NEWS
26 April 2024: And yet again almost another whole year has passed since the last entry in this “news” section. And again I have to emphasize that the reason for this is that I tend to put “current affairs” on my DT Blog and associated Newsletter rather than on this more static website. So do check the Blog and if you want to be kept up to date with what’s going on with DT, sign up for the Blog's Newsletter! That’s the safest way of not missing anything.
Anyway, one bit of very current news I can announce here is there’s been yet another interview with me that fed into this short but nicely written article on Sky News (external link, opens in a new tab). Do take a look.
And what has happened on this website since the previous entry? Well I’ve finished everything for Northern Ireland, including quite a number of all-new chapters. I had a quite serious period of health issues after that (including a week in hospital). I was probably at my lowest ever in May/June. But I gradually got things under control again and was able to go on a comparatively short trip to Iceland in the summer – and all the new/updated Iceland chapters were completed afterwards.
Also still in the summer I made a shorter trip to Copenhagen, the last major capital city in Europe that I hadn’t previously been to (now the only ones left are Andorra la Vella, San Marino and Tórshavn on the Faroe Islands, all hardly cities). And that yielded a number of new chapters too.
In October I returned for a short visit to Bratislava, Slovakia and did an excursion to the intriguing Holocaust site of Sered to the east of the city.
And then came my big winter trip to Taiwan, originally planned for spring 2020, then postponed three times because of Covid-19 (Taiwan used to have the strictest and longest lasting travel restrictions during the pandemic). I went to a good two dozen DT sites on that trip and writing all that up will be my next really big task. It’ll keep me busy for quite some time to come.
Already finished is the major update of my Auschwitz chapter, after I went on a return trip to this arguably No. 1 dark-tourism site in the world in mid-January. In Kraków I also visited a good number of additional DT sites, and I’m currently working on writing the associated chapters for those. They should be up within in the next couple of weeks.
In March I went on a quick return trip to Copenhagen and that yielded one more additional chapter.
Earlier this month I went to my original home city of Hamburg (I moved away in the 1990s but keep visiting it) and that yielded some updates and two all-new chapters, about the Energiebunker Wilhelmsburg and the Polizeimuseum.
Looking ahead, this summer I’m planning one monster of a long trip, namely to Australia, with add-ons of Rabaul in Papua New Guinea and, a long-standing dream of mine: Nauru, the least visited nation on Earth. Flight connections are a bit precarious so fingers crossed it will actually work out.
So much for now. Hopefully it won’t take me another year to update this section, but if it does, you know where to look for up-to-date news in the interim (that is: my DT Blog and the DT Newsletter!)
-------------------------------------
11 May 2023: As usual, I’ve fallen behind in keeping this section updated. But not all that much has happened on this website since my latest update in March. But I’ve been back to Northern Ireland, which really warranted a return visit. I spent eight days in Belfast, two more in Derry and there’ll be a lot to say about this intense field trip. Writing up all the updates of existing chapters, and adding about ten all-new ones, will be my task over the coming weeks and months. Generally, though, if you want to be kept in the loop with current goings-on rather refer to the DT Blog that I run in parallel to this website. If you want to be kept updated on a regular basis, then sign up for the Blog’s Newsletter.
--------------------------------------
1 March 2023: all new chapters for Cyprus (south) and North Cyprus are now complete and uploaded.
---------------------------------------
22 February 2023: A recent interview with me has appeared online on the "Cyprus Butterfly" website, (external link; opens in a new tab). The site is aimed primarily at the sizeable Russian ex-pat community of Cyprus; hence the text has been translated into Russian (but you could back-translate it by using the Chrome browser and Google Translate; it's not free from errors, but reasonably OK). But I've also put the original in English on this website (minus the photos, but with extra links).
----------------------------------------
26 January 2023
Another year has passed since I last put an update on this page. So it’s not really “news” any more. The reason is that these days I put everything current and in the pipeline on my DT Blog and/or notify subscribers about developments via the associated DT Newsletters. So if you really want to be kept up to date, then I suggest you subscribe to that Newsletter too.
