We’re introducing a new section on Visit Sunny Chernobyl today. (That’s not the royal “we” there, by the way. It’s the optimistic “we”.) Every regular traveler (regular in that they would prefer to avoid toxic sludge, radiation, etc, while on vacation) has a list, or an idea of a list, of places he or she would like to visit. As often as not, the list has precious little to do with where a person actually will travel, but it’s still nice to have the list as an ideal. And the pollution tourist is no different. Yes, I have a list. And I’m going to reveal that list here. Gradually. Post by post. When I feel like it. A few of the places I’ve had in the back of my mind for years. Others are the product of recent eureka moments, or have been suggested by friends.
Thus is born the Destinations section of our humble site. (If you can think of a name that sounds even more like a section of Parade magazine, please let me know.) These will be the posts that explore the pollution tourist’s dream vacations. And though I fully intend to visit all these places myself in the months and years ahead, I’ve got special prizes for any person out there who first gets to any of our featured Destinations and sends me some photos and a report.
Anyway. There’s been a heat wave in New York City. A sultry (or, if you like, oppressive) closeness hangs in the air, and whatever you’re doing, you find yourself suddenly sweatier than you had expected. The spring is out of Spring’s step. Actually let’s face it, Spring isn’t stepping at all anymore. It’s stopped in its tracks, stunned and overtaken, undone by the heat. The euphoria that came with the end of Winter is long gone, and there’s a bit of dread about the hot months unfolding before us, a yin-dread that fits perfectly hand in hand with the yang-dread you get on a cold November day when you see Winter stretching out in front of you.
In short, it’s Summer. And so unless you’re a communist or something, it’s time to think about the beach.
The main problem with the beach, aside from all that sand and water and sun, of course, is the presence of so many other people. And for some reason, beaches just shouldn’t have too many other beachgoers around. No beach, whether it be on Long Island or in the Caribbean, is ever advertised as having more than, say, three people on it, and one of those people is supposed to be you, looking much better than you actually do in a bathing suit. (The other two people allowed on advertising beaches are attractive, sexually available members of the opposite sex.) These idealized beaches are completely pristine, their sands virginally white, their waters a supernatural indigo unseen even in Oliver Sacks’s weirdest acid trip.
Reality usually diverges from this ideal, naturally, and the crowded, trash-strewn mediocrity of most beaches is the counterpoint to every magazine ad you’ve ever seen for the Bahamas. The idea of the pristine beach depends for its allure on our memories of sullied beaches, in the sort of structuralist codependency that used to turn college students on. I once saw a beach that managed to be both pristine and sullied at once. It was near Pondicherry, on the southeast coast of India. It was perhaps the most beautiful beach I’d ever been to, with miles of smooth sand and warm water. But then I noticed it was scattered with all kinds of shit. Literally shit. Maybe not all kinds, though—it was pretty much just human shit. The beach, though coveted by foreigners for its picturesque beauty, was valued locally for its usefulness as a toilet, and there were little bowel-ziggurats everywhere you looked. It was a nasty disappointment, unless you understood that the shit was actually guarding that beach, driving the crowds away like a little army of plucky brown sentinels. Standing there, surrounded by the morning bowel movements of an entire community, I realized that the problem with dirty beaches is not that they’re dirty, but that we wish they were clean.
Ok, I’m digressing. This whole post could have read, “Screw Cancun, I’m going to Sitakunda.”
Sitakunda, in Chittagong, in Bangladesh, is the premiere spot in the world for shipbreaking. You see, ships have to go somewhere to die. But unlike people or dogs, the corpse of a dead ship can be quite valuable, from a recycling point of view. So valuable, in fact, that long before it becomes unseaworthy a ship may find itself worth more as raw material than as a useful boat, no matter how well it plies the ocean. We should be happy this isn’t true for humans, by the way, or people would be killing you for your bones before you even got to retirement age. A bit like having too much life insurance, I guess.
Anyhow, when they can no longer resist the idea of a quick payout for an old boat, the owners of these ships—tankers, supertankers, ubersupertankers, cruise ships, what have you—sell them to shipbreaking companies. Shipbreaking companies, which are… companies that, um, break up ships. See? The shipbreakers drive the ships up on the beach at high tide, and when the water recedes, the ship is left high, dry, and ready to be ripped to pieces and melted down to make new stuff.
I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, this is the twentyfirst century. Shouldn’t they be doing that in a dry dock?” That is what you were thinking, wasn’t it? Unless you’re my girlfriend, who may be this blog’s only reader. In which case, you’re thinking, “How did it come to this?”
Anyway, drydocks are expensive. So is cleaning up all the crud that spills out of a ship (especially a tanker) when you cut it apart. Just the cutting apart of a ship is expensive, if you want to make sure people don’t get cut up along with it, or crushed by falling sections of hull, and so on. So, naturally, shipbreakers spring up where the costs are the least, where you don’t need a drydock, where you can just let the toxic crud spill out on the beach, and where a few crushed workers or severed limbs are all part of the trade. Namely: Sitakunda.
Sitakunda is one of the few places in the world where coastal conditions, lax worker protection, and casual environmental regulation all come together to create a shipbreaking mecca. (Ambon, in India, is another.) The result is truly something to be seen, and I hope to get there soon. Thousands of people trudging around, taking gigantic ships apart with nothing but their hands and the occasional blowtorch. (What, you’ve got a better way?) The beaches have long since become something of an industrial shithole, and—just as you might expect—that tends to keep the tourists away. But why should it? Is it really so much better to sit on the white sand and gaze at the azure perfection of the water in some unspoiled cove in the South Pacific, when you could be here in Sitakunda watching a hundred guys pull the side off a supertanker with a rope?
Cmon! Easy question!
Anyone who has doubts should check out the photography of Edward Burtynsky, the post-industrial Ansel Adams, who has taken some mindbending pictures of shipbreaking beaches. You can also check out this segment from 60 Minutes, though you should ignore the haughty “hell on earth” attitude and the holier-than-thou approach they take to the Bengali scene. After all, the whole world—that includes us—is selling their ships to the shipbreakers. It’s not like we as consumers are leaping out of our barcaloungers to pay more for our shipping or our fuel, just so the ships that provide it can be taken apart more cleanly. We’re all in this globe thing together, guys, so let’s be a little less shocked and show a little more ownership when we find out that our commerce creates a lot of trash, and shit.
Vacationwise, Sitakunda seem absolutely ripe. In the positive sense. I doubt that the shipbreaking companies get a lot of tourists, especially ones who aren’t there to cluck their tongues at their environmental practices. (I might cluck my tongue, but not so specifically at the shipbreakers. More at the world in general.) I would imagine that, once they figure out you’re not an activist, a friendly beachgoer could set up his chair and umbrella largely unharrassed. What’re you going to do, steal a propeller off an old Carnival cruise ship? And tourguides must be cheap, since they probably won’t realize they are tour guides until after you have ask ed them to guide your tour. Just make sure you don’t get crushed or killed or burnt or stuck in toxic quicksand or something, ok? If you do, it’s not my fault.
And it doesn’t have to be all about sludge and falling steel plates. It looks like, as you get away from the shipbreaking beaches, Sitakunda is an interesting region to visit even from a more conventional point of view. Proper tourists would surely skip it, but then, they would probably skip all of Bangladesh. There are a bazillion mosques and temples and shrines (and a few ashrams) in the area, and even an eco-park and some alternative energy projects, for chrissakes. What’s not to like about this place?
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UPDATE: In the comments, Mark says he has recently been here, and that most of the yards are actually in a place called Bhatiary, about 20km to the south. Thanks, Mark!