[shrug shoulders] Not such a great idea if you ask me...but nobody ever does [/shrug shoulders]
Chernobyl gives tourists an eerie glimpse of disaster
By C.J. Chivers
New York Times News Service
Published June 15, 2005
PRIPYAT, Ukraine -- After visiting the ruins of the Polissia Hotel, the darkened Energetic theater and the idled Ferris wheel, the mini-vans stopped again. Six young Finnish men stepped out and followed their guide through a patch of jungle that once was a courtyard.
Branches draped down. Mud squished underfoot. The men stepped past discarded gas-mask filters to the entrance of a ghostly kindergarten.
Much was as the children and their teachers had left it 19 years ago. Tiny shoes littered the classroom floor. Dolls and wooden blocks remained on shelves.
Much also has changed. Now there is rot, broken windows, rusting bed frames and paint falling away in great blisters and peels. And now there are tourists, participating in what may be the strangest vacation excursion available in the former Soviet sphere: the packaged tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, scene of the worst civilian disaster of the nuclear age.
A 19-mile radius around the infamous power plant, the zone has largely been closed to the world since Chernobyl's Reactor No.4 exploded April 26, 1986, sending people to flight and exposing the Communist Party as an institution wormy with hypocrisy and lies.
Now it is a destination.
"It is amazing," said Ilkka Jahnukainen, 22, as he wandered the empty city here that housed plant workers and families, roughly 45,000 people in all. "So dreamlike and silent."
Chernobylinterinform, the zone's information agency, says its tours do not carry health risks. The agency says most of the zone is far cleaner than it was in 1986.
A lethal exposure of radiation ranges from 300 to 500 roentgens an hour; levels in the tour areas vary from 15 to several hundred microroentgens an hour. A microroentgen is one-millionth of a roentgen. Dangers at these levels, the agency says, lie in long-term exposure.
Still, the zone in northern Ukraine has more radioactive spots than those where tourists typically go. So there are rules, which Yuriy Tatarchuk, a government interpreter who served as the Finns' guide, listed. Don't stray. Stay on concrete and asphalt, where exposure risks are lower than on soil.
The area's popularity as a destination is increasing. Few tourists came in 2002, the year it opened for visits, according to Marina Polyakova of Chernobylinterinform. In 2004 about 870 arrived, she said, a pace tourists are matching this year.
Tourists cannot wander the zone alone. One-day group excursions cost $200 to $400.
The tour Saturday began with a drive through meadows, marshes and forest, broken by glimpses of gap-roofed houses and crumbling barns.
Soon reminders of the grim history appeared. The tour stopped at a graveyard of vehicles and helicopters used to fight Chernobyl's fires.
Next stop: the nuclear plant and "sarcophagus," the concrete-and-steel shell built to contain Reactor No. 4's radioactive spew. The Finns posed for a group photo.
Chernobyl gives tourists an eerie glimpse of disaster
By C.J. Chivers
New York Times News Service
Published June 15, 2005
PRIPYAT, Ukraine -- After visiting the ruins of the Polissia Hotel, the darkened Energetic theater and the idled Ferris wheel, the mini-vans stopped again. Six young Finnish men stepped out and followed their guide through a patch of jungle that once was a courtyard.
Branches draped down. Mud squished underfoot. The men stepped past discarded gas-mask filters to the entrance of a ghostly kindergarten.
Much was as the children and their teachers had left it 19 years ago. Tiny shoes littered the classroom floor. Dolls and wooden blocks remained on shelves.
Much also has changed. Now there is rot, broken windows, rusting bed frames and paint falling away in great blisters and peels. And now there are tourists, participating in what may be the strangest vacation excursion available in the former Soviet sphere: the packaged tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, scene of the worst civilian disaster of the nuclear age.
A 19-mile radius around the infamous power plant, the zone has largely been closed to the world since Chernobyl's Reactor No.4 exploded April 26, 1986, sending people to flight and exposing the Communist Party as an institution wormy with hypocrisy and lies.
Now it is a destination.
"It is amazing," said Ilkka Jahnukainen, 22, as he wandered the empty city here that housed plant workers and families, roughly 45,000 people in all. "So dreamlike and silent."
Chernobylinterinform, the zone's information agency, says its tours do not carry health risks. The agency says most of the zone is far cleaner than it was in 1986.
A lethal exposure of radiation ranges from 300 to 500 roentgens an hour; levels in the tour areas vary from 15 to several hundred microroentgens an hour. A microroentgen is one-millionth of a roentgen. Dangers at these levels, the agency says, lie in long-term exposure.
Still, the zone in northern Ukraine has more radioactive spots than those where tourists typically go. So there are rules, which Yuriy Tatarchuk, a government interpreter who served as the Finns' guide, listed. Don't stray. Stay on concrete and asphalt, where exposure risks are lower than on soil.
The area's popularity as a destination is increasing. Few tourists came in 2002, the year it opened for visits, according to Marina Polyakova of Chernobylinterinform. In 2004 about 870 arrived, she said, a pace tourists are matching this year.
Tourists cannot wander the zone alone. One-day group excursions cost $200 to $400.
The tour Saturday began with a drive through meadows, marshes and forest, broken by glimpses of gap-roofed houses and crumbling barns.
Soon reminders of the grim history appeared. The tour stopped at a graveyard of vehicles and helicopters used to fight Chernobyl's fires.
Next stop: the nuclear plant and "sarcophagus," the concrete-and-steel shell built to contain Reactor No. 4's radioactive spew. The Finns posed for a group photo.
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