Amongst the main things that happened since last January was my trip to Namibia, which finally went ahead (after having been postponed twice) … and it was absolutely wonderful. One of my best trips ever. It also yielded ca. a dozen new chapters on this website. Do take a look, especially at the photo galleries for the ghost towns of Kolmanskop, Pomona and Elizabeth Bay.
Before that, over the Easter period I went back to Albania, especially Tirana where there had been lots of developments in terms of dark tourism since my first short visit in 2011, so I had plenty to catch up with, and that too yielded several all-new chapters plus major updates of the previously existing ones. A significant site that I visited on a tour outside the capital was the dramatic prison of Spaç, which is probably the very darkest of all the sites I’ve so far seen in the country.
Over the long weekend around May Day I travelled, for the first time, to Kosovo. I stayed in the capital Pristina, but also went on an excursion that took me to Mitrovica, Gazimestan and Prekaz, the latter being the most significant dark-tourism site in the country.
I then spent two long weekends in one of my favourite cities: Budapest (easily reached by train from here in Vienna). There too, several new sites had to be explored, and I also revisited the atmospheric Kerepesi cemetery and updated the chapter for it here and expanded the photo gallery.
I also travelled to Prague for a conference (entitled “Visiting the Shadows”), where I gave a presentation, entitled “Off the Beaten Track – Islands of Dark Tourism”, which I subsequently adapted into this lavishly illustrated Blog Post.
Over the course of this past year, in May, I managed, for the first time ever, to get caught up on all my writing for this website on the basis of material from my own travels (the then final one being the chapter about the Matterhorn). Further travels yielded new material after that, but I also caught up with all that by early December.
On New Year’s Eve I then travelled to Cyprus for 12 days – so that is currently what I’m working on. An updated Cyprus chapter and about a dozen all-new chapters will eventually appear here.
Sales of my book “Atlas of Dark Destinations” have been steady, though not as good as I had initially hoped for. There have also been more reviews.
Travel plans for this year are vague at this stage, as various factors are somewhat unpredictable at the moment; but one idea, already postponed twice, could be Taiwan. We’ll see.
---------------------------------------
20 January 2022
Sorry, again, I've neglected this section for way too long. Lots happened. Most importantly my book has come out, in fact it already did in October last year. I've created a separate page for the book and a main menu entry on this website. So you can go there to get more info about it. For everything in between check my DT Blog, including for posts about last summer's travels I undertook. The most important updates that these travels resulted in on this website concerned Sobibor, Patarei prison in Tallinn, the KGB building in Riga and the all new Documentation Centre Displacement, Expulsionm Reconciliation in Berlin. My overseas travel plans (to Taiwan and Namibia) were scuppered yet again by the pandemic, but hopefully this year I will be able to resume proper travel. Taiwan is still on hold, but Namibia is planned - fingers crossed it'll be a case of third time lucky.
On the Blog you can also get some links to reviews and features about the book, most significantly this lavish feature in the Mail online. In addition I gave a few interviews, including two live on TV. That was a first for me and I must admit it was a little nerve-racking (I'd done recorded programmes for TV before, but never before live - and it does make a difference!). The latest one was today, and there's already a YouTube video of it (external link; opens in a new window). You can tell by my breathing that I'm not totally relaxed, but overall I think it went OK-ish. I just made one big blunder, by getting metres and feet confused when talking about the Le Redoutable submarine, which I accidentally made over three times bigger than it actually is (saying "400m" instead of "400 feet" - damn!!!). The clearly auto-generated subtitles on YouTube, however, are getting increasingly and more and more hillariously off the mark as the programme progresses, often drifting into total gibberish. But that at least is not my fault.
I also have a few written interviews coming up and will post links to those as I receive them, on the Blog and DT Newsletter as well as (eventually) here.
