Shambhala, Avalon, the Blessed Isles and the like have inspired humans for millennia, and yet–mystical insights aside–no physical traces of any of these locations have ever been found. Writers on dark tourism, however, like Peter Hohenhaus, have meticulously tracked down and descended into all kinds of hellscapes–places much more familiar and accessible to mere mortals.
Hohenhaus’s new book, Atlas of Dark Destinations, is a massive survey of tragedies both natural and man-made. He takes his readers to all four corners of the globe, illustrating through grisly, melancholic, and heartening photos humankind’s bloodthirst, fragility, and willpower. The ancient god Mercury was a psychopomp, a divine guide of souls in the nether regions, and in some sense Hohenhaus performs a similar function. His text and its accompanying images usher us into darkly alluring underworlds and otherworlds, remnants of primeval eras far more unforgiving than the present.
One of the Tatarian locales he introduces us to, for instance, is Ijen, an Indonesian volcano containing the world’s largest and most acidic sulphurous lake. Almost like the mythical Mount Pilate, whose demonolatrous residents became the stuff of legend, Ijen spits ghostly blue flames and can only be approached while wearing a respirator mask. Hohenhaus also describes how the acid lake tragically swallowed an unsuspecting tourist whole.
Among many other interesting locations mentioned in the Atlas are Turkmenistan’s hellmouth Darvaza, and Kazakhstan’s desiccated Aral Sea. Both are historic lessons–hugely relevant today–in how bureaucratic officialdom regularly raises up Pandemonium from the bowels of the Earth by grossly mismanaging or being criminally negligent in regional and global crises.
We caught up with Hohenhaus to learn more about his book and his personal and professional interests in dark tourism.
The Custodian: You say one of your earliest forays into dark tourism was a trip to North Korea. When did you go and what was the atmosphere like at the time? What did you see?
Peter Hohenhaus: That was in the summer of 2005, two years before I first encountered the term ‘dark tourism’ (so, like probably everybody else who visits dark sites, I already was a dark tourist without knowing it). It was a group tour – as is the case for most visitors to North Korea (the DPRK) because tourism is highly regulated there. I was in a very interesting group, which even was a bonus rather than a detraction (I don’t normally do organized group travel, because I fear adverse “group dynamics”, but in this case I had to, and it worked out well – I’m still in touch with a few people from my tour group back then!).
We were shown the usual “highlights” the regime and its tourism authority want visitors to see. So the really dark bits (hard labour camps, nuclear sites, etc.) were not mentioned, obviously. But we had an excursion to the DMZ on the border with South Korea, so we got an impression of the ongoing tensions between and division of the two Koreas. In Pyongyang we visited the Korean War Museum – in which the narrative is naturally very different from ours in the West. Other highlights included the USS Pueblo (a captured American spy boat), Kim Il-sung’s birth house, as well as his mausoleum where he’s lying in state (like Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh). We were shown various huge monuments, and the absolute top highlight was attending an Arirang “mass games” show in the world’s largest stadium (these are the largest choreographed shows on Earth–involving DPRK propaganda on a humongous level).
Before we went we were instructed to wear our best formal attire and that cameras were not allowed. This was already an indication that it would not be a regular show. And indeed, before the show started, then dictator Kim Jong-il (who had some Russian dignitary with him) stepped onto the VIP balcony and waved to the 100,000 spectators, many of them soldiers (who were probably ordered to attend to make sure the stadium was full). The whole amassed crowd then roared and started chanting “Kim Jong-il, Kim-Jong-il”. It was one of the most blood-chilling moments of my life.
In addition we were driven by bus, on empty eight-lane motorways and smaller country roads, to the International Friendship Exhibition, in which thousands of gifts are on display that Kim #1 and #2 had received from foreign leaders. That way, en route, we also caught a glimpse of what country life was like–noticeably poorer and more spartan than anything in the privileged city of Pyongyang. We noticed that while children and old people happily waved at us (foreigners are such a rare sight), younger or middle-aged adults tended to avoid looking our way. The only vehicles we saw in the countryside were ox-drawn carts…or military trucks.
Propaganda was of course everywhere, and on our last day we were given the opportunity to purchase some hand-painted posters in a somewhat clandestine meeting on one of the dark upper floors of our hotel, but overseen by our Korean guide, so in a hidden transaction but sanctioned by the tourism authority (probably thanks to the good relations they have with Koryo Tours). We purchased two posters.
When an excursion to the Chilbo mountains had to be abandoned due to adverse weather, we were given a tour of the Pyongyang film studios instead. Again, plenty of propaganda, and especially noteworthy were the depictions of Western/US “decadence”.
It was an otherworldly experience overall, a glimpse into a country that is so utterly different from anywhere else. Yet there was no element of fear or intimidation. We were treated courteously and fed well. The dark elements of the country were at best hinted at, understood by all, but not brought up in the open. The only challenging question one group member dared was to ask whether homosexuality was legal in the DPRK, to which our Korean guide’s answer was: “yes it is, but it doesn’t exist in this country”. Priceless.
The Custodian: As I was reading your book, I could not escape the feeling a strong sense of memento mori. It was instructive; the faded graffiti, the grandiose but lonesome architecture, the ruinous statues of turbulent, long-past ages…One grasps deeply the sadness, the vainglory, the ruthlessness of the human condition. Is this something you’ve also experienced in your travels? If so , how did you personally address–or cope with–this sentiment?
