There’s a lot to do in Kiev. You can stroll down the Andriyivskyy Descent, lined with cafes and shops; or explore the mysterious catacombs of the Pechersk Lavra, and its menagerie of dead monks. Or you can dive into the city’s pulsing downtown nightlife.

But I wasn’t interested in any of that crap. I went straight for the Chernobyl Museum.

There’s a special blend of horror and civic pride on display at a museum dedicated to a local industrial disaster. The Chernobyl Museum has that and more, incorporating history, memorial, commentary, art, religion, and even fashion. Clearly, it is the mutant offspring of several divergent curatorial aesthetics. I found the main exhibit upstairs: a wide, marble-floored hall that doubles back on itself at its midpoint. The walls and display cabinets were crammed with every imaginable kind of Chernobyl paraphernalia: photographs, newspaper articles, objects, books (both foreign and domestic), letters, dioramas, videos, a full-sized set of helicopter rotors… The organizing principle seemed to be: if it had any relationship to the accident, it belonged in this gallery.

A tall aluminum scaffold leaned out to the left of the gallery entrance. It was, I suspect, some kind of homage to the liquidators, the army of military and civil personnel whose job it had been to clean, raze, bury, and otherwise attempt to contain and control the appalling contamination of the Chernobyl zone. Dangling from the structure were half a dozen mannequins of the kind you might find in a department store. Each wore a different kind of contamination suit, and they were arranged in a formation that suggested a bizarre squad of flying superheroes. The top mannequin, especially, looked as if it had been frozen mid-bungee-jump. It modeled a black firefighting suit with large, white stripes running sideways across it, a wide leather belt, and a metal backpack connected to a gas mask and respirator. The mask and respirator were thrown jauntily forward, hanging down the chest. A white helmet perched on the mannequin’s head, and through the plastic bubble of the faceguard, I could just make out the painted lips and full lashes of its plastic, female head. I stood mesmerized by its cool, department-store gaze.

The scaffold also bristled with scores of small photographs of men in uniform, early responders to the accident, who had received overwhelming doses of radiation as they combated the fire and its effects. The images clustered around a clock, its hands frozen at the time of the accident—1:26.

Underneath the scaffold was a model in cross-section of the reactor building in its pre-accident state. As I peered into it to get a view of the reactor’s inner workings, my interest was noticed by two middle-aged women who had been lurking by the door. They were docents, I think, but they moved with the curt authority of guards. They rushed forward to turn the model on, groping at a control panel attached to the base. At the flip of a switch, the model reactor glowed, showing the normal circulation of water in the core. But the women were unsatisfied. Fussing in Ukranian, they began flipping the switch back and forth, wiggling and slapping the little control panel with increasing fervor. I struggled not to see any symbolism in this, and failed. Finally, they jiggled the switch just right, and the rest of the reactors systems—water and steam pipes, cooling systems and boilers—flickered to life.

Running up and out of the aluminum scaffold were several fire hoses, limp tentacles that draped from the ceiling and led me onward down the exhibit hall. My two companions ignored my interest in the cases of documents and photographs, shuttling me instead to a series of video kiosks. They would start each video and explain its significance briefly in Ukrainian, eyeing me hopefully for glimmers of understanding. One of the videos showed a group of men shoveling debris off the roof of the reactor. You could look at this video in any other circumstance and think it the most pedestrian thing in the world. A bunch of guys shoveling. They walk back and forth. They shovel some more. The entire group, cameraman included, was probably receiving crippling doses of radiation.

Underneath the helicopter rotors, there was another scale model. I was beginning to suspect a Ukrainian affinity for models and dioramas. This one was of the landscape surrounding the accident site, and showed the location of Pripyat in relation to the reactor complex. A city of over 40,000, Pripyat had been evacuated on the 27th of April, thirty-six hours after the accident. The model also showed many of the smaller towns and villages that had been abandoned. I studied the model carefully, parsing the landscapes for promising picnic spots. But my time in the exhibit hall was limited. The two docents, fervid in the pursuit of their craft, shooed me into an adjoining hall; evidently another video had started, and they didn’t want to have to start it twice.

