Hello, and welcome to the blog. This is our inaugural post, perhaps the first of many. It may in the future be considered the founding document of pollution tourism. That, or an embarrassing reminder of the writing style of my early middle period. Either way, please press the “fanfare” button on the side of your head.
The creation of this site represents a great leap forward for all of us, specifically as regarding our options for leisure travel. Previously, pollution tourists (I should say “pollution tourist,” in case I’m the only one) have spread the gospel using the folkloric mode, their reports often delivered over bowls of guacamole that tended to win a disproportionate share of an audience’s attention. Visitsunnychernobyl.com (and it’s umbrella site pollutiontourism.com) takes that guacamole out of the equation, and provides a scalable, digital platform from which I can not only talk to myself—something I can do without a computer—but archive it (which I find increasingly difficult using only a brain). The blog will also help me realize how quickly my punctuation and grammar are failing.
An inaugural blog post seems like a good time to bang out a manifesto, and pollution tourism certainly has one. It’s a manifesto battle-tested down through the years, over plates of french fries and between glasses of vodka and tonic. In fact, it has been battle-tested for so long that it is now positively battle-scarred, its a-frame badly bent and blue smoke billowing from its coughing tailpipe. Time to leave the original, word-of-mouth Pollution Tourism Manifesto in a ditch by the side of the road, where it can rot in peace. We’ll set out on foot, free of any guiding philosophy. The new manifesto will write itself point by point as we head out across the country and the world in search of new and better (i.e. worse) places to spend our tourist days and dollars.
For the meantime, we’ll start with a simple rule of thumb: Follow the dirt.