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Dozens of dilapidated stone buildings are all that remain of the once-thriving border village of Martoli, in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. Nestled in the Johar Valley and surrounded by Himalayan peaks, the most notable being Nanda Devi, once considered the tallest mountain in the world, this village had traded sugar, lentils, spices, and cloth for salt and wool with Tibetans across the border.

The nomadic inhabitants of several villages spent the winter months in the plains gathering goods to be traded with Tibetans in the summer. However, the border was sealed following an armed conflict between India and China in 1962, disrupting life in the high villages and leaving people with little incentive to return.

Kishan Singh, 77, was 14 when he left with his family to settle in the lower village of Thal. He still returns to Martoli every summer to till the land and cultivate buckwheat, strawberries, and black cumin.

His ancestral home has no roof, so he sleeps in a neighbour’s abandoned house during the six months he spends in this village.

“I enjoy being in the mountains and the land here is very fertile,” he says.

In late autumn, he hires mules to transport his harvest to his home in the plains, where he sells it at a modest profit.

The largest of the Johar Valley villages had about 1,500 people at its peak in the early 1960s. Martoli had about 500 residents then, while some of the dozen or so other villages had 10 to 15 homes each.

Now, only three or four people return to Martoli each summer.

A few villagers are returning in summer to the nearby villages of Laspa, Ghanghar, and Rilkot, as they can now travel by vehicle to within a few kilometres (miles) of their villages on a recently built unpaved road.

Among the scattered remnants of earlier stone houses in Martoli, a new guesthouse has appeared to cater for a few trekkers who pass through the village en route to the Nanda Devi Base Camp.

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SOMETHING isn’t quite right about this picture of a lovely looking three bedroom house listed for sale.

Those advertising the family home have been accused of “pulling a fast one” by neighbours since it was listed.

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The property in Stockton-on-Tees, Durham, has allegedly been subject of some creative photo editing to boost its appeal.

It’s listed on Rightmove for £350,000, where an initial illustration showed it looking in top notch condition.

The house’s exterior looks neatly done up for the cameras, boasting a tidy front drive and small hedgerow.

But eagle-eyed observers have since suggested that the image – which no longer appears on the Rightmove posting – may be AI enhanced.

The Daily Mail reported from the site of the house to find it looking in vastly different condition.

Gone is the charming shrubbery next to the property, which is instead a fence next to a beauty studio.

The vibe of the photo taken from the scene was rather different to the spruced up image presented in the advert.

After running the original picture through AI checkers, the Daily Mail reported that the image may have been doctored.

One site told them: “We are quite confident that this image, or significant part of it, was created by AI.”

The Rightmove listing also offered a 360 degree view showing the nearby Eaglescliffe railway station.

But the publication also found that the station is under noisy redevelopment at time of writing.

Other images in the listing show spacious looking rooms throughout the house – which all appear in smart condition.

A man who claimed to be the property’s owner pulled up in a Porsche and confronted the Mail reporter while they were at the site.

When they explained their findings, he reportedly told them: “I think you will find a lot of adverts do that now.

“You are not allowed on the property but do what you want to. You don’t need my name.”

One neighbour told the Mail: “They are pulling a fast one. It’s a laugh. The price is shocking.

“It has been empty for a while. I cannot believe it.

“They have faked it all. It is a bit overpriced even though they have done it up.

“An old fellow used to live there but it has been empty since he died and I don’t think the estate agents have had a lot of interest- especially at that price.”

But another told them: “It does not bother me. Who cares?

“If you are going to view it you are going to see what it is like anyway.”

A spokesperson for Roseberry Wood said: “Please be assured there was no intention to deceive in our marketing of the property.

“The listing clearly states that some images have been virtually staged to enhance presentation.”

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From hiding in Auschwitz to vlogging in war zones, some Gen Z travellers are going to extreme lengths to secure content for social media as part of a growing dark tourism trend

Dark tourism is one of the most popular niches for young travellers. As stories emerge of tourists eating sandwiches on Holocaust tours and fraternising with global terror organisations, it provokes the question: is it ethical?

