Chernobyl Journal #2: The road to Chernobyl

Sunday, April 19th, 2009 | project wormwood, travel journal, video

This is part two of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.

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Our tour to Chernobyl was scheduled for Thursday and Friday.

Entry into the zone of exclusion is only allowed with proper authorizations and a tour guide. I was in contact with our guide Yuriy from the Chernobyl InterInform agency -- that’s the official state authority -- a couple of weeks before the trip and had arranged a 7:30 pickup from a street close to our apartment. I apparently woke him by a phone call at 7:15. “Yes, I will be there in 20 minutes”, he said, which our Riga colleagues translated as: “I will get out of bed now.”

The Chernovan

We were finally picked up at 9:00; meanwhile we had eaten breakfast at a local eatery. Yuriy was accompanied by a driver whose name we never learned (the silent Slavic type) and a 22-year old girl, who he introduced as “Tanya, the best hacker in the zone”. She was, as we learned, in charge of web security on the Pripyat’s website, and came along for her fourth visit to the zone. After the friendly introductions, we drove off north, with a stop at a local supermarket. “We will get dinner at the hotel, but will need to bring our own food for lunch”, Yuriy said. “And drinks if you want, because in Chernobyl, everything is 10% more expensive”. Surprised that there were even shopping possibilities in Chernobyl, we bought food and drinks.

The road north

The drive was longer than expected, and most of us slept during the drive through the bland, brown landscapes. In March there is hardly any green grass around, and the only memorable aspects of the scenery are long stretches of skinny birch forests along the road. We passed “the egg”, a big white, egg-shaped memorial in the middle of a large roundabout put there by one of the former mayor of the zone. “It’s a time capsule”, Yuriy told us, “containing letters of former inhabitants”.

We followed the road branched off north. Around Kyiv the roads were flooded by cars, and we often had to slow down. But by now the number of cars we saw on the road had gone down to one every ten minutes: Traffic jams were obviously not a problem in the zone of exclusion.

After a short photo break at the Chernobyl district sign, we arrived at the first security checkpoint, where a soldier in blue camo gear checked our passports against Yuriy’s authorization documents. And after the gate was closed behind us, we suddenly were in the Chernobyl zone of exclusion.

Chernobyl Town

Our first stop in the zone was “the hotel” in the town of Chernobyl -- our base camp for the tour. The town was evacuated and abandoned after the accident, with the exception of a couple of inhabitants who didn’t want to leave or came back as re-settlers after some time. Chernobyl is a more lively place than you might imagine: Nowadays it is repopulated with 500 people, many of them scientists. It features two shops, a bar, the hotel and a couple of administrative buildings. We could see a lot of people walking around -- mostly in uniforms, but not all of them. We also met some very friendly chernocats and chernodogs, who were living (well-fed and domesticated) by the research station next to the hotel.

“Hotel Chernobyl”, or just “the hotel” was a complex of yellow container barracks next to the Chernobyl InterInform agency (again, yellow container barracks). We each got our own room in the hotel, complete with a bathroom, a bedroom and a living room -- it even had a fridge! While we dropped our bags, Yuriy changed into his uniform (camo gear), packed a couple of respirators into the trunk, and assembled his high-end Geiger counter. While waiting, I turned on the counter I had brought with me -- which I kept beeping during the whole tour. At the hotel, it showed a radiation level of 0.1 uSv/h, which is the normal background radiation for Europe. That doesn’t mean that it’s safe to eat locally grown vegetables there.

After some waiting time, the tour continued: We drove past the firefighter monument (of which we had seen too many pictures to stop) and arrived at the second checkpoint -- the guards were taking the controls very seriously. Continuing on a straight road, the ominous shape of destroyed reactor #4’s cooling tower appeared on the horizon: There it was -- ground zero of the 1986 accident.