Last summer I was on the road around Europe for around 3 months, your standard uni is done for now lets find ourselves kinda crap. I lie, summer in Scotland is about as fun as watching puppies getting kicked into traffic. In others words, I had to get out of there.
I promised myself that during the trip I would keep an even balance of "doing cool shit" vs partying at every opportunity. That promise was broken very, very quickly in pretty much every country I visited. Turns out doing cool things can sober you up real fast!
I had first toyed with the idea of visiting Chernobyl after meeting an Australian guy when I was in Belgrade. We were both equally fascinated on the subject, we exchanged information on good documentaries about it and agreed that it was a very good level in a very popular video game. After we had drank all the beer we could find we promised that we would meet up in Kiev and go see it together, then we went our separate ways.
Now, for the sake of the length of this post we are skipping over:
- 1 week of unbearable humidity in Cyprus
- 2 weeks which I probably should have died while travelling through the Greek islands. Who knew all there was to do is sit at the beach, visit a vineyard, rent quad bikes, party and mess around on paddle boards. Fuck yeah, paddle boards!
...and now I'm in Kiev!
First thing I did when I got to my hostel was message the guy asking when he was arriving. As it turns out, Australians require a visa to get into Ukraine and that he was now stuck in Poland. Tit. I'd now be doing this on my own.
The next morning I had to meet outside of a hotel I couldn't pronounce, which navigating my way to would be difficult as the street signs are almost all exclusively in Cyrillic. Thankfully, it was pretty close by. Chernobyl is about a 2 hour drive north of Kiev, we had to stop at a checkpoint once we reached the 30km exclusion zone so they could check we all had the correct paperwork needed to enter.
I would be joined by our guide, 2 Swedish guys and an American-Ukrainian girl. We were lucky to have her with us, more on that later.
This sign was the first thing that I recognised from all the documentaries I had watched about the disaster. The beginning of the village can be seen a little further up the road. All the people who still live there mostly wear old military uniforms since they are cheap and suitable for the cold. On the day we visited however, it was about 25c and we were specifically told not to wear shorts and wear a long sleeved top to stop any radioactive particles getting on our skin. Needless to say it was fucking hot.
The village is filled with statues and memorials for the victims of the disaster.
So the girl that was with us explained that her parents lived in Chernobyl at the time of the disaster. Her Grandfather was also a worker at the power plant, luckily he was not on site at the time everything went wrong. They were all relocated to Kiev 48 hours after the disaster (I know, right?). Apparently the entire bus fleet from Kiev was drafted in to get everyone out.
Anyway, before she left for Ukraine, her parents gave her the address of their old house. After asking a lot of the locals for directions to the street and climbing through some heavily overgrown areas we probably should not have been in, we totally found it! The roof was caved in and the interior was now very much a part of the surrounding forest, but the number on the wall and street name checked out. She was absolutely ecstatic, I was so happy to have been there to see it. It really helped to ground myself from all the hype that surrounds Chernobyl and Pripyat in the media, that real people lived here.
I'll spare you all the history of the disaster, if you are even tiny bit interested there is a wealth of documentaries on Youtube that you can lose yourself in for hours.
From there we drove about 15 mins to the location of the reactor, it's pretty alarming how close the power plant is to where everybody lived.
In total there are 6 reactors:
- 1-3 were operational until 1991
- Reactor 4 exploded and made a right ol' fool of itself.
- 5-6 were never finished.
Technically the above picture is illegal, but the security staff around us did not give a flying fuck about what we were taking pictures of.
Just down the road from the reactor was a river, we stood on a bridge over it and our guide pointed at the water and threw half a sandwich in. Those large black shapes are huge radioactive Catfish, did not expect to see that!
After noping the fuck out of that situation we moved onto the town of Pripyat. You know...the place were 50,000 people used to live but is now a ghost town? Our guide actually said there was a slap waiting for anyone who quoted a certain line from a video game whilst driving into the town. I was the only person that laughed.
I think the best thing to do here is to just dump the best images I have of Pripyat and if anyone has any questions about the city or anything to do with the trip I'd be more than happy to answer them.
EDIT: I had a look through my phone and found a video of us walking through a few buildings. No doubt some of you will recognise it.
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