Defined by darktourism.com as tourism that involves travelling to sites that include death and disaster, it’s been widely expanded to include locations linked with unscrupulous figures and unpleasant events like incarceration. According to a 2022 Travel News survey found, a staggering 91% of Gen Z (13-28 year olds) have engaged in the activity in some form.

And if we’re talking about popular dark tourist sites, few places get darker than Auschwitz. It’s the most impelling legacy of the Holocaust, the twentieth century’s most obliterating tragedy. In the five years that it was active over 1.1 million people lost their lives, of which one million were Jewish. It’s also become an increasingly popular tourist destination.

Over 1.8 million people visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in 2024, a 10 per cent rise compared to 2023. And while these numbers are lower than the pre-Pandemic high of 2 million, the museum puts this down to the current conflicts in Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East.

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Beverley Boden is a PhD researcher in the field of dark tourism and associate dean at Teesside University International Business School, who happens to spend a lot of her time at Auschwitz. Part of what fascinates her is what motivates people to visit these destinations, as well as the toll it takes on the tour guides.

Recently she’s also noticed a definite increase in interest in dark tourism from a crowd with two specific characteristics. Firstly, they tend to be predominantly young: 16 – 24. Secondly, there’s a lot of people who haven’t fully done their research.

Beverley explains: “When you’re at a place like Auschwitz, you see how disrespectful some tourists can be. They take calls when the guides ask them not to, eat food when the guides ask them not to. They take inappropriate pictures. They go into places that they shouldn’t.”

In one instance she recalls observing two young tourists hide behind the camp’s ovens, in gas chamber number one, and a tour guide had to plead with them to stop.

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Another time, a man pulled out a sandwich and began eating it outside of block number 10, while the guide recounted the intentional genital mutilation of women to end the Jewish race.

It’s not just Auschwitz either. Beverley says she’s also noticed an interest in Chernobyl, another quintessential dark tourist destination. While the Russia-Ukraine war has made visitor numbers hard to discern, the location of one of the world’s most terrifying nuclear tragedies has long drawn a mass appeal.

As for why she believes that these destinations have taken off with a wider audience, including those who haven’t done as much research, Beverley points to several theories. One is the wild popularity of recent shows, like Netflix’s Dark Tourist, which aired in 2018 and which sees the host travel to a plethora of unlikely destinations, from haunted forests to Jeffrey Dahmer’s hometown.

From her own experience, she admits there is also a level of “morbid curiosity” in seeing places associated with destruction and death. For the upcoming generation, too, who haven’t known a world without Internet, there is a desire to “push the boundaries”.

However, another, potentially more worrying facet of dark tourism, Beverley explains, includes visiting active or recent conflict zones.

Pursuit of the perfect selfie

Travel vloggers like Miles Routledge, Mike Okay and @josievlogsthings have gone viral – and caused controversy – over recent years for their visits to locations like Mauritania, Iraq and Afghanistan. These countries all have UK FCDO travel advisories and some are currently caught in active wars or are being run by governments with questionable human rights records.

Whether borne out of a genuine interest, or something ulterior, the audience’s intrigue is undeniable: many of these videos gain millions of views. After all, is your travel content really that engaging if you haven’t taken a selfie with the Taliban? As travel YouTuber Miles Routledge claimed to have done, after being held in custody by the Taliban in 2023.

While there’s no explicit link, the rise of these social media vlogs has correlated with an increase in real-world visitor stats. In 2023, over 5,200 tourists visited Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government documented a record 500-plus US and European tourists visiting the country in 2024.

One such visitor was Xiaochen Su, a Chinese-American digital nomad currently based in Malta. He was backpacking through the Middle East when he spotted a connecting flight to Baghdad and thought, “why not one more country?” When he landed he didn’t know what to expect.

“I heard about Baghdad so much on the news back when the war was still happening. I just wanted to see what the current situation was like,” he says.

