For the next two or three weeks, this is going to replace the Friday documentary reviews. I'm going to go over this documentary series of extreme tourism. If you don't know what the Vice Guide to travel is, it's a crazy deathwish project from Vice Magazine co-founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi. This series covers the most extreme tourism destinations, that any tourist right in their mind would avoid. Liberia, North Korea, these kind of places.
I'm a fiend for that kind of thing. I want to know what's going on in the places where most of humanity refuses to look. Everybody is going to remember the war in Iraq in a hundred years, but who will remember Darfur? It seems crazy to think we're going to forget this, but nobody's helping them right now and the Darfur people are left to themselves. I watched the first two episodes and here are my highlights....
I'm sure you remember all that weapons-of-mass-destruction talk that somehow justified the U.S takeover of Iraq. Right? They found no WMDs over there, but guess who found some? Yes, Shane Smith did. In Bulgaria. Tipped off by a journalist who bought an actual NUCLEAR WARHEAD, he got the contact and flew over there to investigate about this.They found the guy and he told them that crazy story about how Ossama Bin Laden came over to Bulgaria and tried to get a nuclear waste management contract and the "Mr. Ivanov" guy told him: "Why do you want to do that? I can get you the real thing".
Now he could have told them stories, but he showed them a warhead detonator. He told them the actual warhead was at his mother's house. Think about it for a second, the U.S invaded a country under suspicion of holding WMDs but completely ignore a country that sells some and is allegedly tied up in every weapon scandal around the globe. The threat to humanity is not who you're lead to believe. I'm not accusing the Bulgarian people here, I'm accusing those people who would do anything for money. Including selling NUCLEAR FUCKING WEAPONS.
The other startling highlight of this first viewing was their trip to Chernobyl and to the legendary town of Pripyat. This is a place that defies any notion of fairy tale. There was no good end for Pripyat, not even a hopeful one. Since 1986, this town has been drowned in radiations. Twnety-five years later, the levels of radiations are still so high it makes a Geiger counter go wild. They went in the winter, in the snow and it was still real bad.
The scariest moment? The point of their expedition was to hunt wild boars and check for mutations. They shot at them, but they disappeared in a forest nearby. Shane and his staff writer started chasing them down, but somebody stopped them, saying: "Don't go in there. This is the Red Forest, it's the most radioactive place on Earth. You enter there and you die". This was nuts. The images of Shane Smith, walking in the snow with his automatic rifle, confused and scared, was truly a sight of apocalypse.
Worth of mention, Suroosh Alvi's visit to Pakistan's gun market. If you wonder why there are so many firearms in the world, I'm sure a lot of them are FABRICATED there. They are dirt cheap also. You can get an assault rifle for under two hundred bucks. You even have quality control areas on rooftops.
This is nuts. I'm surprised one of the Vice guys didn't meet a violent end yet. More to come next week.