Hard holidays: Vacations peppered with radiations and ghost town tours

HBO mini-series Chernobyl has triggered a tourist rush to the nuclear disaster site. But then dark vacations have always been an attraction, writes Nikita Puri

Scrolling through Instagram, the hallowed online diary documenting all travels, a friend’s newest post shows her dressed in a period costume from 19th century England. Touring The Jane Austen Centre in Bath, Somerset, she’s standing next to a life-sized figure of Fitzwilliam Darcy, the fictional character from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In stark contrast to this is the next post: an acquaintance walking the ghost town of Pripyat in northern Ukraine.

Provided one knows what happened to the town and its population of about 50,000 people, the picture of the abandoned, derelict town, with a Ferris wheel that was never used, shocks one out of comfort. On April 26, 1986, an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant saw thousands dying of radiation exposure and more getting affected by the particles carried by the wind. Radioactive particles were detected as far as Sweden, about 680 miles from the site of the disaster.

Such tours have always been around. But tour operators from Chernobyl have reported a rise of 35 to 40 per cent in their bookings after HBO’s historical drama, Chernobyl, went on air this May. Radiation levels are still high in some parts of the area 33 years after the accident, and yet busloads of tourists are pouring in to walk around Chernobyl and Pripyat with respirators and dosimeters to avoid radiation exposure.

A tourist in Chernobyl

One could be forgiven to think that this is an anomaly, an aberration to what one would usually describe as a vacation. It isn’t. Away from Goa’s beaches and Norway’s northern lights or museums dedicated to art and literature is a lesser-known form of travel. It’s called “dark tourism”, and it can very well border on the morbid. The other monikers include grief or black tourism. It's essentially understood as a trip to a place that has deep-rooted links to some form of tragedy, death or destruction.

  

Even if it’s considered “weird,” says Karan Anand, head, relationships at Cox & Kings, there is a set of travellers looking for experiences it has never had before. Though dark tourism has always been a niche segment, there’s a significant rise in the number of millennials opting for such experiences, he adds.

“Today's travellers are experience-seekers and the rise of dark tourism is a dimension of that quest for an unusual adventure,” says Balu Ramachandran, senior vice-president, Cleartrip. While dark tourism has the economic potential to help the affected community rebuild itself, “people are also beginning to see it as an emotional experience to become aware of what might have transpired at such a destination,” Ramachandran says.

That these destinations are now accessible and offer distinctive experiences, alongside new learnings from history, makes them especially attractive to adventure seekers, says Vipul Prakash, chief business officer, MakeMyTrip.

Travel companies have been observing an uptick in dark tourism in India as well, with Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar and the Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands remaining the most popular destinations. “Over the last year, we have seen bookings to Port Blair and Amritsar increase by about 50 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively,” says Ramachandran.

There’s also the Skeleton Lake in Uttarakhand, where 200 skeletons were found in the high altitude glacial lake in 1942, and the supposedly haunted, abandoned village of Kuldhara near Jaisalmer. “There was a surge in the number of Indian travellers who wanted to visit the Chhabad House or see the Oberoi hotel, Taj hotel and CST station (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) in Mumbai post 26/11,” recalls Anand of Cox & Kings.

It’s more than the quest for a “morbid” experience that drives such tourism, says Asees Kaur Chadha, a clinical psychologist and arts therapist. “The desire to go to such places may not have anything to do with the calamity in itself but with the experiences of the people who lived through that. It’s an attempt to enter the minds of those people.”

David Farrier, the host of television show Dark Tourist, swims in Kazakhstan’s Atomic Lake

Chadha bases her views on Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. “It basically says that from an evolutionary aspect, all humans throughout the world — people who have lived in the past, those who are alive today and those who will be living in the future — are collectively bound by a set of principles,” she says. It is perhaps this collective unconsciousness that makes one want to connect with the rest of humanity.

Chadha’s expertise lies in travel therapy, which is rooted in environmental psychology. “The location and surroundings of a person have a huge impact on them,” she says. As part of her therapy, she removes her patients from stressful environments and takes them to nature-friendly environs so as to help them develop fresh perspectives. A therapeutic experience on the Andaman beaches is one example of what she offers through her Gurugram-based practice, Soul Therapy.  

The point of history is “to understand the mistakes our kind has made in the past. These trips help us get a better sense of why and how certain things happened,” says Chadha. This is especially significant at a time when, in the face of changing social structures (like nuclear families) people feel more isolated than they were before and there’s a need to actively seek out a sense of belonging and community. “Such experiences also help us learn how humanity has evolved in the face of both man-made calamities as well as natural disasters,” she says.

Media, too, has played a role in bringing forth the histories that have compelled tourists to move beyond beaches. Chernobyl, the television show, is the perfect testament to this. Yet another popular show that has come up primarily because of the thrill-seeker’s longing to go beyond conventional holidays is Netflix’s Dark Tourist. Here the host, David Farrier, joins dark tourists across the globe for experiences that range from scary to bizarre. It could be walking with the scores of tourists who flock to experience first-hand the remains of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Or, going on tours given by the small but loyal following that serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer has in Milwaukee. Or else visiting Colombia to see the places that were once commanded by narcoterrorist and drug lord Pablo Escobar, including the compound where he’d have people murdered.

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer

In one episode, Farrier, alongside a dark tourism enthusiast who visits warzones, swims in Lake Chagan in Kazakhstan. This is also known as the Atomic Lake. Their guide tells them the water here is a hundred times more radioactive that normal drinking water, thanks to the nuclear tests that the old Soviet Union carried out between 1949 and 1989. “I’m not sure if we are having an adventure or just being incredibly stupid,” remarks Farrier during the trip. Either way, it’s another spot crossed off his dark tourism list. 

A queue outside the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam | Photo: iStock

In Europe, grief tourism destinations include the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Berlin Wall in Germany, the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and the Somme Battlefields in France. “Visiting such places is a way to relate to the pain and trauma the victims went through,” says Anand. Lighting candles and offering flowers at memorials become prayer-like ceremonies here.

Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands | Photo: iStocks

On an aggregate, notes Ramachandran, Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru contribute to more than 85 per cent of the dark tourism bookings from India. While the Cambodian Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge regime rounded up and murdered millions, see a bulk of the bookings from Bengaluru, almost all the bookings for Kigali in Rwanda are from Mumbai. Kigali hosts the mass graves of the victims of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. This is the kind of tourism that also calls upon others to exhibit a high degree of sensitivity. 

The Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland | Photo: iStock

What Chernobyl offers today is a wasteland of sorts where dogs roam stray and where vegetation has established its stronghold on long abandoned buildings. An English language tour costs a minimum of $100 per person, and guides hawk on the importance of covering every inch of skin possible (so no shorts or open-toed sandals here), and refraining from touching anything or sitting anywhere. And yet, tourists-laden buses continue to pour in. 

The ghost town of Pripyat in northern Ukraine | Photo: iStock

Farrier, the host of Dark Tourist, best summarises the appeal of dark tourism in these words: “I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone. And somehow it’s made me feel even more happy to be alive.”