Chernobyl Journal #13: End of the Rainbow

Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | decay, hdr, travel journal, video

This is the last part 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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After that short excursion, it was five o’clock -- time to leave. We went back to the bus, where Tanya had fun harassing Yuriy and the driver with feedback noises from the walkie-talkies:

Sound: Walkie Talkie Feedback Galore!

We picked up Laura and René (who had lost their way in Pripyat, but found back to the main street), and drove back to Chernobyl. The last location we visited before returning to the research station was the old shipyard north of Chernobyl. The rusty boats looked beautiful in the evening sunlight. It was hard to find a good spot to shoot them without having tree branches in the way, but it was a worthwhile location to visit at the end.

At the InterInform station we settled the bill, and Yuriy showed us a couple of radiation maps on the walls. After that, we said goodbye to him and Tanya (they were staying in the zone), and drove off south.

Contamination Control

The drive was very quiet, as most of us fell asleep from exhaustion. Half an hour later we arrived at the 30km checkpoint. All of us had to leave the van and walk through a door into a small building next to the gate. We entered a large, green painted room which was divided by what looked like subway security doors: It was the contamination checkpoint. To pass it, we had to put our feet on predefined spots, put our hands into metal boxes, and were scanned from head to toe. If you were clean, the light would turn green and the gate would open. If not, well… we were lucky we didn’t find out what would happen then. The process was fully automatic, impersonal, and looked like it was adopted straight from Half-Life’s “City 17“.

My own radiation check consisted of statistics derived from my own Geiger counter. Here is what it showed:

	Day One	Day Two
Average	0.454 uSv/h	0.376 uSv/h
Maximum	19.6 uSv/h	3.1 uSv/h
Dosis	3.21 uSv	1.9 uSv

My total radiation dosis was 3.21 + 1.9 = 5.11 uSv. That’s the equivalent of half a dosis you get from a dental x-ray. We received a multiple of that dosis from cosmic rays, travelling by plane. Of course, that’s Gamma radiation only; we don’t know what we breathed in, especially when the Pripyat ghost trucks were close.

Memories for a Lifetime

It was around eight o’clock when we arrived at the apartment. We got out of our dusty clothes, threw away our shoes, showered thoroughly, got some Italian food and spent the evening in a Kyiv live music club and at home with a bottle of Riga Balzams. It was four o’clock in the morning when we finally went to bed.

So ended our trip to Chernobyl and Pripyat. I have seen a couple of strange places in my 7 years of urban exploration: Abandoned psychiatric hospitals, coloring plants full of chemical residues, half-burnt schools and cathedral-like breweries; but nothing comes close to Pripyat. It is a truly abandoned city, the remaining memory of a place once called home by 50 000 Soviet citizens. I still have dreams about the place, its unsettling quiet and absence of life, the beeping of my Geiger counter, the passport pictures of Pripyat school children, and the ever-present radiation.

After the trip, René told me I looked like I had reached the end of my rainbow there. Maybe I did. It’s a lonely place, and the pot of gold is bitter. Maybe I will go back one day. But then, I will speak Russian.