In the zone
25 June, 20:01yiv Post editor Greg Bloom returned to Ukraine last year after a four-year hiatus to update Lonely Planet’s Ukraine guide. This is the fourth of several columns documenting his travels.
Not once during my time in Kyiv did I venture north of the suburb of Vyshhorod, on the southwest edge of the Kyiv Sea, where I used to windsurf. I was keenly aware of what lurked on the Kyiv Sea’s northeast edge: Chornobyl. Every now and then I’d take a mouthful of water after a nasty spill – and I’d worry.
Ukraine was just starting to market Chornobyl as a somewhat macabre tourist attraction when I left Ukraine in 2003. But the sporadic tours were prohibitively expensive and I never got around to joining one. Besides, I wasn’t that interested in contracting any more radiation than I’d received windsurfing. I sent one of our reporters instead, on the Kyiv Post’s dime.
Fast-forward to today, and Chornobyl is suddenly the country’s fourth most popular tourist attraction for foreigners after Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa. I have no statistics to back that up, but it’s pretty obvious. On a single day trip to Chornobyl, I met more foreign tourists (20) than I met in the rest of the country (outside Lviv) combined. Thousands of people a year fly to Ukraine for the sole purpose of visiting Chornobyl.
The popularity of Chornobyl is a double-edged sword for Ukraine, which continues to struggle to attract mass tourism despite relaxed visa rules. On one hand, Chornobyl has been an unlikely boon to the country’s tourism industry. On the other hand, its rising popularity only encourages the international community’s habit of associating Ukraine with Chornobyl. What do Western Europeans think of when they hear the word “Ukraine”? A few years ago, they might have answered “Andriy Shevchenko and Chornobyl.” With Shevchenko’s career on the decline and Chornobyl’s popularity on the rise, now they’re more likely to answer, simply, “Chornobyl.”
This sticks in the craw of average Ukrainians, who are understandably ambivalent about Chornobyl tours. Why risk opening up a wound that has yet to heal? According to my tour operator, SoloEast, Ukrainians rarely sign up for these tours. Chornobyl is not unique in this regard in the former Soviet Union. Other symbols of Soviet tyranny and irresponsibility, such as Stalin’s former dacha in Sochi and the dried-up Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, attract foreigners but draw little interest from locals.
My Chornobyl tour consisted exclusively of foreigners, most of them British. Most intriguing was a group that travelled the world in search of desolate and deserted places. Chornobyl was a natural choice.
“Abandoned buildings are our hobby, and Prypiat and Chornobyl are abandoned, so pretty good for us,” explained Phil Conway of Gilford, England, who runs the website www.urbandesertion.com.
What did their friends back home think?
“They said, ‘Why would you ever want to travel 1,500 miles to see this? That’s crazy.’ But hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Leaving Vyshhorod, we set off through the seemingly endless forests of Polissia, which sprawl north from Kyiv along the Desna and Teteriv rivers. As I was to discover on a subsequent visit, the region is a Mecca for outdoorsy pursuits like mountain biking, fishing, camping and, around Zhytomyr, rock climbing. The people are warm and hospitable. They live uncomplicated lives in harmony with the land and its lakes, rivers and forests. Some say this is where you’ll find that elusive ‘real Ukraine.’
It was in the very heart of this region, on 26 June 1986, that Chornobyl’s reactor No 4 exploded in a fiery radioactive cloud, releasing radiation equivalent to about 30 atomic bombs. That the Soviets dared build a massive nuclear power plant in such an idyllic setting seems a crime in itself, but then the Soviets were guilty of worse environmental planning decisions (the aforementioned Aral Sea comes to mind). But none would have the consequences of Chornobyl: 31 dead in the months following the accident, and tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, stricken with often-fatal diseases or disabilities related to radiation exposure.
As we entered the exclusion zone an eerie silence fell over the bus as the gravity of the event set in. But then the silence was broken by the beeping of our guide’s geiger counter. It seemed we were entering a radioactive “hot spot.” The collective curiosity of the group was piqued, and we huddled around the geiger counter, watching it go from about 40 or 50 micro-roentgens (just a tad above normal background radiation) to about 1000.
The bus stopped as our guide got off and, furiously beeping geiger counter in hand, headed toward a clump of trees on the side of the road, where lurked a piece of radioactive something. We followed him eagerly and watched in awe as his geiger rocketed up to 5000, then 6000, then 8000 micro-roentgens. There were gasps and cheers. Shutters snapped. The group’s thirst for radiation was insatiable.
Radiation as invisible tourist attraction: It was one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen. Not that I was above it. I was right there, videocamera in hand, filming the device’s demonic rise. The geiger counter leveled off at 9000 micro-roentgens – a milestone of sorts. Satisfied, we piled back onto the bus.
At the end of the tour, I asked a few of my companions what the highlight had been. The abandoned-place seekers, naturally, cited the ghost town of Prypyat, although they wished they had more time to explore Pyrpyat’s many abandoned buildings (the highly regimented nature of the tour is not for everybody). Others mentioned the sarcophagus-covered reactor. Still others, if you can believe it, said the Soviet-style lunch in Chornobyl town’s stolovaya was the highlight (stolovayas are a big hit with tourists seeking “authentic” Soviet experiences).
But for me the highlight will always be the spectacle of our group chasing radiation, that invisible tourist attraction.
The new edition of Lonely Planet’s Ukraine guide was released earlier this month. Read more about Bloom’s travels in Ukraine and elsewhere at http://mytripjournal.com/bloomblogs