Everybody thinks they're a good tourist - it's all the other ones who are inappropriate and embarrassing. This applies especially to the phenomenon David Farrier calls "dark tourism", a kind of morbid sightseeing, which he explores in his new Netflix documentary series Dark Tourist.
Remember Logan Paul, the thundering YouTube idiot hauled over the social media coals last year for posting a video of himself gawping at a corpse in Aokigahara, Japan's notorious "suicide forest"? That was dark tourism, and Logan Paul the world's worst dark tourist.
Farrier visits the same forest in the first episode of his new show. It's basically the complete opposite of the Logan Paul video; he doesn't find a dead body, nor does he wear a stupid hat. He's open-minded, inquisitive and respectful - a good tourist. But you still can't help but wonder: is this okay?
It's a question Farrier grapples with throughout the series. Earlier in the Japan episode he goes on a bus tour around Fukushima, visiting towns devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami or rendered uninhabitable by the subsequent nuclear radiation leak. At one point the tour stops on the coast, where the tsunami hit. It's eerie and sad, huge piles of debris lining the road. A couple of the other tourists get out and start taking selfies.
This is part of what makes Dark Tourist such a good and textured travel series. It captures the authentic anxieties and contradictions of everyday tourism that most other shows of this type would gloss over. "Get any good photos?" Farrier asks the pair back on the bus, a roundabout New Zealand way of saying, "Have you no sense of decency, you horrid ghouls?"
