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I have known of ''dark tourism'' as a thing - a specific pursuit of travel to specific places associated with death and suffering - for quite a while. The first genuine example I encountered were tours of the Chernobyl zone, which seemed a tad ghoulish but as Chernobyl's ''actual'' death toll was relatively low, I let this one slide in my consciousness. And having grown up in a country whose modern history sometimes seemed to contain nothing but martyrology it wasn't always easy to distinguish between more old-fashioned visiting of places of memory and this other thing that has been both practiced and studied as ''dark tourism'' proper. [[Tragic Shores: A Memoir Of Dark Travel by Thomas H Cook|Full Review]]
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===[[The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail by Tim Moore]]===
[[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Travel|Travel]]
One of the results I find from travel documentaries, often on TV but also in book form, is the verdict 'rather him than me' (and it generally is a he). Yes, I'd like to go there and see what he's seen, but I'm damned if I would risk the danger, the potential consequences and/or the effort the whole experience required. This book is the epitome of that, for as much as I love most of the twenty countries it hits on – give me a chance, I've not quite been to them all – I wouldn't countenance making this exact and exacting trip. A couple of years ago, those in the know somewhere in an office deemed the route of the entire old Iron Curtain – the fringe of the Soviet Union, plus Romania, Bulgaria etc – to be a pan-continental biking route. With the news that he can dismiss other attempts and still have a claim to being the first person to clock the whole mammoth trip, our gutsy author undertakes it all, and thus surveys a scar across the entire continent to see if it's still visible, and what flesh it once upon a time divided. Oh and he did it on a Communist-era piddly little bike, lacking in both gears and good brakes, that was designed for nothing more strenuous than conveying you around a campsite, not for 6,000 miles… [[The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail by Tim Moore|Full Review]]
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|author= Amelia Dalton
