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