Cohen - No holiday: 80 places you dont want to visit

2006 Martin Cohen

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ISBN-13: 978-1-932857-29-0

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For Wod!

Glorious, stirring sight! murmured Toad, never offering to move. The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here todayin next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumpedalways somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame (1908)

The travel industry has almost fully rebounded from 9/11. Family tourism is up, and people seem more than willing to hop on planes and cross the globe. There are fun holidays and adventure holidays, honeymoons and Spring Break trips. Or so my travel advisor tells me. But there are few political holidays, for politics and vacations are thought not to mix. Yet holidays are also about discovering unknown aspects of the world. And so it might behoove us to visit not only the great sights but also the great sores: from the cursed massacre sites of Africa and Central America to the poisoned shores of the Aral Sea and Scotland's Anthrax Island.

In this book, we will line upnot at museums and art galleriesbut at more sinister political monuments, like the CIA-funded Academy of Terror. We will tread the no-man's lands of the various demilitarized zones, between North and South Korea, between Syria and Israeleven between Catholic and Protestant turf in Northern Ireland. We will go big game hunting like old-world imperialists in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Then we will become prey in the streets of Belfast and Baghdad. If time permits (for the world is large and there is much to see), we will visit the killing fields of Cambodia, or Australiaor even Madagascar? On this tour, the traveler must be forgiven for losing track of their location. For in truth, the post-colonial landscape is similar the world over, and the difference is just a matter of time zone.

00 Working No Holiday

01 Self-reliance line

02 African White Elephant

03 Outpost of Tyranny

04 Area of Outstanding Natural Destruction

05 Biker Politics

06 Animal Cruelty Outings

07 Massacre Memorial Walks

08 Cultural or Educational Side Trip

09 Imperialism Hikes

10 Revolutionary Trail

11 Trivial Tripping

12 Poisonous Places

13 Weapons of Mass Destruction

14 Radioactivity

15 Divided Communities

16 Photo Opportunity

17 Risk Factor

A: Low / B: Moderate / C: High

No Holiday: Chernobyl, Ukraine

Travel back in time to a concrete memorial to the heroic dreams of the USSR

According to the London Daily Telegraph, Chernobyl has become an unlikely tourist destination. But why so unlikely? After all, as the home of the world's worst nuclear disaster, surely it deserves a visit.

And these days, visitors have ready access. Scheduled flights to the capital of the Ukraine can be combined with competitively priced $190 packages specially tailored to visiting the infamous reactor.

Travel companies in Kiev line up to take day-trippers on guided tours around the Chernobyl power plant and its poisonous environs.

One typical tour offers to let you Experience the peace and quiet of the ghost-town Prypyat (where all 47,500 inhabitants had to abandon their homes the day after the accident!) Explore the deserted apartment blocks, schools, hotels, kinder gardens [sic].

This is followed by lunch. We are reassured that the quality of food is guaranteed though its radioactivity levels are not. In the afternoon, a briefing is conducted by a specialist of a governmental agency to provide you with answers to your questions about the current ecological situation and the future of the exclusion zone.

Lucky tourists, armed with Geiger counters, can even find their way into the radiation zone, where they will be shown family homes, abandoned Pompeii-style (the unfortunate Roman City buried in poisonous ash after the eruption of Vesuvius) and unchanged since they were evacuated at a few minutes' notice.

The zone is also a strange time capsule of the vanished Soviet era. A bust of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin still greets the travelers at the plant's en-trance. Prypyat, once the area's largest city, is now a ghost town whose melancholy concrete apartment blocks, still bedecked with uplifting communist slogans, offer pitiful reminders of the desperate evacuation. In an abandoned playground, a motionless Ferris wheel waits forever for the children to return. Family photographs, upturned furniture, shoes, clothes and other belongings lie where they fell as the shroud of plutonium settled over the city.