I visited Ukraine for five days in December with Emily and Tim, with a two-day tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone booked in the middle. Here's what we got up to on the first day in the Zone!
Cherevach village
We were picked up just before 08:00 by our tour operator, with whom we'd booked a private tour in order to get more flexibility. This turned out to be a good call -- we saw absolutely nobody else inside the exclusion zone with the exception of one other group we steered around towards the end of the second day, in Pripyat. Our guide, Nataly, also noted that we'd picked a good time to come, as during summer it's apparently impossible to get a photo of anywhere without other people in-shot. Plus even in the summer heat, the rule regarding long sleeves and trousers still applies, so it can get uncomfortable.
As it was, it snowed while were out there, which definitely made up for the lack of blue skies!
The drive from Kyiv to the edge of the 30km (outer) exclusion zone was about two hours, during which time we stopped off at a service station to use the toilets and pick up some toilet paper on the advice that the few loos we'd have a chance to visit were often run out (this turned out to be true).
At the border we had to have our passport checked against the details we'd emailed the tour group a month or two beforehand, as entry to the zone is heavily restricted and must be pre-arranged. Strictly speaking, the tour was an educational one, and we'd been shown a video in our 10-seater minibus to that effect. That said, there was a souvenir stall just outside the border, at which be obligingly bought some mugs and fridge magnets (the latter has become something of a holiday tradition for me).
Our ID checked out and after a short drive we pulled into the first abandoned village, Cherevach.
All the houses were shrouded behind 30-year-old foliage.
After the disaster, workers called "liquidators", whose job is to reduce the levels of radioactivity in the region, cleaned out the buildings of contaminated material, leaving the places nearly empty.
Mostly furniture, metals, and electronics were removed. Most paperwork seemed to stay.
In the village shop, the roof was beginning to fall in.
It was interesting to see what rural communities in Ukraine in the 1980s were like. They used brick ovens to cook and heat the house, and were still using outhouses. Most houses also kept animals in a separate building.
Chernobyl town
Our next stop was the town of Chernobyl, which the power plant was named after as the then-nearest town. However, it's 17km away from the reactors rather than the newer town of Pripyat, and now houses temporary resident workers for the area. There are officially no permanent residents though some older residents refused to evacuate the town and still live there; their houses are marked as occupied and stand out as the only maintained buildings off the main road.
Statues of Lenin were removed after the fall of the USSR, but disturbing structures is forbidden in the exclusion zone, so this one remains.
A monument to Hiroshima and, later, Fukushima. The cranes are a reference to Sadako Sasaki's cranes.
Abandoned town names along a footpath.
A monument to the firefighters who died trying to get the initial explosion under control. Their colleagues made this sculpture themselves having been denied federal funding, coating some of their real equipment in concrete to make it more realistic. All the figures in the monument look scared. It is engraved with the words "To those who saved the world." Given that the Soviet government was planning to evacuate Minsk 230 km away at one point, I don't think this was an overstatement.
Kopachi village
The checkpoint for the 10km (inner) exclusion zone was just after Chernobyl town, after which we visited Kopachi village, where an abandoned school was just off the road.
This was also the first time our Geiger counters started beeping, having been calibrated for the safe residential level of 0.3 µSv/h (I think). However, upon entering the building, and in particular the basement, the radiation levels dropped again. This was also the first "hotspot" we came across, a spot on the ground with a particularly high concentration of radioactive material in it. The known ones are marked with a signpost.
This one measured 5½ µSv/h; by comparison our flight to Ukraine probably registered around 3.3 µSv/h.
Inside the school.
A little further on is a site used to home old farming equipment. The area is apparently popular with Stalkers, trespassers in the zone, named for the term coined in a 1971 sci-fi novel, Roadside Picnic.
Indeed, an abandoned trolleybus showed signs of recent habitation when we went inside.
A stolen sign and some graffiti. Also on the table was what looked like a biography of Paul Lafargue (Поль Лафарг) -- make of that what you will.
Duga-1, the "Russian Woodpecker"
Next stop was the Duga-1 receiver, a 750m long radar array that was designed to be able to detect US ICBM launches. The transmitter for this commonly interfered with short-wave radio in a tap-tap-tap pattern that gave it its nickname.
We had to pass through a small staffed checkpoint to get into the complex, though given that the whole place was abandoned I'm not entirely sure why. Duga-1 was a secret base, and though there was also a town here to train staff and maintainers, all the inhabitants were essentially sworn to secrecy and not allowed to leave.
It was difficult to get a photo that captured the magnitude of the array.
Along the whole length of the radar was a command bunker, which we walked along with torchlights and was very eerie. We also walked through some command rooms off the main corridor.
My camera overexposed this a little. No tripods were allowed on the tour since nothing except our boots must touch the ground.
Ghosts
In the evening we stayed in a guest hotel in Chernobyl town (the room measured 0.18 µSv/h) where we had dinner, a supposedly basic meal that just kept coming and coming! Of note was some pizza, some potato dumplings (varenyky, I think; imagine gnocchi dim sum) and cream-cheese sweet pancakes. The hotel itself was very comfortable and even had wifi!
The next day we went to Pripyat, the evacuated city, and the site of the reactor itself, but that'll have to wait for the next entry!
I definitely recommend it! Nothing can quite describe the feeling of unease of walking around a nursery with several Geiger counter alarms going off at once (even though at that point they were set to be triggered at very low levels)
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iguana
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Date: 2017-12-29 22:11 (UTC)