The second hall was some kind of memorial, equal parts altar and art gallery, and one of the most opaquely bizarre spaces I had ever set foot in. Just inside the door was a large altar screen, seemingly transplanted intact from an Orthodox church, but strung with barbed wire. On its left side hung a life-size painting of the Archangel Gabriel, on the right an empty contamination suit holding a pair of wire clippers. This was only the entryway, but symbolism-wise, I was already in over my head. Coming around the screen, I entered a moody, auditorium-sized chamber with a vaulted ceiling. Soothing Russian choral music played in the background. The somber lighting cycled slowly from red through blue to green and back. Dominating the center of the room was another model: a life-sized replica of the top of the reactor core. Its thick, metal tiles lay on the floor, arranged in a rough octagon about forty-five feet on each side. I hesitated before stepping onto it, imagining the gigantic nuclear core that, in a real reactor, would have extended several stories below this surface.

At the center of the replica reactor shield, a section of tiles had been removed, and in the recessed area, arranged on a backdrop of black velvet, was—naturally—an assortment of old bibles and Christian icons painted on small wooden panels. Above this, suspended from the ceiling, was a cupola of sorts, decorated with embroidered white banners. And hanging from the hovering cupola by four heavy chains was, you know, just what you would expect at the Chernobyl Museum: a long dugout canoe. Filled with dolls and stuffed animal toys.

The baffling mix of nuclear, Christian, and childhood symbolism was starting to creep me out. It was like stumbling onto the huge art installation that your crazy backwoods neighbor had been secretly working on for decades in his tumbledown garage, complete with its own invented mythology and intended cosmic significance, and now you’re wondering what’s he’s got buried in the back yard. The central reactor area of the exhibit was surrounded by curtains of mesh webbing that hung from the ceiling. The netted surface was decorated with dozens of small photographic portraits of little children. The victims of Chernobyl? They stared out blandly in all directions. Backing up slowly, I was surprised by a trio of mannequins lurking behind a fold of webbing. Like their compatriots on the scaffold in the first gallery, these too were posed in contamination suits. Two of them were leaning towards me, hands outstretched, as if to ask me what I was doing there. The third stood to the side, carefree and cocky, hands on its hips.

I walked to the front of the hall, following the cloth banners that led from the cupola and the hanging canoe to the front of the room. There, on the front wall, hung four large mosaics of child portraits, the pictures arranged in the same octagonal matrix as the reactor head. Pedestals stood at either end, supporting sculptures of stylized dancing figures, and in the middle of it all a video of the Chernobyl landscape played on a large television. Facing all this, mounted on rods that protruded from the metal tiles of the reactor head, was an array of small round stools. I sat down next to a Ukrainian family watching the video. The choral music swelled. It was impossible not to imagine that our stools were control rods, and we, sitting there, were trying to use our weight to force them down into the core just a little faster.

But also we were in church. Above the television, a spotlight shone on a large photograph of a young child’s face, his hairless head resting one hand. Large scars arced over his scalp. Or were they surgical markings? Was this all a temple to children whose birth defects were attributed to the accident? A visitor from another era would have thought this was the cathedral of a religion that worshipped nuclear power and small children, and that this central image was the plutonium baby Jesus. Lurking in the darkness above him was another member of this strange pantheon: the framed icon of a Russian Orthodox saint. Above the saint, the wall was painted with a blue sky and crude little clouds, and near the ceiling, his back glued to the wall, floated a lone teddy bear. Dirty and almost invisible in the gloom, the forlorn bear surveyed the hall, its face downcast, taking in the strange memorial spread out below, inscrutable behind its little button eyes.

———

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.

It’s not really called that. In fact it’s not even an express train. But I still like calling it the Kiev Express. It sounds like the Orient Express. And the actual train, of Soviet vintage, did have a certain Agatha-Christie-meets-Leonid-Brezhnev feeling about it. Long oriental rugs ran the length of the corridor, and the compartments were outfitted with faux-wood paneling and dark red seats that folded up to make bunk beds.

