Visiting Chernobyl

The vehicle graveyard

2006-06-13T21:45:00.000+02:00

About 15 km from Chernobyl, thousands of vehicles are left to rust. At first, the graveyard was meant to store only vehicles contaminated by isotopes with a short half-life, like Iodine. After a few months they would have been safe. Unfortunately, other vehicles were parked there, and the wind blew more dangerous particles over here, rendering all these trucks and helicopters useless for the first few centuries.
Unfortunately we were not allowed to walk between the vehicles.

^^ fire engines.

^^ school busses used for the evacuation of the zone. You can clearly see what is left of the rotors of two helicopters in the back.

^^ An army truck. Note that the engine is missing, probably stolen by looters or corrupt civil servants for sale on the black market.

^^ Armored Personnel Carriers used by the fire department.

^^ These gunship helicopters flew straight from the Afghan battlefield to Chernobyl to aid in the building of the sarcophagus.

Pripyat III: The kindergarten

2006-06-13T21:13:00.000+02:00

We also visited a kindergarten. Most childeren aged 3 - 6 would spend their day here, since it was customary for both parents to go out working in the Soviet Union.

^^ The entrance. You may have noticed that I love peeling paint.

^^ Little trees are reclaiming the playground.

^^ A piece of graffiti in the gym.

^^ A toy car with a child's gasmask on top. Without a doubt the weirdest image I have seen during our trip. Childeren sized gasmasks creep me out.

^^ The kitchen.

^^ Obligatory shoe-shots.

^^ I loved that drawing. After a while, it gets harder to imagine that at one time, Pripyat was a happy place (Filled with turnip-cooking sparrows?).

Pripyat II: Swimming pool

2006-06-13T20:59:00.000+02:00

These are some pictures of an indoor swimming pool / sporting hall :

^^ The windows of the swimming pool are long gone

^^ Another view from outside

^^ Our guide climbing the stairs to the pool.

^^ The basketball court on the first floor.

^^ The swimming pool. There were shards of glass everywhere. (Click for big)

^^ Serge and the pool

^^ The team filming us

Pripyat I

2006-05-22T21:32:00.000+02:00

The abandoned town "Pripyat" was a so-called "sleeper town", built to house those who worked in the power plant and the port. It was built from scratch in the seventies after the plant was completed and was very modern by contemporary soviet standards.

^^ When entering Pripyat from the south, travellers are greeted with a part of the refrain of the Hymn of the Soviet Union. "Partiya Lenina, sila narodnaya / Nas k torzhestvu kommunizma vedyot!" (Party of Lenin, will of the people / Lead us to the victory of communism).

^^ Further down the road is the "cultural palace". The gray cloud in the background is smoke from a forrest fire. Pictures from inside will follow.

^^ Those little stars were a nice touch.

^^ We climbed that high rise building. The view was spectacular.

^^ Another view of that appartment building. About five hundred people lived here.

^^ Ugh, insitutional green. This is inside the appartment building. Unfortunately, there was no time to explore it.

^^ The kindergarten as seen from above. Pictures from inside will follow

^^ The view of the town square as seen from the top floor: bottom: The restaurant, left: the cinema / cultural palace, top: the hotel.

^^ More housing blocks (click for big)

^^ Reactor 4 still dominates the landscape in Pripyat.

^^ A giant hammer and sickle, Serge and reactor 4.

^^ A forrest fire

In the next update, I will show how some of the buildings look from the inside.

Part 1

2006-05-15T19:34:00.000+02:00

This is taking forever, because I had to scan a lot of negatives (my digital camera broke during the trip).

I kept my eyes peeled on the way to the Dytyaki checkpoint (where we would enter the zone) for arrows pointing to Chernobyl. There were several, this is the first one:

^^ "Chornobyl", to the left.

^^ 2 Kilometers before the zone, an old sign welcomes us to the "Chornobylskii Raion" (District of Chernobyl). "If you move behind this sign, you're back in the Soviet Union" according to our guide.

^^Sound engineer Kenneth in front and photographer Serge in the back.

^^ The sign reads "Chornobyl".

^^ The main roads in the zone weren't in any worse condition than those outside.

After a short talk in the Chernobylinterinform visitor's center we went directly to see the Sarcophagus.

^^ I posted this one before, I like that shot a lot :-)

^^ Reactor 5 was never finished.

^^ Serge, Tim, David and Kenneth in front of reactor 5.

^^ This would have been reactor 5's cooling tower. Reactors 1 to 4 were cooled directly with water from the Pripyat river.

^^ Soviet pylons look friendly, don't you think?

^^ Our guide Maksum in front of one of them.

^^ Reactor 4 in close up

^^ David filming the sarcophagus. The light was pretty bad (not a lot of contrast).

Coming up: The abandoned town Pripyat and more.

Soviet Pimpmobiles

2006-05-07T20:27:00.000+02:00

^^ I believe this one is a Volga, a luxury car reserved for high ranking party officials.

^^

^^ The friendliest car in the east.

Preview

2006-05-05T17:38:00.000+02:00

I am now pretty busy sorting my images and retouching them where necessary. Here are some preview images. I feel they speak for themselves so I didn't add commentary:

More by the end of the weekend, and probably finished by the end of next week!

Google maps location

2006-04-27T23:26:00.000+02:00

Check out reactor 4 as seen from space in google maps

We're leaving for Kiev in less than five days, woo!

Pixelpress report

2006-04-09T17:41:00.000+02:00

Online documentary magazine Pixelpress has a good set of pictures on radioactive contamination in the ex-USSR and it's effects on the population on their website. Check them out here: Nuclear nightmares.

^^A Bellorussian father and his child.

National Geographic article

2006-04-06T18:45:00.000+02:00

This month's National Geographic magazine features a big article on the Chernobyl accident and the people still living and working in the zone. The pictures are available here but unfortunately they're embedded in a flash presentation.

^^ Chernobyl survivors living in the exclusion zone

In the footsteps of... (2)

2006-04-05T22:17:00.000+02:00

Urban explorer and motorcycle enthusiast Elena Filatova was hot shit on the net about a year and a half ago when she first published her Ghost Town story. Appearantly, she stretched the truth a little and never drove through the "zona" by bike, she made that half-day trip on a bus with other tourists (probably multiple times).

^^ One of Elena's pictures.

I read about Chernobyl tourism for the first time on Elena's site, and even though her story is part fabrication, it motivated me to go and find out more about visiting the zone and to document my local exploration trips better. Have fun (re-)reading Ghost Town.

In the footsteps of...

2006-03-28T19:38:00.000+02:00

I was googling for reports by Chernobyl-tourists when I bumped into Deborah Ostrega's weblog (of Lords of Acid - fame). She also visited the zone, today exactly one year ago (28th March 2005).
You can read the report she wrote in december last year (in Dutch) on her weblog: parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

^^Ostrega in front of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

First Post

2006-03-27T20:51:00.000+02:00

I have been wondering for a while how to log my trip to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and where and how to publish the pictures I will be bringing back. I still haven't decided, in the mean time this free weblog service will do just fine.