Let's take some photos in Chernobyl - Traveling Toby #01

Just a short summary of my daytrip to Chernobyl. I hope you enjoy.

How dangerous is it to go there?

That’s the first thing people are always asking me when I mention my trip to Chernobyl. Well, most people actually called me crazy for going there. My mum initially shouted at me and told me not to go. I am not an extreme brave man, it is just not as dangerous at most people think. The radiation levels are not that high in most areas around Chernobyl. Spending one day there is exposing your body to about the same radiation which you get during a long-distance flight. Or far less than one x-ray scan.

Yes, there are certain areas around the reactor where the radiation levels are still extremely high, but you are in a guided tour group anyway so you won’t enter such areas. The Red Forrest for example is one of the most contaminated areas in the world today. Just don’t do anything extremely stupid and follow the guide seems like a smart tip I would give.

Where do you start?

You need to book a tour. All of them basically start somewhere in Kiev where you get picked up by a bus. There is no other way to visit Chernobyl. This is still a restricted area with a lot of control stations which are guarded by military soldiers at anytime. Beginning from the 30km exclusion zone, one military soldier will always convoy the tour together with a Geiger counter.

Just look for “Chernobyl tour” on the internet and you will find quite a lot of different offers. Since the last couple years this is actually becoming more of a common tourist thing. Do not expect to see a lot of Ukrainians in the tour groups though, all the people I met were from other countries.

To be honest: All the locals I talked to thought that I am crazy that I am going to Chernobyl. They are still quite shattered about the accident it seems. One Ukrainian woman who showed us around in Kiev told me that for her the air smells and tastes different since the accident happened.

All the various tours offer a slightly different program, just pick whatever you prefer. Most of them are for 1 day (pick up in the morning, coming home in the evening), and some tours take 2 days. Then you sleep in a near by hotel. As you could imagine, there are not that many available. There is even a special tour where you get to dress up in old soviet military uniforms and you drive up to the reactor in an old Lada (Russian car). Depending on the type of the tour you pay about 80$ (1 day) to close to 300$

I only had a 1-day tour and probably would say that a 2-day tour would have been better. But it probably was not my last time anyway.

What do you get to see?

Well, as already mentioned, that really depends on what kind of tour you book. But some stops are pretty much the same for any tour. The drive from Kiev takes about 2h. We got to see a little documentary about the accident in Chernobyl on the bus which was very interesting and informative. The rest of the time our tour guide told us what we are not allowed to do when we are in the exclusion zone. No crawling around in the dirt, not to pet any animals (there are so many stray dogs there) and, we should not eat anything we find there. Seems understandable. At the 30km exclusion zone there were no security checks. All we had to do is to show our passports and the military soldiers made sure that we are not wearing short shorts. That was it.

After that we drove again for quite a long time. The roads in the exclusion zone seemed way better than most of the roads I saw in Ukraine. Probably because there are not many people driving around here.

After some time, we stopped at abandoned Kindergarten. All the relaxing mood and fun we had on the bus with the other tourists felt silent that second. Seeing the rotten kid drawings and all these toys left behind by children started to make you think of horrible it must have been. The thought of all the fear and sorrow these kids and their parents must have had is just
inconceivably. Just look at the pictures and decide for yourself.

Some aspects of the tour feel quite “museums like”. For example, you are going to see quite a lot of monuments dedicated to the people who were fighting with their lives to prevent an even bigger nuclear disaster. We also stopped at one location to look at the different tools they used to work near the melted reactor at that time. The UDSSR got sent specialised robots from Japan and Germany to help, but pretty much all of them broke due to the heat and the high radiations levels.

We also stopped at the only supermarket there is in the exclusion zone. It’s basically just an old lady in a shady room selling everything from a few groceries, to alcohol, to beauty products and even some souvenirs. I got myself a Chernobyl coffee mug (love that thing) and a t-shirt.

Like obviously, you are going to see the infamous Reactor No. 4 of the nuclear power plant. To be precise, you are going to see the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement. It is a shelter to contain the remains of the reactor and the temporary “sarcophagus” which built immediately after the disaster. The total cost of this new shelter was around 1.5 billion dollars. One of the next steps is going to be to remove about 150 tons of partially melted nuclear fuel from the inside of the old sarcophagus using special robots. You are only allowed to photograph the Reactor from this exact angle for some reason.

Oh, and all the other three reactors are still up and running. Was not expecting that but that’s the reason why so see so many people still leaving in the exclusion zone. Our tour guide told us that they are not allowed to any longer than 5 hours are day in the other reactors.

After that we started to do the most interesting part of the tour. We went to see Pripyat, the town right next to the nuclear power plant where most of the workers used to live. It’s just a ghost town, nobody lived there for 30 years. We started off at a hotel, next to a mostly destroyed supermarket, went through the famous amusement park and ended up at a sport stadium. It kind of felt like walking through a forest with random building popping out there randomly. It is just so fascinating to see nature fight and slowly claim back the city. And that’s also the reason why I would have enjoyed having another day there.

Pripyat was just so special and fascinating for me and we basically rushed through it because there was not much time left. I could have spent ages there taking photo and videos.

Is it worth it?

It felt way more touristic than I thought it would. I really did not expect that. Also, the price is quite high when you compare it to other activities in Ukraine. Even though I would certainly do it again and probably will again in the future. I am not finished with Pripyat yet.

And of course, the coffee mug was also already worth the whole trip.

I hope you enjoyed my little post about my day trip to Chernobyl. There is still so much to talk about, but I did not want my post to be endless. So please, just ask if you have any questions. Or just go there for yourself If you can. I am doing a video about my trip soon, which I probably first going to upload on YouTube, and if you want to see more pictures you can check out my Instagram account.

My YouTube Account: LichtcatchingToby
My Instagram Account: LichtcatchingToby