---------------------------------------
22 April 2021
again, I've neglected this section for far too long. I can no longer blame it on my Facebook page, since yesterday was the first anniversary of the day when I was purged from that platform. But I can claim that it is now the DT Blog that has taken over as the place where I announce current goings-on. On this website, recently a couple of reviews (this and this) were added and some new and updated chapters have gone up too for Munich, Gdansk and Warsaw, and also a new stub entry for China (with a 10 darkometer rating!). Before that, updated chapters include Kazerne Dossin and Breenbonk in Belgium, and various places in France. The latter two countries will be my main focus on this site for the next few months as I still have to write up all those chapters for the places I had visited a few years ago in Ypres and the Somme & Verdun. Since we still can't travel due to the pandemic (although there may be a slim chance that I might be able to go to Namibia this summer after all), I should have a chance to get this finished before my book comes out. This is now completed, as far as my part is concerned, and will go into production soon. Apparently you can already pre-order it (not only from the big imperial A but also from other online book sellers). Look for "Atlas of Dark Destinations" by Peter Hohenhaus. It's scheduled to become available in October. This is what the cover will look like:
-----------------------------------
22 July 2020:
finally I've been able to finish all the reconstructions of the posts I used to have on my purged DT page on Facebook, from the very beginning in May 2015 to when I was cut off in April this year, and everything in between (i.e. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019).
The result is a bit like time travel as well as reminiscing; do take a look, especially if you used to be a follower of that purged page!
The DT Blog is also progressing fine, with now 22 posts, and more lined up. If you haven't yet subscribed to the Newsletter, please do so.
But now I should return to writing some well overdue updates on this main website for some destinations I've been to but haven't got round to writing up yet, some even going back a long time. So I'll try to get a few of those done until the proofs for my book will get back to me, probably some time in late August. Then, that book project will have to be given priority again, of course. The envisioned time of publication is now estimated to be in the second half of 2021, perhaps October. So please be patient!
-------------------------------------
28 June 2020:
Meanwhile the new blog is running well, so far 16 posts have gone up and more and more people are signing up for the newsletter. It's still a very far cry from the thousands of followers I used to have on my purged Facebook page, but it's a begining, and it's out of reach of the evil Facebook Gestapo with its their dumb and destructive algorithms and censors.
The reconstruction of archive pages from my off-line stored material from my FB posts has also progressed, the posts from the years 2019 and 2018 are now also visible again, and I'm currently working on 2017. Hopefully in a week or so I can put that batch up here too. Please bear with me.
-------------------------------------
4 June 2020:
some good news for a change: I've meanwhile set up my own new BLOG - please do go and take a look ... and please subscribe to the Newsletter!
Also good: I've been commissioned to write a guest article in a German magazine, and it's even paid. I'll put the link up here and on the Blog once the article out (it will be in German, though), some time towards the end of the year (my deadline is early September, but I'll probably be able to submit much earlier than that). And of course work on my book will also soon continue, once I receive the proofs from the publisher, and then I also have to start work on the German version of the book.
Not so good news:I have more health issues: my chronic sinusitis could not be treated further yet, due to the corona crisis it had to be put on hold, and now I have other issues on top, including pains in the knuckles and tendons in my hands - obviously from too much typing and computer work (and age, of course). So this may slow my work down too. But I'll soldier on, somehow, as long as I can.
As for Facebook: all attempts to get through to anybody on the inside have failed, all avenues of appeal online remain blocked, so I think I simply have to give up on it and move on, as I'm doing with my Blog. In addition, I've started to at least recreate as much as possible of my old Facebook page, namely from the files I had been saving offline. the result won't be interactive as the original, and without comments, likes or shares, but at least most of my own texts and almost all photos can be reinstated in the form of 'archive pages'. I've already finished the section for 2020 (up to April 21, when the purge hit), and am working on earlier years too. It's a lengthy process but over time I hope to get this finished for the earlier years too. Keep checking.
