30th – Welcome to the Zone

The breakfast arrived as ordered (the sandwich was surprisingly large and filling with a yoghurt on the side) and half an hour later I checked out and left for the train station. There I easily located the tour guide, got referred to a specific vehicle and got in together with 13 others.

The view from my hotel room.

With introductions out of the way we drove 2 hours north before reaching the checkpoint at the border of the Chernobyl zone. On the way we watched a documentary on the accident to get into the mood. Watching is saying a bit much, though, as I nodded off not even half way though, and talking with others when reaching the checkpoint, I had not been the only one. We were all OK’d (luckily!) and entered the fabled zone. The temperature had dropped and large snowflakes started falling, there was a low cloud cover and foggy conditions which decreased visibility, something that continued the rest of the day.

A slightly larger snow plow than what I'm used to.

We drove around and started off the tour with seeing a small local village with a few houses and a propaganda building with its own theater/stage.

A small kiosk.

The propaganda center.

A car left behind, stripped of anything of value.

Small house.

From there we continued into the inner zone, the 10km zone, closer to the accident site. Here everything is abandoned as opposed to the 20km zone where 140 people have resettled and live. We saw the church, Chernobyl Lake and memorials before we reached an absolutely massive construction; Duga-2, a 500m long and 120-140m tall radar installation that was built to monitor for launches of ballistic missiles. The thing was huge and looked ridiculous and the best way to describe it is to compare it to a fence built to keep out T-rexes. Looking up at it from the ground it looked absolutely mindbogglingly silly.

Memorial for the first responders, workers and firefighters. The firefighters that arrived in the beginning was only informed of a fire and not what was causing it so they kept spraying the source with water with absolutely no effect. Within 2 weeks they were all dead.

Due to the radiation they tried using remote controlled vehicles so they wouldn't risk workers' lives. The electronics didn't react well to the radiation so they could only be used for short periods of time.

Duga-2. The size was absolutely.... something. 

From there we got to see the radar control building followed by the building where staff was taught how to recognize the different missiles. The buildings were a fascinating sight of disarray and varying degree of deconstruction and decay. While tragic it did without a doubt have its own beauty.

The control room.

Where the staff got to learn how to recognize and differentiate the various missiles.

From there we passed by a kindergarten before passing by the Chernobyl plant and going onto a train with all the employees at the plant who work there (keeping it safe during the teardown which will still last quite a few years into the future) which brought us to the town of Slavutych where we had dinner. At the train station we all had to go through radiation scanners to make sure that we hadn’t received too much radition during the stay.

The kindergarten.

This doesn't really make dolls less creepy.

After dinner we took a vehicle that brought us to our place for the night. Apparently the hotel booking for the tour got screwed somehow because we got split out into two different private residences. 6 of us got put into a house “with a double room and two rooms with two single beds in each” which turned out to be one room with 4 single beds (where one was an armchair that could be unfolded into a bed) and one with two singles and a double. It all seemed quite disorganized but suddenly the owner of the place we were staying at showed up and made us pancakes while showing us ship/car/bike crash videos on youtube on his TV. The pancakes were delicious but the entire situation was just weird.

During the evening I was made aware of that the train ride actually took us through Belarus before ending up back in Ukraine. Not for long, maybe 20 minutes, and there was absolutely no indication that we crossed a border and nothing looked different. But still, technically, I was in Belarus.

Early start tomorrow; we will be picked up at 0600 to return to the train station.