VIA Lost Weekend
The travel industry is fond of its buzz phrases, such as ‘Venice of the North or South, East and West to denote anywhere from Birmingham, England, to Wroclaw, Poland, or ‘adventure travel’, to describe everything from a one-man, one-armed expedition to the Antarctic to using the stairs in your house . However, the newest phrase cooked up by the industry has to rate as one of the worst, ‘Dark Tourism‘.
Dark Tourism is visits to sites such as Ground Zero, Auschwitz and Alcatraz. Apparently, suffering is a big crowd puller. Prisons, sites of natural disasters and battlefields all fall under the new heading.
Anybody who finds this kind of tourism ‘dark’ clearly needs a crash course in human psychology, one flick through CNN or the BBC is hardly a trip to news Disneyland.
Human history is filled with suffering, and anybody who is interested in history will find themselves at these sights. People have long been visiting ‘dark’ sights to learn and educate themselves about the worlds past mistakes first-hand, at the time, this was simply known as educational tourism.