After a long year of planning, we finally headed out of Kiev today and into the wilds of the Zone. Our guide Yevgeny was raring to go at 7:30am and we headed out into the countryside going northbound towards Belarus.
We hit our first checkpoint 30km outside of Pripyat. A very formal affair - we had to show our passports which were compared to the information that was sent over several weeks before when booking our trip. For a few seconds there I was worried that I had sent them my old passport number when I booked, as I only renewed it a month before the trip and we weren't going to be let in - but these are the kinds of anxiety moments I have. Once we got the all OK, we headed into the town of Chernobyl, where the people who still work at the reactor stay. As there are strict rules about how long you can stay within the Zone, workers either do 15 days in/15 days out or weekdays in/weekends out and have a home outside the perimiter where it's considered "clean". Many of them live in Kyiv and take the 1.5 hour commute in.
We met our guide form the Chernobylinterinform state agency who spent a half hour reading us the disclaimer and rules - which we then had to sign and was kept with us the entire two days and used as our official paperwork to get past the other 2 interior checkpoints:
- don't touch any plants with your bare hands
- keep with the guides at all tiimes as there are packs of wolves around that have begun to bite people during the day
- if you get your camera or video gear contaminated, they are not responsible for it
- this is all at your own risk and you are cool with that
We first got a tour of Chernobyl city - the only church left for all the people, some of the many abandoned homes, and the post office that has a digital display which updates the radiation counts around the zone every minute. We also saw the famous monument erected to commemorate the workers who dies responding to the disaster. It was paid for by the families of the workers and the locals for their "heroes" and reads "For those who saved the world".
We then headed off for the first of the big 2 ultimate photo locations on our lists - the Chernobyl reactor. We stopped on the highway to take some long shots of the sarcophagus, the half-finished cooling towers, and the equally half-finished reactor #4 which was in progress when the disaster happened. The cranes are still on the site and will remain there. We stopped at the bridge to feed the mutant catfish in the man-made cooling pond then proceeded around the reactor to the official "photographer spot" at the nuclear monument. It would have been nice to go and walk around a bit, but it was still awe-inspiring to be standing 300m from the biggest technological disaster of my time. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting a nuclear reactor sarcophagus to look like, but it kind of reminded me of Hearn Generating Station when it had seen better days. They are already beginning construction on the new one as this one is already old and will soon fail.
Our next stop was something I have been dreaming of for quite some time - the abandoned city of Pripyat. It's amazing just how close the city was to the reactor and now wonder that it had to be evacuated. I could have walked over there from the reactor site.
At the checkpoint - our last for the area - we started exploring. Let me just say how fantastic our guide was, We had emailed ahead and let the tour company know that we wanted our time tailored specifically towards photography and even sent a list of the buildings from Google Maps that I had tagged as interesting. I'll be damned if we didn't hit at least 14 of those locations today - which is why I can no longer feel my feet, calves, thighs, or spine. Well worth it. Let's see if I can remember some of the highlights so this blog post doesn't turn into a novel:
- a cafe that had mostly intact stained glass windows made in a way that I had never seen before
- a hospital with medical equipment
- a school filled with desks and a chalkboard full of the names and dates of people who had visited the city
- an orphanage with rooms full of children's bed frames
- the view of the city from the top floor of the main hotel
- the bumper cars in the amusement park
- an Olympic grade swimming pool with 2 levels of high dive boards
- a grade school full of children's gas masks
After a full day of exploration, we headed back to the INterinform building to see if we were irradiated, using a full-sized dosimeter that looked like it was from the 50s. We all passed. It's going to be sweet dreams and a deep sleep for me. We start the adventure all over again with an 8am breakfast tomorrow.
(Day 2 of Chernobyl to be posted tomorrow)
