Monday, 19 January 2009

• Disaster Tourism

  by Molly

  When thinking about a travel destination, the most common response is to name an island destination with warm weather, cold umbrella drinks and a beach nearby. What if your response was one a little less than traditional?

  

  After the Hurricane Katrina, disaster, or grief, tourism started to gain quite a bit of recognition. This type of travel has been around for quite some time, and is defined by Wikipedia as "the act of traveling to a disaster as a matter of curiosity."

  Diaster/Grief tourism is a type of travel that is more popular than one would think, and spans the world in popularity. Large crowds came to visit Ground Zero to see the wreckage after the 9/11 attacks, and went to Thailand to see the mass destruction caused by the tusnami in Phuket. There were so many disaster tourists, in fact, that they were beginning to impede relief efforts.

  Although, disaster sites aren't the only popular destinations for grief tourists. Some of the most popular destinations in many of the major cities include battlegrounds, cemetaries, old prisons and Holocaust museums. Some of the top sites are Alcatraz, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, which seems almost necessary when you are in San Francisco, Japan or Poland.

  But why must we continue to revisit the sites where such terrible events took place? Why would someone want to travel to New Orleans just to see how desolate and terrible the lives of so many have become?

  And yet, I have been to Alcatraz and Holocaust museums and graveyards on my trips. I don't think of myself as a disaster tourist, I just felt that it was important to see those sites. They are an important part of our history that shouldn't be forgotten, but it does seem kind of grave and sad to travel to a place knowing that you will only be reminded of something terrible.

  But the popularity of this type of tourism has only grown. For more information, check out this Grief Tourism website

  Have you ever gone on a disaster tourism-type trip? Would you ever go?

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