I got to use the bunks twice on my way to Kiev, which is once more than I had expected. I had bought my ticket thinking it was a twelve hour trip, through the night, which sounded like fun. But I was off by an entire day, and found myself in for a thirty six hour ride. Ample time to get to know the faces of the other people on the train. In the next compartment, for example, there was a man who looked exactly like the Watcher from Kieslowski’s Decalogue films. These are a bunch of solemn morality tales, full of heartbreak and death, made in Poland in the 1980s. The Watcher is a recurring character that turns up from time to time in the different stories, never saying anything, just staring at the camera with a pained expression, a mute commentary on the mortal struggles that embroil the human race. Or something. But why was he on my train?

I spent my time reading. I had brought a pair of books about Chernobyl, one of them a collection of interviews with survivors of the accident, and the other an investigation of the accident’s effect on the environment. Of course when I say I was reading, I really mean that I was taking an epic series of naps that was occasionally interrupted by some reading—and by frequent dips into the bulging sacks of groceries I had bought at the Sudbahnhof station in Vienna.

It was important to make inroads into the groceries, of which I had an embarrassing tonnage. You see, I sometimes have pretty extreme levels of pre-travel anxiety, and—although I’m all man—this stress always seems to express itself in the form of shopping. Before moving to Colombia, for instance, I bought a new laptop. Before traveling to Afghanistan, I decked myself out with an entire new travel wardrobe. And in Vienna, before my big train trip to Kiev, I had gone through the grocery store like a survivalist with a sweet tooth, collecting breads, juices, water, salamis, chocolate crackers, and enough cheese to last the summer. Once on the train, I was able to see how compulsive I’d been in my provisioning, and I almost wished the ride would last forty eight or seventy two hours, so that I might have time to actually eat it all.

For help, I had a companion in my passenger compartment. He was called Max, a rotund, balding man in his early thirties. He spoke in a high, oddly formal voice, and was always smiling. He looked like a grown-up Charlie Brown, if Charlie Brown had grown up in the USSR. Originally from Kiev, Max now lived in Australia, where he worked as a computer programmer.

Max had an endearing way of volunteering explanations for things that needed none. I would wake up from a nap, my book sliding onto the floor, and look out the window to see that the train had stopped in a station, and Max would turn to me and say, “We have stopped.” Later, I would wake up from another nap to find the train moving, and Max would say, “We have left the station.”

We spent the first night passing through Slovakia. The weather was beautiful, and as dusk settled we had beautiful views of the country’s crumbling industrial infrastructure. Cracked smokestacks stared out over small, deserted factories. Warehouses sat empty, the glass in their windows long since smashed out.

In the morning we reached the border with Ukraine, and after a quick passport check we rolled into a cluttered rail yard, separating from the rest of the train and coming to rest between a set of oversize jacks taller than the passenger car itself. A team of crusty rail workers set themselves wrenching and hammering at the train’s wheel trucks, and placed the jack’s pads underneath the lower edges of the car. Slowly we rose into the air, leaving the trucks beneath us on the rails. They were changing the wheels on the train.

“They are changing the wheels on the train,” Max said.

Because railroad tracks are set at different widths in Europe and in the former Soviet Union, any train car that wants to pass from one region to the other must have its wheels changed. Never mind that we could have walked across the platform with our luggage, settled into a new train, and been miles down the track in the same time it took them to change our wheels. That’s the kind of thinking that will make you unhappy on a long train trip in eastern Europe. Besides, When was the last time you were in a train that got jacked up into the air?

A new set of wheels came rolling down the yard, giving off a satisfying pinging sound as they crashed into our old wheels and sent them coasting away in the other direction. A railman clambered onto the train, ejected Max and me from our seats, and pulled up the upholstered bench on which we had been sitting, produced a giant wrench, and tightened a set of large bolts that he found underneath. I’m not kidding.

By afternoon we were in the Carpathian mountains, a cheery alpine landscape in western Ukraine. We chugged by forested hills and undulating fields. Little barns and houses studded the wildflower-glazed meadows. I fully expected Julie Andrews to emerge spinning from a barn, arms thrown outward, singing The Sound of Music in Ukrainian.

