Chernobyl: Day 1 (9/29/19)
(Long entry incoming)
Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!! Chernobyl tour day 1 baby!!!! I woke up at 5am so I could pack up my stuff and walk the 45 minutes to the pickup spot by the 7:30am leave time. My group is 14 people from all over Europe but during the two hour bus ride to the exclusion zone I most connected with a student from Sweden that I sat next to. We spent most of the day hanging around each other rather than the loud and obnoxious group of four German dudebros.
The 1st place we went was Pripyat, a Soviet city built to be “the city of the future” and has been retaken by nature in the years since its post disaster abandonment. We got our radiation badges and Geiger counters and cleared the security checkpoint to enter the area, then set out into the city. First stop was the famous abandoned hospital, the one with the firefighter’s radioactive clothes in the basement. We didn’t go inside, not because its illegal to enter the structurally unsound buildings in the zone, out tour guide was very clear we would be entering plenty of buildings during our trip, but because it was HELLA radioactive just inside the door. We then walked through a forested area to a partially collapsed school building, except what we walked through was not a forest area at all but where a main road once stood! The entire city was closer to a forest with scattered buildings than it was to resembling any sort of cohesive cityscape!
Next step was the riverside cafe, where the guide pulled out a photo album of pictures of the city before decades of inattention so we could compare the broken down shell in front of us to what it once was. We also found our first Pikachu - 1 out of a supposed 100 graffiti Pikachus that inhabit the Chernobyl area. Our guide has still only found 62 after three years of working there. That was also when we learned about the Chernobyl Tour drama: basically every other tour company has an agreement not to rat each other out about entering buildings but Chernobyl Tour is snitching on people to get them fired.
The it was on to the Pripyat movie theater, one of very few theaters in the USSR where you could view foreign films. Its exterior was covered in mosaics and the interior was totally ruined and off limits like every other building … so of course we snuck in to check it out! And almost got caught by another group passing by! The main square and Palace of Culture came next, one of a few places in the city where the treeline is broken by concrete. Every place we visited had a story and history behind it, which I would love to write down but I’m limited by my hands and time so that’s not happening.
Then it was on to the Pripyat Amusement Park with its iconic ferris wheel; now locked to prevent it from rotating in the wind and still very radioactive in the higher seats. That was where we met good girl number 1, a very sweet pupper who lives there and has mastered the art of being cute to earn scraps. Which are needed, since there is practically no wildlife besides ants in the area. No birds in the morning, no isencts buzzing around, and no spiders in the buildings.
We then trudged through a long area that was pretty densely forested, aka the old soccer field, before rendezvousing with the van. A few minutes later we wre running up the stairs of a prefabriacted housing unit, dead silent up six stories, to see an exclusive location that our guide apparently had to pay the oldest tour guide for the information about. A single apartment that was unique, one not exactly the same as every other apartment in the entire city. It had a single hallway covered in reflective mirror wallpaper. We checked it out and then made our way back down but apparently too late as the guide charged back up to scold everyone for taking too long.
On to the Duga Radar, a massive 150 meter tall, nearly kilometer long, top secret missile detection radar that cost more than double the entire cost of the Chernobyl power plant! It was so large that citizens of Pripyat several kilometers away could easily see it from their windows as it towered above everything in the area. They were told it was a TV antenna, and it never functioned properly even once. Its design was inherently flawed and the US found out about it just a few seconds after its first test. It was truly mind-bogglingly massive. Like you crane your neck to see the top, then left and right and don’t even see the edge of the structure. And in classic Soviet construction fashion, it is accompanied by a kilometer long building with the sole purpose of holding the wiring which was never used.
Next, onto another appartment complex, this one without any unique features but without any real risk of being caught so we could explore to our heart’s content. Then a school with rotting floors and a despoiled piano in the music room (got that word from Pachinko, the bookI’im reading currently). With sunset approaching, we left the exclusion zone via a radiation checkpoint where each of us and the van was scanned for any lingering sources we had picked up, and onto a memorial for the 164 abandoned towns, villages, and cities and their displaced inhabitants from the disaster. And finally a dinner at our lodging for the night, Hotel 10 just outside the exclusion zone after 12 straight hours of driving through and experiencing Pripyat and the surrounding area.
Tomorrow is day 2 of the tour, which will include a visit to the Chernobyl power plant itself and a tour of its interior which I am SO pumped for!
