Clambering into the back of a mini-van with dated upholstery and rosary beads dangling from the dashboard, we were given our insurance passes for visiting the exclusion zone. We leafed through them excitedly, not feeling like it was real, as if these were fakes or tickets for Space Mountain or some other would be Disney attraction. The driver swerved through traffic, chatting on his phone and leaning backwards to fast forward the incredibly depressing Chernobyl documentary that was playing for us behind him. The documentary was cut short at a less than satisfying ending, declaring that the concrete structure built to contain the radiation could potentially wear through any day. We had arrived.
Our friendly soldier guide took us to a meeting room that looked perfectly preserved since 1986. He gave us a minimal safety talk on not touching anything whatsoever, breathing in the radioactive dust that would line everything, or taking any souvenirs for our own. Pointing out the exclusion zone with a big wooden stick and a wall map, with his full camouflage outfit and the flash of multiple tourists SLRs I felt like I was at a Jurassic Park press conference. Driving into the deserted ghost town of Pripyat, our soldier told us to stay close together as there many wild boars and wolves lurking around the buildings, carrying radioactive essence on their fur. Alex laughed nervously. The soldier turned around and stared him in the eye for an uncomfortable amount of time before adding, “I’m not joking.” Ironically, the exclusion zone is now so lush and filled with surviving wildlife that the surrounding areas have been turned into a reserve. Though a quick google search can reveal the six legged specimen we encountered in the Chernobyl museum, a taxidermy canine victim of radioactive mutation.
Littered with rubble and debris, we climbed the skeleton of a staircase and stared into empty, cavernous lift shafts and rotting floorboards of a huge, derelict hotel lobby. Once at the top of the balcony, I could see lush green vegetation covering the miles of abandoned buildings, all battered concrete with hollow spaces where windows had been knocked out as to prevent the build up of pressure in radioactive gas. In the old school rooms remnants of the Soviet era remained littered throughout the dust. Hundreds of tiny gas masks like the faces of hybrid squid-children covered the floor. All was grey, and peeling, and dust filled, apart from the brightly coloured illustrations of fairytale books, looking up hopefully from the floor. We went to the nursery, an immaculate horror-film-set of rusted, metal cribs and broken baby dolls. We then went on the Reactor site itself, my anxiety levels rising with every sinister click of the Geiger counter. I stared at the sarcophagus from fifty metres away, thinking about all the cold connotations of that word.
Although the town of 35,000 Chernobyl plant workers and their families was evacuated, it took the authorities 36 hours to alert locals of any accident. Though this was not the site of immediate mass death, thousands who’d played on the long deserted ferris wheel, swam in the spooky, echoing swimming baths and sat at dusty wooden desks would have been affected, slowly, by radiation and resulting sicknesses. I ate my lunch in the Chernobyl canteen in introverted silence, toying with creamed potatoes and gherkins on the plate and sipping on grape juice that smelt like gel pens, thinking about the metallic taste that radiation poisoned victims were said to have had on their tongues.
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