The Chernobyl zone has become a fairly popular tourist destination today
And travel companies are ready to offer tours with a 'twist' – offers that will not only surprise a discerning tourist but also allow them to make money in a crisis.
One of the directions, one might say a trendy trend, which is exactly this 'twist', is immersion in the life of the country, the opportunity to spend a couple of days not strolling through museums, restaurants, and shops, but living the life of a 'native'. For example, how about helping an Italian farmer in an orange grove? Or a Scandinavian farmer with strawberry picking? Get up at dawn, spend the day doing physical work in the fresh air, feel at one with nature. Indeed, such an experience is one hundred percent exotic for a New Yorker or Londoner, plus free labor for the farmer and profit for the tour company. As they say, everyone is happy.
However, if agricultural work does not attract you, scuba diving and spearfishing cause a bored yawn, and African safari is a long-past stage, then you can go to Vietnam. Where former Viet Cong guerrillas will lead you along secret paths in the jungle, through underground tunnels, and will gladly tell you about places of military glory. There it is – an opportunity to see history not through the prism of mass culture, but from the stories of eyewitnesses.
Although such 'exoticism' can be found closer. They say some travel companies offer tours of Stalin's camps and prisons. The last century has thoroughly battered the vanished country of the USSR: the White movement, dispossessed peasants, sufferers for their faith, dissidents, and hundreds of thousands of innocent people sat in camps that multiplied in huge numbers in the north, the Far East, and Central Asia. Stalin's repressions left an unhealing wound in our history, and one way to immerse oneself in the atmosphere of that time is to take a tour 'to places not so remote', feel the watchful gaze of a submachine gunner, try prison gruel, absorb the loneliness of prison walls. Such an experience is very sobering, allows you to look at your life in a new way. They say the Russian autocrat Alexander II once ordered himself locked in a solitary cell to understand the feelings of prisoners, so that when he next signed a sentence, he would understand what he was condemning someone to.
In addition, industrial excursions are gaining great popularity in city tours – for example, to a perfume factory, a metallurgical workshop, or a cognac distillery. In our modernized age, the technology of manufacturing one or another product can be quite curious and informative.
Well, if you want real extreme, there is no better way to shake up your mind than to see the world after the Apocalypse. Where? If you search a little on the web, you can find legal tours to the closed zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It is there, after meeting with self-settlers, a lecture on the causes and consequences of the accident, after viewing the famous 'sarcophagus' from afar, on the streets of the dead city of Pripyat, you will feel and understand what emptiness and loneliness mean, and how fragile the world created by man is. Empty streets, houses, schools, hospitals, and silence... What better reason to reflect on life?
Such tourism not only carries an educational load but also develops an understanding of international conflicts and disasters, develops the spiritual principle and prompts reflection.