MOSCOW, November 29 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – The upcoming doomsday can now be a VIP experience, with prepackaged tours to heaven and hell offered for sale in Ukraine at great discount and with money-back guarantee.
The Heaven All Inclusive package comes with a pre-booked place in paradise and a first-class flight to that destination on Dec. 21, an ID card “so that nobody bothers you,” and a travel guide.
A similar offer for Gehenna would get you a mention on the “Scriptures of Satan,” a ticket to “freefall to Hell,” a pass to travel around the place and a survival guide.
The heaven package costs 120 hryvnias ($15) and the trip to hell is 150 hryvnias ($18), but both can be had with a 75-percent discount through a local deal-of-the-day website that reported 24 purchases as of late Thursday.
Though distrustful web surfers already surmised the offer is a phishing scheme, the tour operator claimed it was an honest joke.
“We made it just for fun,” said Olga, who answered the phone specified on the tour operator’s website, Reverv-ticket.net.
The site was established by New Offers, a small company with offices in Kiev, Donetsk and Moscow that makes a living providing various educational courses in a number of subjects ranging from foreign languages to oral sex techniques, she said.
A lot of clients enjoy the joke, but the firm also received plenty of calls from people who take the expected Apocalypse seriously and feel offended, said Olga, who refused to give her last name.
This is not the first time Ukrainians have taken up the Apocalypse: earlier this month, free end-of-the-world survival courses opened in the local city of Simferopol. In Russia, Apocalypse survival kits, complete with vodka, a rope and heart medication, are available on sale in the Siberian city of Tomsk.
Current predictions for the end of the world are based on an ancient Maya calendar that has Dec. 21, 2012 as its final date. Mainstream scientists have rejected the forecast as groundless.
