Travelling to the dark side

The lessons of history: Visitors to Cambodia’s Killing Fields ponder a memorial filled with the skulls of more than 8,000 victims of the Khmer Rouge. (CHOR SOKUNTHEA/REUTERS)

From New York's ground zero to the Killing Fields of Cambodia, tourists are flocking to sites of suffering - and even into war zones. Laszlo Buhasz explores our desire to pay tribute and look death in the face

LASZLO BUHASZ
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
November 5, 2008

When I went to Kanchanaburi, Thailand, I was a dark tourist.

I had come to see a bridge on the Kwai River, an important link in a wartime railway built by the Japanese known as the Death Railway. In 1942, 60,000 British, Australian, Dutch and American prisoners of war, along with 270,000 conscripted labourers, were shipped in to work on the line. When it was completed 15 months later, it had earned its nickname: More than 13,000 PoWs, 80,000 Asian labourers and 1,000 Japanese and Korean guards died while working in the most appalling conditions imaginable.

While death and brutality marked every metre of its length, Hollywood and the nearby burial grounds of the Death Railway's victims focused remembrance on Kanchanaburi. Here, one of several bridges built by prisoners has become the Bridge on the River Kwai: a concrete version of the dramatic structure built, and then destroyed, in the immensely popular 1957 movie.

The result is that while the nearby cemeteries are manicured and dignified, the bridge has become uncomfortably entwined with hucksterism and cinematic myth. Surrounded by garish billboards, cheap hotels, tacky souvenirs and touts for elephant rides, the bridge and its meaning have been buried under layers of commercialism. Each November, around Remembrance Day, a "sound-and-lights" show with fireworks celebrates the bridge's destruction in 1945.

There are strange scenes like this around the world today, as tour buses keep rolling in to sites associated with death and suffering: the Killing Fields of Cambodia, New York's ground zero, the genocide memorials in Rwanda and Nazi death camps in Central Europe. This Remembrance Day, many travellers - even those with no family connections to the soldiers who fought there - will also visit memorials to the dead near European battlefields of the First and Second World Wars.

These visitors have mixed motives: to remember and pay tribute, out of patriotism or just to see what they have seen in the movies, says Philip Stone, a senior lecturer with the
University of Central Lancashire in England who is studying the phenomenon of dark tourism.

But experts say it's also a way of confronting the darkest parts of human nature. The experience of death has been abstracted, moved out of everyday discussion, Stone argues. "It has largely been professionalized and institutionalized by hospitals and funeral parlours. And yet people still have a fascination [that is] inherent in human nature. So they go out and find some of the answers about death by visiting ground zero, the Cambodian Killing Fields or a Siberian gulag."

Their numbers are so significant that tourism boards are taking notice. About two million people will visit Cambodia this year, and a third are expected to visit the Killing Fields. Ground zero in New York has become one of the most-visited dark-tourism sites in the world, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, many on organized tours of 9/11 sites. More than 700,000 people tour Auschwitz every year. And Rwanda has become known for two attractions:
gorillas and genocide.

Increasingly, tourists are also going to places touched by disaster almost as soon as it happens, according to academic John Lennon.

"In Northern Ireland, there were bus tour to the sites of the Troubles in the time of the Troubles," says Lennon, a professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and co-author of Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster.

"In Sarajevo, there was a Massacre Trail for tourists within months of the massacres. Today, you can find tour operators who will take you to Afghanistan and Iraq if you want to get close to a theatre of war."

Going to these places is a socially acceptable way to confront death, says Manfred Becker, a Toronto filmmaker whose documentary Dark Tourism recently aired on History Television and will be shown next month at a festival in Guangzhou, China. His documentary covers places such as Cambodia, where a visit to pyramids of skulls can be followed by the thrill of firing an AK-47 or throwing a live grenade.

In Vietnam, groups of Westerners are shown Vietcong tunnels, man traps and then a collection of deformed fetuses - allegedly the result of American defoliants - preserved in glass jars.

"Many are searching for profound meaning, to understand what happened in these places," Becker says. "But many also go to remind themselves how good they have it."

While the details change, our fascination with death is nothing new, Lennon says. He points out that Romans once flocked to watch gladiators kill each other, and people travelled in carriages to watch the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In 1861, spectators took picnic baskets to watch the first battle of the American Civil War at Manassas, Va., and the battlefield was sold two days later to speculators who turned it into a tourist attraction.

But the reach of pop culture has intensified the process, Lennon says. "The trigger for me to look at dark tourism was when the movie Schindler's List came out," he says. "When Steven Spielberg wasn't allowed to film at Auschwitz, he had to mock up a replica of the death camp outside Krakow. For about two years after the film, some tourists actually went on tours to the film set because it was handier to Krakow than the real thing."

The very popularity of some sites has affected their impact.

Blake Dinkin, manager of community relations for Barrick Gold Corp., felt rushed when he toured Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp in Germany, this summer.

"In the museum, there was a display of clothes, letters and other mementos of those who died," he says. "We were given just 30 minutes there. It takes a lot more time to absorb a place like that emotionally and to be properly affected by it, not just to intellectualize it."

Not all dark-tourism sites have been overwhelmed by their popularity. In Rwanda, memorials to the 1994 genocide do not receive large numbers of visitors, says Samar Muscati, a Toronto lawyer who is co-editing a book about Rwandan survivors of sexual violence who contracted HIV.

"When you go there now, you can take your time to concentrate on what happened and it really does affect you," he says. "Once these places get commercialized and you go there as a package tourist, you won't get the same meaning from them."

Some sites offer a look at ongoing suffering. Muscati has also visited the infamous Potosi Mines in Bolivia where hundreds of thousands of miners have died since Spanish colonization - indigenous people, African slaves and now locals who have been contracted to mine there and have to provide their own tools and supplies.

"Tours are sold as a chance to be a miner for a day," Muscati says. "They take you into the shafts and the conditions are appalling. Miners still die there. At the same time there are benefits for the miners. You're supposed to bring them coca leaves to chew for energy and also dynamite. But, of course, there are many who go on the tour for goose bumps and machismo."

And really, Lennon says, it's not so hard to understand why people want to do that, or why they want to look death in the face. "Aren't we all curious about the things we fear?"