Max had become curious about my plans. He hadn’t run into many Americans on the train before, especially not long-haired ones packing suspicious quantities of groceries. When I told him I was going to Chernobyl for vacation, his face lit up with appreciation, and he needed little prompting to share his own experiences of the accident. He had been eleven years old, living in Kiev, when word of the disaster got out, in May of 1986. Soon, people were trying to get their children out of the city. It was nearly impossible to get train tickets, but eventually some relatives managed to get Max onto a train bound southeast for the Crimea. Even though tickets had been so hard to come by, Max said, the train was nearly empty. He implied that the government had manufactured the ticket shortage to keep people from leaving the city.

“When we arrived,” Max went on, “the train was surrounded by soldiers. They tested everyone and their things with dosimeters for radiation, before allowing them to move on. They were trying to keep people from spreading contamination.”

He stayed away from Kiev the entire summer, only returning in mid-August. From his parents he heard stories about life in Kiev during that time: the streets were washed down every day; bakeries that had left their wares out in the open on shelves now wrapped them in plastic. He talked about the possibility that cancer rates in the area had increased because of Chernobyl, and told me that when his wife, also from Kiev, got her first checkup from their Australian doctor, they had found abnormalities in her thyroid, which Max attributed to radioactive exposure.

“It’s very lucky Kiev didn’t get more radiation, thanks to the winds,” he said. There was a quiet moment. Then he turned to me and in his very polite, clipped voice asked, “And what do you think about nuclear energy?”

—

It was a restless night. I lay in my bunk and imagined—as only an American can—the post-Soviet gloom slipping by outside, the train shuddering as it pushed through the thick ether left behind by an empire. From the book of Chernobyl oral history, I was reading the account of a firefighter’s widow; her husband had been among the first responders to the explosion at Reactor Number Four. He left their apartment in the middle of the night and by morning was in the hospital, massively ill from radioactive exposure, swollen beyond recognition. “I don’t know what I should talk about,” she says as she opens her story. “About death or about love? Or are they the same?”

I fell asleep with the book on my face, rocking back and forth with the movement of the train as it pushed towards Kiev, dreaming of sickened roads covered with frothy white bubbles.

———

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

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.

———

Beautiful Messes: A Travel Guide to Man-Made Disasters

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. I’ve got to put in a word for Pittsburgh here. They may be tops in “short-term particle,” but that’s only one list. The ALA also has rankings for “year-round particle” and for ozone. Anyone who wants to check it out will notice that LA still comes in first for “year-round,” leaving ozone as the tie-breaker.

And the result? In a split decision… LOS ANGELES. Sorry, suckers. Pittsburgh’s not even in the top ten for ozone. So LA pulls down two out of three lists, and therefore (if you ask me) keeps the title for worst all-around air quality in the country. Hear that, LA? You need to cool it with the “In yo’ face, Pittsburgh!” attitude. It’s also hard not to mention that about half of all the spots on these lists are occupied by cities in California.

That’s right. Anyone who goes to Disneyland is a pollution tourist.

Buried in all of this (specifically, buried on page 10 of the ALA report) is the real news:

Several cities that also reduced year-round particle pollution dropped off the “25 most polluted” list this year, including New York City…

Whoa! All this time I thought NYC was the green champ just based on per-capita carbon footprint, and that in aggregate it was still pretty bad. But in fact, we’re not even on the list. So tell me again, why don’t you live in New York City?

In other listfreak news, Newsweek has the 9 Unhealthiest Summer Vacation Destinations, which sounds great until you realize that they’re just as concerned about crime and restaurant hygiene as they are with pollution. What gives? Just because you could get robbed blind in Detroit doesn’t mean the place is unhealthy. The other problem? Newsweek seems to think you ought to stay away from unhealthy places. As if!

—

Thanks to the American Lung Association for their State of the Air report, which is the source of all the ruckus. You can donate to their campaign for clean air.