---------------------------------------
21 May 2020:
The farcical saga with Facebook continued ... After the initially announced 30-day ban period had passed, not only did Facebook NOT reactivate my personal account, it has now also deleted the entire DT page that I had been curating since five years ago and that I had filled with content that's roughly the equivalent of two fat books worth of text and with thousands of photos. It's all been erased, wiped out, exterminated. No explanations were given, and all avenues of appeal were either not working or remained blocked. That's maximum censorship. What I find worst is the fact that I thus no longer have any contact with the over 3000 followers I had gathered over the years. It's unfair to them too.
However, I'm still trying to get a human being at Facebook to look at my case, as the injustice of this digital annihilation will be obvious to anybody actually capable of understanding the content I posted, unlike algorithms, which are evidently extremely bad at this.
BUT: I'm also working on alternatives (I'll put updates here once they're ready), and I have saved most of the content I posted on the DT page on Facebook offline, so I can gradually recreate a kind of mirror of it right here. It'll take a while but I've made a start - see this dedicated Facebook archive page! The final almost four months of posts can now be seen there (obviously without comments by other FB users and replies to them, nor with any 'like' or share function). So it's not all lost.
--------------------------------
22 April 2020:
more bad news, quite bad news. I have been shut off from my Facebook page – see the full story here. Not nice to read but it’s an important explanation in more detail than I’d wanted it to be here on the news page. So please follow the above link!
--------------------------------
10 April 2020:
Much more has happened since the last update here. As already half-expected, those trips in May have meanwhile also been cancelled, and the Namibia trip in August will for now be deferred by a year to summer 2021. It’s become clear that the coronavirus crisis will last a long time and bring big changes … here in Austria, and in the UK too, there’s now talk of a ban on international travel for at least the time until a vaccine has been found, tested, approved and applied widely. And that can take a year or more. So I’m not planning any trips for now. It may well be that even a postponement of the Taiwan itinerary to 2021 won’t be realistic. Hopefully, though, by August 2021 we’ll have freedom of movement back. We’ll see.
But of course I also fear for the travel industry. How many tour operators, hotels, airlines, etc. could possibly survive a whole year or so without any income-generating business? I sincerely hope that I’m only being overly pessimistic, but I’m finding it ever harder to stay positive. I’m still working on updates for this website (currently for France – so you can expect a bunch of new chapters there very soon), but I’m also finding it difficult to muster the same level of motivation for writing as before … But for now I’m hanging in there ...
---------------------
16 March 2020:
I didn't expect having to update this section so soon since the latest comprehensive update below. But things have moved quickly ... due to the global Coronavirus crisis, and the travel restrictions imposed to curb or at least slow it down, two of those planned trips mentioned last time I already had to cancel. Kosovo should be easy to slot in some other weekend, but Taiwan will have to be postponed by a whole year. Given the current escalation I'm also worried about the two short trips in May, but am slightly more confident about the long Namibia trip in August. If the measures taken at the moment have the desired effect, I should be free to travel then again. Fingers crossed. Right now this country (Austria) is more or less in lock-down. We're all supposed to stay at home, and can only leave the house for "essential reasons" (like shopping for food or meds). Oh well, I hope it'll at least work so that things get back closer to normal before too long.
----------------------
7 March 2020:
oh dear, oh dear. A whole year has passed since I last added anything here. Part of the reason is, I repeat, that these days I put most breaking news on DT's page on Facebook.
Another reason is that a lot has happened since 12 months ago that distracted me from keeping this page (and the site as such) always up to date. The main thing is: I've been contracted to write a book ... about dark destinations world-wide! It's with a reputable British publishing house and will be a lavishly illustrated (including plenty of my own photos) tome of ca. 350 pages in half coffee-table-book size. This had kept me very busy indeed for most of the past year, but I've actually submitted my work already, a couple of months ago. So I can now "lean back" (well, not really) and resume updating and expanding this website - until I get the proofs, that is. And then I'll also have to prepare the German version of the book. The original English draft is currently with the copy-editors and a designer. Production will take quite some time. But I will obviously advertise it here and elsewhere as soon as the book comes out!