PH: Yes, it happens all the time, but the ways in which these sentiments are addressed/coped with vary a lot. In the DPRK most people in the group used (sometimes sarcastic) humour to deal with all the craziness. But at other, really seriously dark sites one more often falls into silence as you attempt to take it all in. It was most intense at Auschwitz and at the genocide memorials in Rwanda. There’s also a difference whether you visit a place with a guide or independently. When guided you let the guide do most of the talking and follow their lead. But when my wife and I (we usually travel together) are somewhere without a guide, we either stay silent throughout the visit, or at best point out particular details to each other. For me the fact that my visits at dark-tourism sites these days are in effect research field trips, to gather material for my dark-tourism.com website (and then the book), means I often have a certain “professional protection wall” between me and the site, especially as I concentrate on photography.
That often softens the impact that especially dark places can otherwise have on you. But it does nevertheless sometimes get to me, and usually it’s comparatively smaller details of a personal nature, rather than big monumental aspects. But the heavier sentiments then rear their head again when it comes to writing about these places. It’s pretty routine for me by now after having written about over a thousand dark destinations on my website (and a select 300 ones in my book), but occasionally it can still be emotionally taxing. I experienced this especially with Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec (the three Operation Reinhard death camps in Poland) and in particular with Murambi and Nyamata in Rwanda.
C: Were there any landmarks on your list that you weren’t able to visit?
PH: Do you mean in the DPRK or in general? In the DPRK we couldn’t visit the war crimes museum, which would have been interesting, nor Mt Paekdu with its dubious Kim Jong-il “nativity” propaganda lies.
In general, I still have a pretty long travel wish list. At the top are the destinations I couldn’t get to in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, in particular Taiwan and Namibia, but I’d also like to revisit Albania’s capital Tirana, as there is now so much more that’s significant for dark tourism than there was when I was last there in 2014. The longest list of places I have yet to visit is for the USA. I’ve been to the country five times, but still haven’t made it to the Deep South to see all the sites related to slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, for instance. Other big gaps are Cuba and much of Central America, as well as Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (where so far I have only been to Easter Island and Hawaii).
C: What tools would you say dark tourism can offer in addressing today’s global climate and environmental issues?
PH: The topic of climate change features only very rarely in dark tourism, mainly because most dark sites are related to dark pasts, not so much the present or future. But as it happens I’ve only just put a post on my blog that is about precisely this niche where the topic, exceptionally, does come up. E.g. there is a climate exhibition that is part of the Glacier Museum in Fjaerland, Norway. This has some pretty chilling outlooks to offer. Glaciers are also something where global warming can be directly observed, and sometimes this is even commodified for visitors in the form of information panels and signs that point out how far the ice used to reach. On hiking trails near Grindelwald in Switzerland there are panels with QR codes along the way where visitors can download background information about the climate-induced changes in the landscape and look at before-and-after images.
Other environmental aspects feature in dark tourism in the form of man-made disasters such as the Aral Sea drying up, pollution through mining (e.g. the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana) or oil drilling (Absheron, Azerbaijan), and other such things, like the Sidoarjo mudflow in Indonesia … and of course nuclear sites such as Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Otherwise the same “tools” regarding climate change apply to dark tourism as to tourism in general: offset your carbon footprint, avoid flying wherever possible, give preference to trains over other means of travel, don’t pollute, don’t be wasteful, and be as vegetarian as you can. (btw. my word-processing software just suggested I expand “can” to “cannibalism” here … spooky!)
C: What about geopolitics? Do you think there should be courses or seminars in dark tourism offered in schools?
PH: There are both seminars and courses, or at least coursework on dark tourism as part of wider studies, as I know from countless interviews I’ve given to students, especially in Germany, here in Austria and the USA. The hub of dark-tourism research in higher education, however, is the UK, where there are several courses and even a dedicated Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston. Geopolitics, however, doesn’t seem to play much of a role in these. The focus tends to be more on visitor motivations and highly philosophical (over)interpretations of what dark tourism is and why it exists. That’s despite the undeniably great potential dark tourism has in helping to understand geopolitics – basically learning from the past so as not to repeat it. More specifically, encountering all the propaganda that many dark-tourism sites come with, not just in the DPRK or in the context of Nazi ideology, makes you less susceptible to the forces of propaganda or conspiracy theories in general. That’s a definite bonus of dark tourism, something to gain for life in general from it.
C: What are you currently working on?
PH: At the moment mostly PR for my book Atlas of Dark Destinations that came out last October, i.e. contacting media, doing interviews and so on. Other than that I have to maintain my DT Blog and weekly Newsletter, and also keep expanding my main website. I still have about a dozen or so chapters to write from material I gathered from my own travels over the past couple of years … even though that was much restricted by the pandemic. But for instance I visited Venice (without cruise ships – hooray!) and Switzerland in the summer of 2020 and still have to write all that up, and I have small bits to catch up with from last year’s travels through Poland and Germany. After that I will have exhausted my first-hand material, and desperately need to go travelling again!
Another thing that may well keep me busy this year is preparing a German version of my book. It’s in my contract that if there is to be a German one that it would be my job to do. And I hope the publishers do decide that soon. There already are a Spanish and a Russian version, so a German one would sit well alongside these, also given how many German sites are covered in the book. And then there’s the fact that Germans are the world’s “travel champions”, and that partially extends to dark tourism as well.
But mainly I hope to be able to travel and explore again both to further broaden my own horizons and to expand the coverage on my website.
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