This is only the second year for what everyone hopes will be a yearly tradition (can’t wait ’till the 2008 list comes out). TIME did a nice little slideshow about the list when it came out, but the seriously interested will head for Blacksmith’s site. It has a map, extra photos, and tons of information—a veritable treasure trove for pollution tourists everywhere. As Blacksmith President Richard Fuller says in the accompanying TIME article, “…we forget that ordinary pollution is still something that destroys a lot of lives. These cities aren’t on the tourist trail.”

Give it time, Rich. Give it time.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, Popular Science has put up a pretty weak list called the World’s Dirtiest Cities. Considering the amount of overlap here, and the image grabs from Blacksmith’s site, the PopSci folks clearly started with the Blacksmith list, tossed out things that weren’t cities per se, and threw in Milan, Pittsburgh, and Mexico City for popular appeal. They’re already being convincingly taken apart in their own comments. True, from a site traffic point of view, putting Milan, Pittsburgh, and DF on there is totally pro. Just think of the thousands of residents of those cities who might click through to this slideshow out of sheer, outraged disbelief.

Otherwise, lame. PopSci ought at least to link back to Blacksmith, who are the original badboys of pollution destination rankings.

And what do the badboys tell us? China, India, and the former USSR are where the action is, with Africa and South America represented by one spot each. The suggestions I’ve received from helpful friends and horrified rubberneckers in the past couple years have followed pretty much the same distribution, which only gives Blacksmith that much more credibility in my eyes.

So far, I’ve only gotten to one of the ten listed sites. Got a lot of traveling to do.

Yes, overseas travel is great. But let’s not neglect the virtues of places a little closer to home. Me, I live in New York City—a story of its own—and I’m dying to spend a day biking around that part of New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson that is so aggressively nasty-smelling. Exactly what are those guys brewing up?

For those of you who might be living in the fair environs of Houston, I point you to Port Arthur, TX. In today’s New York Times, Adam Ellick reports about a proposed deal that would bring PCBs from Mexico to Port Arthur to be incinerated. PCBs don’t usually get imported to the US, because they’re wretchedly toxic, and it’s hard to tell when they’re being incinerated completely. So, naturally, the people living in Port Arthur would prefer that these Mexican PCBs be let alone.

To me, the PCB thing is a bit of a sidebar to the real story, which is the town itself:

This downtrodden chemical town on the Gulf of Mexico has no shortage of nicknames: Cancer Alley, the Armpit of Texas, Ring of Fire.

Built on a gush of oil wealth, Port Arthur eventually wooed chemical and waste plants as well. But since the 1970s, this city, which is majority African-American, has complained that it has become a dumping ground for the nation’s toxic waste.

In addition to the print article, Ellick put together a video report that has some great images of what looks like a very depressed town dominated by oil and chemical plants. You know there’s good spots to drink in this place.

I also want to point out that Port Arthur may be the Armpit of Texas, but we all have them. Armpits, I mean. And I’m not planning on getting rid of mine any time soon.

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?

—

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!

Within the first couple of days, we had hit a good range of my favorite places, and Katie was tiring of hearing me say thing like, “This is the spot where I used to catch the bus in October ‘94,” and “Well I’ll be! That building wasn’t there before!” For my part, revisiting my old haunts was pleasantly nostalgic, but I was getting a little worn down by how it also reminded me of how long it had been since I first moved to DC, and how long since I left, and of how much things had changed, and of how even if I live to be a hundred, I’m still the better part of four fifths of halfway into the grave.

It was time for something new‚ and a little environmental degradation is always a pick-me-up. Pollution tourism in Our Nation’s Capitol!

DC offers a number of attractive destinations for the pollution tourist‚ but where to start? Superfund never seems like a bad idea, and the EPA website does list eight sites. But there was nothing that struck my fancy. Sure, American University may still have WWI-era chemical weapons buried underground somewhere–but who can find them? And while Cardozo Senior High School students have proven themselves impressively resourceful in turning their school building into a Superfund site with only a few ounces of merucry, that situation has long since been cleaned up. I mean, I assume.