As for past travels and new chapters on this site: Japan has seen a lot of additions, including some immensely important ones, especially Fukushima, and also major updates for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including the boat tours to Hashima, and several new sub-chapters for Tokyo. Plus a new entry for the totally unique Okunoshima and yet more tsunami-related chapters: Ishinomaki and especially Okawa!
The new chapters that are based on my most recent trip, to Ethiopia, are also all already in place.
I'm currently working my way through the material from my summer travels last year. The chapters for Guyana and French Guiana are already up, and include major long chapters about Jonestown and Devil's Island/Iles du Salut. I'm now in the process of writing up Suriname, which will yield several all-new chapters and then I have some important updates to do for Gdansk, where I briefly took a return trip to before the Three Guyanas trip.
When all that is done I'll also have to see to some long-overdue updates and new chapters from trips before last year, some going back almost four years, but which somehow got suspended because newer things felt more urgent. This applies mainly to France and Belgium, but also a couple of places in Germany.
As for travel plans for this year, I have several short (long) weekend trips lines up and a two week trip to Taiwan around Easter - and I'm currently keeping fingers crossed that these trips will still be possible and that it won't come to any travel restrictions because of the current Coronavirus spread throwing a spanner in the works. Hopefully not, as in particular Taiwan has been quite a while in the planning and is to include a whole host of new and exciting places so far neglected on this site. And for the summer I have a three-week trip planned to a country that doesn't even yet get a mention on this site: Namibia - plenty of cool ghost town material there, but also other things.
Finally, I've also done loads more interviews, for both radio, papers or their online spin-offs, as well as for researchers (the topic of dark tourism as a study topic seems to be getting especially popular in Germany and Austria at the moment!). Media interest has mostly been fuelled by the success of last year's HBO/Sky mini-series "Chernobyl" (which is indeed very good), which in turn gave the Chernobyl tourism industry a massive boost, so much so that there is now even talk of "overtourism", with all the negative side-effects of not only overcrowding but also plenty of tourists misbehaving. Featured all over the media were whole series of rather inappropriate selfies taken in the Zone (including those by so-called "influencers" who exploit the Zone as backdrop for their own purposes, without much respect for the site, its history or its victims). In turn this was giving dark-tourism a bad press yet again, even though I always try to point out that these dubious things are rather the result of the fact that normally non-dark tourists are suddenly getting crazy about Chernobyl. And that's not really the fault of "proper" dark tourists like myself. In general, I must say, the selfie-craze is increasingly getting out of control, including within dark tourism, sadly. Please people, restrain yourselves; dark tourism and selfies do not comfortably go together!
So much as a year's worth of an update. I'll try (but cannot promise) to not let another whole year pass before I update this section again ...
-------------------
There's an article about me and dark tourism in the current edition of the prestigious Der Spiegel weekly (in German - available online, but for subscribers only, here - external link, opens in a new window), and a new interview with me in another German paper, this one available in full online (also external link, opens in a new window).
And I've finally managed to finish my review of the recent Netflix series "Dark Tourist".
-----------------
7 February 2019: I've had my surgery and am recovering fine ...
... time to catch up then. So, what's there to report since the last proper update. Well, the new chapters for Johannesburg (South Africa) are uploaded (and an expanded glossary entry for Apartheid too), plus the updated and expanded chapters for Chernobyl (plus Pripyat, the NPP and Duga) with plenty of new atmospheric winter photos, plus all-new chapters for the Pervomaisk Stategic Missle Base and Slavutych to boot. In addition, a couple more book reviews are new (this and this), and the Malta chapters are all as good as finished too.
I've had a few more interviws as well and in early March will attend a travel trade fair for a panel discussion on dark tourism, and there may be more in the pipeline on the media front that I will put updates about here in due course.
