Personal top-10 dark tourist experiences

   
1. Chernobyl & Pripyat, full 2-day private tour in May 2015, and again in November 2018, Ukraine
 
2. Murambi genocide memorial in December 2010, Rwanda
 
3. Opening of the Arirang Mass Games by Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang
    in August 2005, North Korea
 
4. climbing down into Ijen crater in the middle of the night to see the blue flames at the sulphur mine next to the crater's acid lake, Indonesia, August 2014 
 
5. Majdanek in the snow in April 2008, Poland
 
6. Auschwitz-Birkenau full two-day guided study tour in April 2008, Poland
 
7. Driving into the Polygon/Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, right past ground zero and the ruins of the measuring towers and bunkers, and seeing the gruesome medical effects of the atomic testing at the medical exhibition in Semey, August 2011, Kazakhstan
 
8. Îles du Salut, French Guiana (especially the former ‘reclusion’ cells on Île St-Joseph), August 2019
 
9. Fukushima two-day tour in and around the exclusion zone, also featuring some of the remaining damage from the 2011 tsnunami, April 2019, Japan
 
10. Goli Otok former prison island, by privately hired boat and then three hours alone on the island exploring the ruins, April 2018, Coatia    
 
 
 
more extraordinarily dark experiences:
   
- 'Ground Zero' in August 2002 (also in April 2010 and again in 2015 with the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum), New York, USA
 
- Hiroshima Peace Park & Peace Memorial Museum, April 2009, and again in April 2019, Japan
  
- Nagasaki, Japan, for the Atomic Bomb Museum in April 2009, and again in April 2019, this time with an add-on private tour with a local historian to other sites associated with the A-bombings as well as with Korean POW camps.
 
- full top-to-bottom tour in April 2012 at the Titan Missile Silo, Arizona, USA
  
- Choeung Ek killing fields & Tuol Sleng/S-21 in December 2008, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
  
- A night camping next to the Darvaza flaming gas crater in the middle of the Karakum desert in central Turkmenistan, November 2010
 
- Montserrat with the erupting/glowing Soufriere Hills volcano & viewing the destroyed capital Plymouth, the island's "modern-day Pompeii", in December 2009/January 2010.
  
- Pyramiden ex-Soviet ghost town, Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Norway, August 2012
  
- Exploring the Alien-like dilapidated monument of Buzludzha, Bulgaria, in April 2011
  
   
- tour of the disused Zwentendorf nuclear power plant, including the reactor core, in November 2013, Austria
  
- Hohenschönhausen former Stasi remand prison guided tour with a former inmate who was an extremely interesting case, March 2008, Berlin, Germany  
   
- battlefield tour from Port Howard, West Falkland, to see the crash sites of Argentinian fighter jets from the Falkland War, December 2013 
  
- Chacabuco, Chile, December 2011
    
- Volgograd, Russia, in August 2017
  
- helicopter flight over Hawaii’s active volcanoes just outside Volcanoes National Park, Big Island, Hawaii, USA, July 2015
  
- Le Redoutable nuclear submarine, Cite de la Mer, Cherbourg, France, September 2016
   
- full day tour of the war sites on southern Okinawa, April 2009, Japan
  
- 8-day tour of East Timor, including 5 days by jeep through the countryside + 3 days in Dili, August 2014
    
- Mauthausen and Hartheim, on a foggy couple of days in November 2009, Austria
  
- Robben Island on a former-inmate-led guided tour from Cape Town in August 2003, South Africa
  
   
  
  

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