Hinterland Travels (www.hinterlandtravel.com) is a UK-based company which has been organising tours to Iraq for 30 years. Owner & Managing Director Geoff Hann said, “In Iraq, although we concentrate on archaeological and historical sites, we also visit the Shia pilgrimage or Shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf. We look at some recent history sites such as Saddam’s Palaces… Inevitably, we do pass through or stop at places where atrocities have been committed. We mention these, but do not make it an integral part of any of our tours. For example, when exploring Kurdistan, we visit Halabja and the prison in Sulaimaniyah.”
On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4 exploded and caused the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. As radioactive plume filled the atmosphere, millions fled from Chernobyl and neighbouring towns. Still unfit for human habitation, there are, however, tourist companies that will take you into the 30 km ring of the exclusion zone. A twenty-six-year-old lady from England (name withheld) is one of the millions who have undertaken such a tour (See ‘Diary of a dark tourist’). She recalls, “I was motivated to visit Chernobyl out of morbid interest and because I have a fascination with post-apocalyptic scenarios. Part of me has always wondered what a place would be like if people suddenly vanished. How would nature take over? What would the silence be like?”
But what makes people forsake a trip to Switzerland and instead, head to Iraq or Cambodia? Experts believe the motivations of a dark tourist stem from the need to heighten their sense of mortality, a quest for a novel experience, a celebration of crime and deviance. Reverence, nostalgia or plain basic voyeurism could also be the reason to visit a cemetery or a battlefield or a shipwreck or a disaster site like Ground Zero in New York or Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. Reveals Geoff Hann, “My clients are motivated to see these places for themselves because of the sheer volume of media coverage. They are also suspicious of the motives of that news. They want to communicate with the people in these areas.”
Most people may feel the label of a dark tourist as derogatory, but the truth is that almost all of us at some point in time have been a dark tourist. Many of us would have been to The Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, and walked in the rooms where our former prime minister once lived, and around the exact spot where she fell after her bodyguards’ bullets tore into her body. I, for one, have taken the tour, and like an unashamed voyeur wondered how life would have been in the same rooms, and paused with reverence and grief at the spot where she was slain. But voyeuristic rubbernecking around a site of crisis can result in hurting people’s sentiments; case in point when actor Riteish Deshmukh and filmmaker Ram Gopal Verma decided to take a tour of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai right after the three-day siege.
Dark tourist sites can be disturbing places where the excesses of humanity have caused much grief and serve as reminders to the gravest mistakes and misdemeanours of mankind. As long as one goes with the right attitude, there’s a lot that one can take away from the experience.
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