Travel plans for 2019 are coming together nicely too: the summer trip to the Three Guyanas (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana) has already been fully put to gther and is booked. And at Easter I'll go on a return trip to Japan to cover some new, or renewed sites, and also finally go to Fukushima. Looking further ahead, I hope to do a short trip to Ethiopa at the end of the year as well, but for that nothing concrete has so far been planned.
------------------
24 January 2019: again, I found that this section has been neglected for too long. Lots has happened since the last entry - details following later - and I hope to stay a bit more up to date on this page in the future ... but first of all I have to go to hospital for a (routine) operation and will be out of action for a bit. If all goes well, I should be able to catch up with things in the next few weeks ...
-----------------------
October 2018: a couple of long overdue book reviews have finally been added to the 'other sources - books' section, one relatively recent publication (Tom Coote's "Shadow Trails"), the other already few years old (Tony Wheeler's "Dark Lands").
------------------------
October 2018: all the new St Helena chapters are now uploaded!
-------------------------
September 2018: I've given quite a few interviews lately, in the wake of the renewed surge in media interest due to that Netflix series "Dark Tourist". I usually post links to the articles that come out of these on DT's page on FB as when they become available online. But I am now beginning to think that maybe a dedicated permanent page with links here on the main site might be a good idea. Let me think about that ... maybe.
----------------------
August 2018: back from St Helena, South Africa, Zimbabwe ... new chapters are in the making. bear with me please!
----------------------
-------------------------
21 July 2018: just out is another article in the media, in German, that includes excerpts from an interview with me (external link - opens in a new window).
--------------------------
15 July 2018: the other day I spent a few interesting hours with a film team from Munich, Germany, doing a TV feature about dark tourism and hence came to interview me at home and on a short tour of some of Vienna's dark tourist attractions. Once that appears online I'll post the link here.
-------------------------
1 May 2018: I gave another interview not long ago that has meanwhile fed into this article on Stuff.co.nz (external link - opens in a new window). You can also check the article against the full text of the interview here.
--------------------------
16 April 2018: I've just realized that I hadn't updated this section for over a whole year ... that's to the point of contradicting this section's very heading. Partly to blame is Facebook, where I run a DT page and it's there that I tend to post more immediate, breaking news as things happen these days.
So what's been new on this site since last spring? Well, lots more new and updated chapters plus photos have been uploaded, for Germany, Britain and in particular Russia, which was my main research trip last year.
This year, other than short family visits over the Xmas/New Year period, I've just been on a two weeks plus trip to Croatia, with a short side trip to Trieste, Italy. So you can expect a whole new bunch of full chapters for those places.
And for this summer I have a very exotic destination planned: St Helena, now finally reachable by air (rather than the week long voyage by boat both there and back) with some add-on in South Africa where I will finally by able to fill in gaps in Johannesburg.
That's as much as I can reveal about my travel plans at this stage.
Looking back again, I'm still seriously behind updating and expanding my Belgium and France chapters. Please bear with me. I'll get there eventually ...
Outside this website - I've given numerous media interviews that appeared in the press, radio and even TV (although that was but a snippet) in Britain, Austria, Russia and elsewhere ... plus even more numerous research interviews - the topic seems to establish itself ever more firmly as an academic subject too - and slowly also outside Britain, where it all started some 20 years ago. In the meantime I've also given interviews to students/researchers in Austria, Germany, Canada, USA and even India.
Generally, there seems to be a further growing interest in the topic of dark tourism. And, I am happy to observe, the general default negativity of representations of DT in the media is slowly beginning to wane. I've had a few much more sympathetic interviewers over this past year. Let's hope this development continues ...
-------------------------
26 March 2017: all the new chapters for India and the Andaman Islands are now uploaded. Do take a look.
....................................
22 Februray 2017: I'm in the media again, this time with a really good and well-balanced article in The Independent (external link, opens in a new window), based on an extensive interview I gave a couple of weeks ago. Well worth reading!
