Today we had our excursion to Chernobyl. Heather was of mixed opinion about signing up for the tour, whether it was exploitive or not. We hadn’t heard about the HBO series on Chernobyl until about a week ago. We only added Kyiv to our itinerary because we needed to fly out of Minsk; it was a cheap flight and also a place I wanted to see. We found out about the Chernobyl tour after googling things to see in Kyiv. We were hoping that the HBO special hadn’t driven up tourism yet (one of the things I wanted to see was the abandoned city of Pripyat, which is better with fewer people).
So we went down to the meeting point at Dnipro hotel at 7:30am. Now that we knew the drill, we got some breakfast to go on the walk over.
We were lucky and got placed in a 8-passenger van rather than the 18-passenger bus. In our van were three German 20-somethings and a couple of journalists for a German media company. They spent some time interviewing us all at each of the sites throughout the day. Our initial impression was that they were here to cover the tourist boom caused by the HBO series on Chernobyl. The journalists seemed a bit disappointed that this was not the reason that any of the five of us chose to go to Chernobyl. In fact, none of us had actually seen the recent TV series!
Our guide, Nikolai, went through the rules and regulations for the day. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is still militarized and strictly patrolled. He also went through the radiation safety checks. He carried a Geiger counter (which measures the current radiation level) and we each got a personal dosimeter (which measures cumulative radiation exposure).
And we were off. Actually, we pretended to leave while the media guys filmed us. Then we stopped and waited for them to get in the van :)
About 300-400 people per day now take the Chernobyl tour; about 1,200 on weekends. Our guide has been running tours for 10 years and has witnessed the increase from 1,600 people a year when he first started.
It’s about a two hour drive to the 30km exclusion zone. There we stopped at the checkpoint while the military checked our paperwork and passports. We also received our personal dosimeters.
Once inside the 30km exclusion zone, we started passing through villages and towns where people were forced to abandon their homes on very short notice and allowed to carry very little. It was hard to recognize the towns because there’s been 33 years of tree growth which now obscures everything. The Soviets didn’t keep statistics, but estimates are that about 130,000 people were displaced from 280 villages.
Next we drove to the town of Chernobyl, from which the reactors take their name. (The largest town in the exclusion zone was Pripyat where most of the engineers lived). Chernobyl is now home to the 3,000 workers involved in decommissioning the reactors, a semi-active town minus things like children (you must be 18 and over to live here).
We stopped at the Chernobyl road sign. None of the five of us were interested in selfies, to the disappointment of the media guys.
In Chernobyl we visited a memorial to the first responders, and those that sacrificed their lives in the early days to prevent things from getting much worse.
We also had a brief stop to see some of the robots that were used to assist in the early clean up. Unfortunately, the robots were not of much use because their electronics got fried with the radiation. The robots on display were still slightly radioactive, but okay to view from a distance.
We next went to a memorial dedicated to the people who lost their villages and homes in Ukraine (Belarus also received much of the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl). The memorial was a replica display of road sign posts for the 280 villages. As you walk towards the centre of the display, you see the ‘welcome to’ version of all the city signs. When you turn around to leave, you see the ‘now leaving’ version, but the city’s name has been shadowed out in black. Because this was the late 80’s and pre-internet, there was also a mailbox exchange set up at the centre of the memorial where people could leave notes for their friends in other villages. (There was no other way to track people back then. Nowadays you’d just create a Facebook group or something).
Somewhere along the way we passed the 10km exclusion zone checkpoint.
Then we drove down an unmarked 8km road to a Soviet radar installation, Duga, built during the Cold War to detect ICBMs. Back in the day, this was a top secret site, appearing as a children’s day camp on military maps.
The radar installation was quite impressive to see. It’s about 50 storeys tall and 450m (?) wide. We were lucky to end up with our guide as I don’t think many tours visit here.
Next we drove to the reactors. From a few hundred metres (about 0.58 on the Geiger counter) we got out of the car for a few minutes to take a couple of pics of the reactors. As we were leaving, a big busload of ‘cliché tourists’ arrived (as our guide called them), and we had to wait for the media guys to film them. (Heather — I found it very disrespectful that a bunch of tourists would take selfies and pose for smiling pics in front of a tragic site. What would make someone think, ‘Hey, I really need this selfie of me smiling in front of this human tragedy which still haunts so much of this part of the world.’
By now, it was after 1pm (I couldn’t believe how fast the day had gone) and we went to the workers’ cafeteria for lunch. There was a radiation check as we entered the building. Lunch was a choice of potato or pasta, meat, coleslaw, and a soup. As our guide said, all comrades eat the same.
After lunch we drove to Pripyat, which most people associate as Chernobyl. It was the city where most of the engineers and management and their families lived (population of about 45,000 at the time). As we drove down Lenin St (the main street), we could barely make out buildings and houses lost in the forest that has grown up over the last 33 years.
We stopped in Lenin Square and started out on foot. All around were ghosts of buildings. Hotels, shopping malls, cafes, theatres, restaurants — all abandoned and left to nature. Most eerie was the amusement park, with a Ferris wheel, carousel, and bumper cars all slowly rusting away. Vandals have accelerated the process in places. It’s very strange to be there, with only a handful of other people.
We also stopped by an abandoned riverside cafe and boat docks.
On the way out, we had two more radiation checks, at both the 10km checkpoint and 30km checkpoint. Our total exposure for the day was 2 microsieverts (as a comparison, a dental xray is about 5-10 microsieverts).
Finally our tour was complete. Our guide was excellent at avoiding the busloads throughout the day - we rarely saw anyone else. I think our experience was influenced by our guide, who was great, and the respectful attitude of the rest of the group we were with.
We still had the two hour drive back to Kyiv ahead of us. We got dropped off at Dnipro hotel and then walked back home. The sun and heat were getting to me, so we just showered, had a quick bite to eat at the hotel restaurant, and went to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment