When nature hurls lemons at you from outer space it’s time to make some ‘cosmic lemonade’.
Just as Pakistan wants to boost tourism (See: Abbotta ‘Not so’ Bad, the Radio Buzz Blog February 9th) by turning the area where Bin Laden was killed into an amusement park, Russian authorities are considering making parts of the land where their meteor hit, into a tourist attraction — a “meteor Disneyland”.
With rides like ‘Finding Nikita’, The ‘Twilight Zone Dungeon of Terror’ with a bonus KGB interrogation and ‘It’s a Schmaltz World’ Chelyabinsk hopes to ‘add value’ to its disaster.
An annual music festival called ‘Beet-Stock” is also in the mix says Vladimir Novochensky, an official from Chelyabinsk.
A “cosmic water park” and a diving station that lets tourists plunge into the lake where the meteor hit and grab pieces of meteorite will be open soon. It is estimated that tourists will have less than 45 seconds to dive, find and retrieve a hunk of meteor before a rescue mission is called.
The rescue mission will also be taped as a reality show with tourists finding out if they can get into a wetsuit fast enough to save a diver.
The town also plans on setting up bus tours to Chernobyl, another devastated city with the theme ‘Chernobyl 902 uh-oh!’ and ‘Chernobyl, It’s glowing with magic’!
With loads of smashed windows and debris strewn across the city, tourism bosses in the area are keen to cash in. “Besides, we don’t even have to clean up. We’ll just leave the rubble where it is and charge people to purchase a piece of ‘authentic space debris’.”
In a Globe and Mail report Natlia Gritsay, a Russian tourism official said, “We need our own Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty. And if we have to build them out of rubble, then so be it.