South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Macabre destinations
‘Dark tourism’ of tragic places aids visitors in processing harsh world
North Korea. East Timor. Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave that for decades has been a tinderbox for ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
They’re not your typical top tourist destinations.
But don’t tell that to Erik Faarlund, the editor of a photography website from Norway, who has visited all three. His next “dream” trip is to tour San Fernando in the Philippines around Easter, when people volunteer to be nailed to a cross to commemorate the suffering of Jesus Christ.
Faarlund, 52, has visited places that fall under a category of travel known as dark tourism, a term that boils down to visiting places associated with death, tragedy and the macabre.
As travel opens up, most people are using their vacation time for the typical goals: to escape reality, relax and recharge. Not so with dark tourists, who use their vacation time to plunge deeper into the bleak corners of the world.
They say going to abandoned nuclear plants or countries where genocides took place is a way to understand the harsh realities of current political turmoil, climate calamities, war and the growing threat of authoritarianism.
“When the whole world is on fire and flooded and no one can afford their energy bills, lying on a beach at a five-star resort feels embarrassing,” said Jodie Joyce, who has visited Chernobyl and North Korea.
Faarlund, who does not see his travels as dark tourism, said he wants to visit places “that function totally differently from the way things are run at home.”
Eighty-two percent of American travelers said they have visited at least one dark tourism destination in their lifetime, according to a study published this fall by Passport-photo.online, which surveyed more than 900 people. More than half of those surveyed said they preferred visiting “active” or former war zones.
About 30% said that once the war in Ukraine ends, they wanted to visit the Azovstal steel plant, where Ukrainian soldiers resisted Russian forces for months.
The growing popularity of dark tourism suggests more people are resisting vacations that promise escapism, choosing instead to witness firsthand the sites of suffering they have only read about, said Gareth Johnson, a founder of Young Pioneer Tours, which organized trips for Joyce and Faarlund.
Tourists, he said, are tired of “getting a sanitized version of the world.”
Pastime goes back to gladiator days
The term “dark tourism” was coined in 1996 by two academics from Scotland, J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, who wrote “Dark Tourism: The Attraction to Death and Disaster.”
But people have used their leisure time to witness horror for hundreds of years, said Craig Wight, associate professor of tourism management at Edinburgh Napier University.
“It goes back to the gladiator battles” of ancient Rome, he said. “People coming to watch public hangings. You had tourists sitting comfortably in carriages watching the Battle of Waterloo.”
Wight said the modern dark tourist usually goes to a site defined by tragedy to make a connection to the place, a feeling that is difficult to achieve by just reading about it.
By that definition, anyone can be a dark tourist. A tourist who takes a trip to New York City may visit ground zero. Visitors to Boston may drive north to Salem, Massachusetts, to learn more about the persecution of people accused of witchcraft in the 17th century. Travelers to Germany or Poland might visit a death camp. They might have any number of motivations, from honoring victims of genocide to getting a better understanding of history.
As tour operators have sprung up promising deep dives into places known for tragedy, media attention has followed and so have questions about the intentions of visitors, said Dorina-Maria Buda, a professor of tourism studies at Nottingham Trent University.
Stories of people gawking at neighborhoods in New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina or posing for selfies at Dachau led to disgust and outrage.
Were people driven to visit these sites out of a “sense of voyeurism or is it a sense of sharing in the pain and showing support?” Buda said.
David Farrier, a journalist from New Zealand, spent a year documenting travels to places like Aokigahara, the so-called suicide forest in Japan, the luxury prison Pablo Escobar built for himself in Colombia, and McKamey Manor in Tennessee, a notorious haunted house where people sign up to be buried alive, submerged in cold water until they feel like they will drown, and beaten.
The journey was turned into a show, “Dark Tourist,” that streamed on Netflix in 2018 and was derided by some critics as “sordid.”
Farrier, 39, said he often questioned the moral implications of his trips.
“It’s very ethically murky territory,” Farrier said.
But it felt worthwhile to “roll the cameras” on places and rituals that most people want to know about but will never experience, he said.
Visiting places where terrible events unfolded was humbling and helped him confront his fear of death.
A chance to reflect
Part of the appeal of dark tourism is its ability to help people process what is happening “as the world gets darker and gloomier,” said Jeffrey Podoshen, a professor of marketing at Franklin & Marshall College who specializes in dark tourism.
“People are trying to understand dark things, trying to understand things like the realities of death, dying and violence,” he said. “They look at this type of tourism as a way to prepare themselves.”
Faarlund recalled one trip with his wife and twin sons: a private tour of Cambodia that included a visit to the Killing Fields, where between 1975 and 1979 more than 2 million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation and disease under the Khmer Rouge regime.
His boys, then 14, listened intently to unsparing and brutal stories of the torture center run by the Khmer Rouge. Afterward, they met two of the survivors of the Khmer Rouge, men in their 80s and 90s. The teenagers asked if they could hug them and the men obliged, Faarlund said.
It was a moving trip that also included visits to temples, among them Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, and meals of frog, oysters and squid at a roadside restaurant.
“They loved it,” Faarlund said of his family.
Still, he can’t see them coming with him to see people reenact the crucifixion in the Philippines.
“I don’t think they want to go with me on that one,” Faarlund said.