. I want to understand history's darker moments, because it feels important to learn from them. And I want to acknowledge tragic events and be part of the activity that commemorates awful happenings. Being faced with dark tourism sites is confronting, and it forces you to question yourself. What would I have written on the walls of this prison? My own problems are dwarfed by the magnitude of others, and it shames me into wanting to live a better life.
Aside from how much there is to learn from these places, they can also be astonishingly beautiful in their own right. And the contrast between the beauty of the scenery and an awful event that occurred there - take Chernobyl in the rolling Ukrainian countryside - also fuels a traveller to consider what they are seeing.
How do you travel darkly?
For me, the single most important thing you can do is attain a balance. When I visited Hiroshima, like most visitors I spent a lot of time at the peace museum and A-bomb dome, learning about the shocking experience of the people.
You know what else I did? I hung out.
I shopped, feasted on the local speciality of grilled oysters, checked out the castle, went on a bar hop and met some of the friendliest people I've encountered anywhere in the world. Because doing dark tourism badly is failing to see past the morbid history to what the destination is today. In Hiroshima's case, it is one of the most vibrant and uplifting cities I've ever visited.
I hope to explore a lot more of this paradoxical territory in this blog, feature some fascinating destinations and look at the rise of dark tourism along the way.
Thank you for reading, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions, leave them in the comments or join me on Twitter @travelsdarkly.
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