....................................
January 2017: just back from India - so a number of new chapters will be put up under that heading soon. I'll give that priority before I return to write the remaining European chapters that still need doing. As I said, I won't be running out of material any time soon ...
....................................
13 December 2016: New and updated chapters are now up under Germany and Poland. France, Belarus and Belgium will have to wait until I'm back from my next trip, which will take me to India for the first time ever. That'll be a mixed trip with lots of non-dark things (culinary delights, wildlife, architecture), and not as frantic and intense a research trip as last summer's, but it will also include some interesting dark sites, e.g. in Amritsar, and the Andaman Islands ... I won't be running out of material to write about any time soon, that much is certain ...
....................................
September 2016: just back from a long field trip across Europe, from Minsk in Belarus to Cherbourg in France. You can expect plenty of entirely new entries as well as substantially updated chapters to appear on this site over the next few months.
....................................
13 June 2016: further to the last entry here - there's an associated blog entry (external link) that's also of interest.
....................................
13 June 2016: just listened to this excellent interview about dark tourism (external link - opens in a new window). For once this one is almost completely devoid of the usual 'moral panic' attacks you so often get in the media; in fact it puts dark tourism in a proper context, which is very much appreciated. One of the interviewees, by the way, is a co-editor of the book "Dark Tourism and Place Identity" (to which I contributed a chapter about Rwanda).
....................................
June 2016: long time no news posting ... sorry for the neglect. Meanwhile all the new USA chapters are up too, as are several new ones for Great Britain and Berlin - more are in the making, also for Slovenia. So do keep checking back.
....................................
5 February 2016: following my latest field trip to the Caribbean, researching sites of dictatorship etc., the new Dominican Republic chapters are now all uploaded, with plenty of new photos too. With that out of the way I can finally get back to Hawaii/USA ...
....................................
14 December 2015: all the new Slovakia chapters are now up. Hawaii is nearly complete (except Pearl Harbor that still requires major revision and updating). The rest of that and the USA as well as the remainder for Spain will be my task in the new year.
....................................
10 November 2015: long time since the last entry here. Meanwhile most of Spain is up, and I am currently working on Hawaii and the USA following my long summer field trip there. Futhermore I've just been on a short excursion into a country that so far is not yet covered on this site: Slovakia. Expect several new chapetrs to appear on that too before long. But it's a lot of work, so bear with me please.
....................................
7 July 2015: all the updates and new chapters for Italy are now uploaded too.
Next big task is Spain ...
....................................
15 June 2015: the new chapters for Chernobyl (now with separate subchapters on Pripyat and Chernobyl NPP and the Duga Installation) are now uploaded. Go and have a look! It really IS the No.1 dark tourism site in the world for me, now represented in full "glorious" detail (in the dark sense) and up to date!
....................................
June 2015: now DT also has a page on Facebook! I'll aim at posting a Photo of the Day (almost) every day. These are selected from my large stock of photos from years of travelling as a dark tourist and so cover a wide range - this past week from nuclear sites to a cemetery with Pinochet junta victims, from Cold War relics to a smouldering volcano, from skulls of a Cambodian killing field to a war ruin in Bosnia/Herzegovina and environmental pollution in Kazakhstan. And that's just the beginning. Do go and follow the Facebook DT page (and please also "like" and "share" it, so its reach gets increased).
.................................
13 November 2014: There's a new article out that I have written for the blog at Experience Travel Group (who are amongst my sponsored-pages partners, see here).
It's about my top-5 dark-tourism sights in Indonesia (external link - opens in a new window).
I think it looks pretty cool, if I may say so myself in all humbleness ... Content-wise there is obviously a lot of overlap with the relevant chapters on this website, but the texts (and some of the photos) are different and thus a worthwhile read for regular visitors to this site too. Do go and have a look. I also appreciate the nice words they have to say about me and my site, of course.
....................................