We turned to local knowledge, which is always best. Zach Lyman–entrepreneur, solar magnate, freelance swimming pool cleaner–had some ideas. The Anacostia River, for starters. Rivers are some of the most reliable spots, year in and year out, on any self-respecting pollution tourist’s itinerary. And the Anacostia (sometimes called the “other” river while people are off worrying about the bigger, sexier, whiter Potomac) has a goodly load of problems: toxins, garbage, sewage, sediment…

And yet. A river is a big job, pollution-tourismwise, what with miles of riverbank and all. Who wants to spend the whole day? Surely there was something more touristy… maybe something near the National Mall? Maybe in view of the Capitol dome itself?

Yes, indeed! And it’s called the Capitol Power Plant.

The Capitol Power Plant is nestled into the landscape not half a mile south of the Capitol Dome, just east of South Capitol Street, like a big baby cradled in the elbow of the arm formed by highways 295 and 395. A big old baby with smokestacks. About a hundred years old, it hasn’t produced electricity since the fifties; instead, it makes great volumes of steam and cold water, which get pumped north through underground pipes to heat and cool the Capitol and a host of other government buildings. Half the energy for this comes from coal, and indeed the plant is the only one in the District that burns the stuff.

In the last decade, some eager beavers in Congress have tried to do away with the coal in the mix, maybe figuring that DC’s air doesn’t need the grief. But people in coal states are proud of their resource, or at least their elected officials are, or at least they have no problem saying they are. Let’s just say it’ll be a while before the honorable senators and representatives from Kentucky and West Virginia let the Capitol Power Plant switch completely over to wimpy natural gas. Not while there are still mountains of virile coal to burn. And Nancy Pelosi will have a hard time offsetting that, no matter how many compact fluorescents she screws in to the Capitol’s light fixtures.

The plant complex is bordered on the east by one of those leafy neighborhoods that makes DC so nice for people who aren’t snobs from New York. We parked there and strolled down North Carolina Avenue. Halfway down the block and—-voila!——we could already see the smokestacks poking up behind the trees.

At the bottom of the hill, you come out into the open and get your first good view of the plant in all its coaltastic glory.

But fossil fuels are never quite as grungy in the burning as one hopes, are they? The smokestacks failed to be smoking. For all I know, they only burn coal on the weekends; I couldn’t see any kind of exhaust, not counting a goodly plume of steam rising from somewhere inside the plant. In fact, as embarrassing as this is for a pollution tourist, I don’t even know what the exhaust from a coal burning power plant is supposed to look like these days. It could be transparent and odorless, for all I know.

For olfactory sampling, I had planned to rely on K., who has an eerily sensitive nose (coupled, fortunately for me, with a positively enthusiastic appreciation of strange and horrible smells). But today she had a cold. She calibrated her nose on some petunias adorning a low wall by the sidewalk and found her superpower greatly diminished. Now she knows what it’s like for the mortals. We’ll just have to take the Washington Post’s word for it when they tell us this is the number two spot for sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions in the district.

Walking around to the west side, we came to what I have since learned is the West Refrigeration Plant. It’s only a year or two old, and doesn’t show on Google Maps’ satellite photo. The satellite had promised a picturesque mountain of coal, which was to have been the black cherry on top of our power plant sundae. Instead, we took a gander at the latest in refrigerator plant architecture: a landscaped hillock leading to a rampart of concrete panels pierced at intervals by angular steel gutter-spouts. Above all this loomed what looked like the first three stories of the new New York Times building. Through the metal slats of this structure we could see several large, squat exhaust towers. What are these things called? They’re like smokestacks, but much squatter, much easier to hide, and not nearly as cool.

Not only is this structure much, much less fun to look at than the giant pile of coal I was hoping for, it also represents—-in its modernization of the plant’s refrigeration equipment–an incremental devaluation in the site’s allure for pollution tourists. We’re here to see the dirt, guys. It’s a coal fired plant! I could forgive them if they would let us hang around on the grassy hillock, maybe play a lazy round of handball against the concrete walls of the plant. But no, it’s all surrounded by steel and chain-link fencing. In fact, chain-link was running amok all around the plant, cordoning off even parts of the sidewalk.

