I decided early on that I wouldn’t plan anything more than a couple of days ahead. It has been working out pretty well. I stay in a place until I don’t. It works here in Europe because there isn’t much of a last minute decision fee on tickets and fare. Or at least not much of one. That has worked pretty well except in the Ukraine.
I was walking around Kiev one day and saw a sign for a Chernobyl tour office. I never really placed Chernobyl on a map so my curiosity was raised. I did a quick google search back to the room and found out that the site of the worst nuclear disaster occurred just a couple of hours drive from Kiev.
There was an option for an overnight trip but cost $300. I didn’t think that there would be much night life so decided to go with the $80 day trip. Too bad that $80 price was an offer if you bought early, like before the place blew up. For me, the final price for the next available was $160 and 3 days out.
Lucky for me, Kiev is cheap and not crushed with tourist. I was able to extend my hotel room with no problem. I spent the next couple of days roaming around town, which is no easy feat. Unlike the rest of Europe, English is not very common. Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. An alphabet that has little in common with the western alphabet. The few letters that are recognizable, don’t sound like we expect and then there are all the other letters that are squiggles. For example, I saw signs advertising “Нотаріус” on buildings everywhere, so many that I 
thought it translated to “for rent” or “for sale”. It turns out that Ukrainians are a stamp happy bunch and like their stamps legal. Putting my google translator to work,
Н (“n” as in neon)
о (short “a” as in “”call”)
т (“t” as in tyrant)
а (“ah” as in “top”)
р ( a hard “r”)
і (long “e” as in “reed’)
у (“ooh” as in “cool”) and
с (“s” as in “snake”).
In short, it is pronounced “Natahreeus” and sounds really close to our word for Notary. Which is what it is. I am told that Ukrainian is pretty easy once you memorize the alphabet. There are no silent letters. I’ll take their word for it.
Its a good thing that McDonald’s has installed self service kiosks, because the order taker usually just gave up and pointed me to it.
Kiev is a pretty high energy sprawling city. It was good to be there but at the end of my two bonus days, I was looking forward to getting radiated for 12 hours in a minivan full of strangers.
There are a lot of soviet style controls getting into the Chernobyl Exclusion zone reaching out about 30 km from the reactor site. Stern looking soldiers brandishing worn out AK-47’s, checking passports and making sure I was a suitable witness to their big mistake. The immensity of the meltdown is still not well known, but it appears to have been waaaay worse than anyone would ever knew. A lot of courageous people went into certain miserable death in an attempt to stop the meltdown from getting to the other reactors. If that happened, They estimate that Europe would not be habitable.
The exclusion zone covers what was once 1000 sq miles of small farm villages that were evacuated a few days after the explosion. The tour let us walk through a town that you couldn’t see from the road, A road that used to be the main street. Nature has totally reclaimed the land in just 30 years. The houses are still standing but were pretty much destroyed in the weeks after the explosion as the cleanup crews removed anything that had been contaminated.
There are still people working at the reactor though. They live there 15 days a month and live in old decontaminated(?) housing. That means there are police, fire, water electric services that need workers too. About 3000 altogether. I wonder how their match.com profile reads. Single employed slightly irradiated gentleman looking for a long distance romance. Then there are the old folks that grew up in the area and just couldn’t cut it out in the real world. They just kept sneaking back after getting taken out until the government just gave up. About 100 of them live out there still without any services other than what they can get from the folks that work there.
We drove around the reactor and its new shell and then had lunch in the workers cafeteria. The stout soviet era lunch ladies seriously and sternly dished out what I think was chicken and rice. The beverage was a glass of some of the nastiest tasting water I have ever had. To be sure I didn’t just grab the wash bucket water by mistake, I had a second glass. It was the same, it tasted like it had been made from the drippings at the bottom of a meat smoker and was a weird brownish color. I didn’t get sick and the toilet didn’t glow so maybe it was a new beverage flavor.
The final stop was a walk around the once modern city of Prpyat erected to house and entertain the well paid reactor workers. When the reactor blew up about 3 miles away, there were about 49000 people living there. The ones that saw the explosion but didn’t know what it was said it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. Given they were living in a planned soviet block city, not sure that their bar for beauty is very high.
Officials delayed the evacuation of Prpyat in the hopes that it could be all swept under the rug. That and the escape routes were more radiated then sheltering in place. But 36 hours later, all 49000 people were told to grab enough stuff for three days and get on the bus. Two hours later the town was vacant never to be inhabited again. The 3 day rule was fake and mentioned just so that people wouldn’t try to take too much stuff or panic. No one was going back.
The weird thing about walking around town was that it was already taken over by the forest. The vision of every post apocalyptic movie maker. We were under strict rules to stick with the group as it was easy to get lost in the thick forest and overgrown bushes. New rules are to not enter the buildings but we did anyway. Pretty damaged but not so much by time as the original decontamination crew and subsequent looters looking for money and valuables that may have been left behind in the rush to get out but expecting to be right back.
I think it was well worth the money and the 2 extra days in Kiev.
The documentary they showed on the bus to the site has been taken off of Youtube, so I posted this one…..
There are plenty of other videos to be found with a quick google search. The HBO mini series was pretty good.
