Visit Sunny Chernobyl

Visit Sunny Chernobyl is the name of the blog, and so today we’re beginning the story, in many parts, of my adventures in the Exclusion Zone.

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Just as you might visit Los Angeles on your way to Disneyland, you get to Chernobyl via Kiev. How you get to Kiev is up to you. There are flights, but that didn’t sound very exciting to me; besides, I was planning on visiting a friend in Austria, and—unbothered by the geographical realities of central and eastern Europe—I thought Kiev was just a hop and a skip further east. So after flying to Vienna, I bought a round trip ticket on the Kiev Express. (more…)

Good Magazine has Eric Smillie’s excellent roundup of five exquisitely trashy spots, all in the United States (except one in the Pacific Ocean). This is the first truly pollution-tourist-friendly article I’ve ever come across. Thanks to Adam Bolt for spotting it.

The list is garbage-focussed, but they all sound like excellent destinations, especially the giant trash pile floating in the Pacific. Smillie deserves special credit for not just rehashing the same lists of polluted places that everyone else has already gotten their teeth into. And he’s even got tips for how to get to each place and where to stay when you get there.

Hear that sound? It’s the zeitgeist sliding in this direction.

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Beautiful Messes: A Travel Guide to Man-Made Disasters

Listmania never stops. At Neatorama I encountered a list of The Most Polluted Cities in the United States, as based on data from the American Lung Association. Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are duking it out for the title, with Pittsburgh moving to the top of the list for “short-term particle pollution.” In the LA Times, Mayor Villaraigosa crowed, “Today I’m proud . . . to say for the first time, it feels good to be No. 2.” And Outside Magazine’s blog phoned in some finger-wagging on Pittsburgh:

Congrats, Pittsburgh. Somehow, you beat out LA as the most-polluted city in America… You should probably start a public bike program, and pass some more green initiatives. In the meantime, pick up your phone. China’s calling. They have some facemasks to sell you.

Not so fast. (more…)