But the spot started to grow on me. After all, over by the Capitol itself, tourists are still waiting for the new Capitol Visitor Center to open, and it’s years behind schedule. But over here at the West Refrigeration Plant, you can already enjoy the facility that will cool that Visitor Center. They’ve even put in a bench and a couple trees. We should have brought a picnic lunch. Always be ready to picnic.

To the south, you can see what looks like some coal-moving infrastructure. Can someone tell me what that tower-thing is called?

Otherwise, on this side, there’s a blocked-off service road across the south side of the plant, which a friendly construction worker said we’d have no luck trying to enter, and a fenced-off access point to the CSX railroad tracks, along which coal is presumably delivered. Or does it come by truck? In any case, there are something like eighteen or twenty thousand tons of coal delivered to this spot every year. It seems unfair not to get to see any of it. Instead, after passing under the very grungy overpasses of the railroad and highway, the only things you’ll find are a nasty chain-link fence with both razor and barbed wire, and a bizarrely nice stretch of isolated sidewalk, complete with street lamps.

It was a hot DC spring day, the kind that would do nicely for summer. We retraced our steps, circling back around the plant, heading towards the east side of the plant to finish our tour. We noticed a couple small townhouses for sale across the street. Anyone? Anyone? They didn’t look too shabby. You could probably buy three for the price of a decent Manhattan 1BR.

At the northeast corner of the plant, a truly American vista: a sign for the new baseball stadium, a security fence, Old Glory, and a couple of coal-fired smokestacks. Yeah!

As you walk south along the east side of the plant, you get a really nice view of the old part of the building. K. kept saying, “It looks just like my high school.” Guess she had it rough growing up.

Further south, we saw what the impressive West Refrigeration Plant is augmenting… a much more down-home east refrigeration plant. Similar to its high-tech cousin, but on a much more human scale, it had a large volume of water cascading down behind its slats. Clearly part of the refrigeration/evaporation/trickle cylce. Or something. There was a strange, sweet smell of mildew or mold that I found vaguely sickening. A bird perched for a moment in one of the slats. The sound of rushing water surrounded us.

Continuing on to the south of the plant, underneath a high section of the overpass, we encountered the fabled horse people of DC. I don’t know if they are truly the subject of fable, but Zach had hinted at them darkly. “Look for the horse people,” he had said with great mystery. “Under the highway… the horse people!” He refused to clarify. The way he said it, it sounded like there was a strange race of human/horse hybrids living in DC’s underworld.

Fortunately, but somewhat disappointingly, there were no horrible mutant horse/humans to be seen. Instead, two regular, non-mutant horses lingered inside a paddock abutting the railroad tracks. A pair of pickup trucks and a horse trailer were parked to one side. It was perfectly incongruous, at once pastorally beautiful and industrially bleak.

Turning around, we had a view of the entire power plant complex, with the Capitol dome rising out of the trees directly to the north. There was a certain visual rhythm to the combination of tall smokestacks, squat refrigeration towers, and looming dome. Not to mention the satisfaction of seeing the points of production and consumption at a glance.

But the crowning moment of our tour was yet to come. Looking west from our vantage point, to a spot beyond the overpass, next to a stack of railroad ties, we finally saw it. The fuel. A two-storey hill of coal, of sweet black manna from Earth, piled against a concrete retaining wall.

I desperately wanted to get over there and get my hands on a little chunk of the stuff, but there was no obvious ingress for tourists. When will these people learn? I would happily buy the ticket to go trudging around on a giant pile of coal. Hell, at least let me kick around on the little training pile next to it!

Instead, we settled for a little fossil fuel ogling, shading our eyes from the sky and gazing out at the lonely black mountain, it’s little rounded peaks glistening in the midday Washington sun.

Additonal Links
Washington Post: “Reliance on Coal Sullies ‘Green the Capitol’ Effort
Wikipedia

Google maps

More pictures

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.