19 September 2014: I'm in the papers! Well, in a specific Austrian tourism magazine, to be precise. It's called "FaktuM" and in its current edition (9/2014) it runs a four-page (pp 70-73) special article on dark tourism ... in German, of course. It's interestingly entitled "Licht ins Dunkel" - i.e. it aims at shedding light on dark tourism (remember, in the German-speaking world the term is not very well known ... yet). In it the author makes reference to dark-tourism.com and uses ample quotes from me too. These are mostly not from the website but from a presentation I gave in German at the University of Vienna earlier this summer.
Thankfully, the article is for once rather positive about dark tourism, i.e. it does not fall into the usual trap of "moral panic" (cf. here ) ... mainly because, unlike so many journalists who routinely slag it off without reflection, the author of this article did her homework beforehand.
The article gives a brief outline of the origin of dark tourism and the academic research of it, and in the second half concentrates on a specific instance of dark tourism, namely visiting ghost towns. Four such destinations are briefly introduced, namely Pompeii, Oradur-sur-Glane, Hashima island and Chernobyl/Pripyat. There are a couple of tiny inaccuracies, but on the whole I am very pleased indeed with this positive coverage of the topic of dark tourism in the media. May it set an example for others to follow too!
For those who can read German, here's a link to the online version of the article (external link) and the fully illustrated version can be found as a pdf-document here. In addition, here's a link to a manuscript for that presentation which I gave earlier and which this article quotes from at length; so you can check it all up in its full context. The manuscript is not 100% identical to the presentation (where I also spoke freely for some stretches), but it is the written version that is closest to it.
......................................
September 2014: back from a long trip to South-East Asia, which was as exhausting as it was exhaustive, covering large parts of Indonesia, East Timor and Singapore. Processing all the photo material and writing up updates and entirely new chapters about all the places I visited on this trip will probably keep me very busy for most of the rest of the year ... and I haven't even finished writing up Latvia and Lithuania ...
.........................................
August 2014: the redesign of this site is now more or less finished. Hope you like the new (and responsive) look. It's still a bit slow, though. I will have to look into that ...
..........................................
17 July 2014: the re-design of the site is well on its way, just a few little things left to sort out. If that can't be done before I set off on my next big trip it will have to wait until I'm back. Keep fingers crossed.
..........................................
10 June 2014: glossary links are working again! Slowly getting there with the re-design too ...
............................................
4 June 2014: The re-design saga continues. Photo galleries appear to be working alright again, but now all links to the glossary lead to 404 errors. Hope this can be fixed soon as it affects a huge number of links. grrrrrr
.............................................
26 May 2014: This site is currently undergoing a redesign, most of the time in the background, only occasionally can you already see the new template/interface design when things need to be tested. At other times (most of the time) it will still look largely as before. But: because of the ongoing work on the new design some functions, such as photo galleries, may at times not work properly while the site is switched into the old design mode. Once work on the new design is finished, it will be switched live permanently and hopefully all will work fine then. The main improvment the new design is intended to bring is that it will finally be "responsive", i.e. suitable for viewing on smartphones and tablets. Please bear with us during this transition period.
...........................................
7 May 2014: just back from a very intense trips to the Baltics - so you can soon expect a whole range of new chapters (and plenty of photos) about Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It's a lot of work, though, so it may take quite some time for it all to be completed.
...........................................
March 2014: there appear to be some mysterious dead links on the site - or rather: the links as such are fine, but when navigating in a certain sequence from subpage to subpage, their embedding in the site somehow gets lost and then a link may chuck you onto the home page instead of where it is suppoed to lead. As it is near impossible to determine at which point the connection gets lost along the way, it's a nasty problem. At present I have no clue as to how it could be rectified. Fortunately it doesn't happen often.
If it does happen to you I recommend that you navigate back to the page you've come from not by using your browser's back button but via the countries list or the menus at the top. That should normally sort it.
...........................................
15 January 2014: FINALLY, dark-tourism.com is "live", i.e. publicly accessible without password-protected logging-in.