Iraq is on the FCDO Do Not Travel list, which advises against all travel to many parts of the country due to a high threat of terrorism. It has suffered through decades of conflict that has resulted in over 200,000 casualties between 2003-2022, according to the online database Iraq Body Count. Xiaochen remembers being taken aback by the dilapidated buildings, including main shopping streets left shuttered and in ruins.

But what also struck him was how warmly he was treated. “People would come up to me and say ‘hey’. We had difficulty communicating, but people were nice,” he says. Ultimately, cities like Baghdad, stages for recent and devastating wars, are places where hundreds of thousands of people still live and work.

This is true for many of these dark tourist adventures. Often these places that hold salacious intrigue for dark tourists are homes, memorials, or even ancestral graves for others. Visiting such locations can be educational, if done respectfully.

“A lot of people think that even traveling as a dark tourist is unethical,” Beverley says. “But I think one of the great things about dark tourism is that it does shine a light on historical events. It can educate the younger generation because lessons can be learned.”

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Mastering control of the ever rising and falling rattan chinlone ball instils patience, a veteran of Myanmar’s traditional sport says.

“Once you get into playing the game, you forget everything,” 74-year-old Win Tint says.

“You concentrate only on your touch, and you concentrate only on your style.”

Chinlone, Myanmar’s national game, traces its roots back centuries. Described as a fusion of sport and art, it is often accompanied by music and typically sees men and women playing in distinct ways.

Teams of men form a circle, passing the ball among themselves using stylised movements of their feet, knees and heads in a game of “keepy-uppy” with a scoring system that remains inscrutable to outsiders.

Women, meanwhile, play solo in a fashion reminiscent of circus acts – kicking the ball tens of thousands of times per session while walking tightropes, spinning umbrellas and balancing on chairs placed atop beer bottles.

Participation has declined in recent years with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the 2021 military coup and subsequent civil conflict.

Poverty is on the rise, and artisans face mounting challenges in sourcing materials to craft the balls.

Variants of the hands-free sport, colloquially known as caneball, are played widely across Southeast Asia.

In Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, participants use their feet and heads to send the ball over a net in the volleyball-style game “sepak takraw”.

In Laos, it is known as “kataw” while Filipinos play “sipa”, meaning kick.

In China, it is common to see people kicking weighted shuttlecocks in parks.

Myanmar’s version is believed to date back 1,500 years.

Evidence for its longevity is seen in a French archaeologist’s discovery of a replica silver chinlone ball at a pagoda built during the Pyu era, which stretched from 200 BC to 900 AD.

Originally, the sport was played as a casual pastime, a form of exercise and for royal amusement.

In 1953, however, the game was codified with formal rules and a scoring system, part of efforts to define Myanmar’s national culture after independence from Britain.

“No one else will preserve Myanmar’s traditional heritage unless the Myanmar people do it,” player Min Naing, 42, says.

Despite ongoing conflict, players continue to congregate beneath motorway flyovers, around street lamps dimmed by wartime blackouts and on purpose-made chinlone courts – often open-sided metal sheds with concrete floors.

“I worry about this sport disappearing,” master chinlone ball maker Pe Thein says while labouring in a sweltering workshop in Hinthada, 110km (68 miles) northwest of Yangon.

“That’s the reason we are passing it on through our handiwork.”

Seated cross-legged, men shave cane into strips, curve them with a hand crank and deftly weave them into melon-sized balls with pentagonal holes before boiling them in vats of water to enhance their durability.

“We check our chinlone’s quality as if we’re checking diamonds or gemstones,” the 64-year-old Pe Thein says.

“As we respect the chinlone, it respects us back.”

Each ball takes about two hours to produce and brings business-owner Maung Kaw $2.40.

But supplies of the premium rattan he seeks from Rakhine state in western Myanmar are becoming scarce.

Fierce fighting between military forces and opposition groups that now control nearly all of the state has made supplies precarious.

Farmers are too frightened to venture into the jungle battlegrounds to cut cane, Maung Kaw says, which jeopardises his livelihood.