Beautiful decay in Chernobyl.

It still doesn’t feel real that I visited this place only a couple of weeks ago. I have always felt a fascination with Chernobyl. The obvious reason being that it is the place of the biggest nuclear disaster in history but also it’s abandonment. There is always an eerie beauty surrounding abandoned places.

So after watching the TV series earlier this year I decided that 2019 was going to be the year I visit. After a Facebook status seeing if anyone else wanted to go, 6 fellow creatives decided to join me and in a matter of weeks, we were booked. The whole trip was surprisingly cheap with flights, accommodation and tour all coming to under £200.

We arrived in Kyiv at 4.20 am on a cold Monday morning and the first port of call was a MacDonalds for breakfast and WiFi! We couldn’t check into our apartment until 3 pm so we needed a plan on how to entertain ourselves for the day with no sleep. We managed to ditch our luggage at the main train station and we headed into the city. We found a free walking tour that was starting in the late morning and I would definitely recommend these as a great way to see the city but I wouldn’t recommend doing one on no sleep and with not enough layers of clothes on.

We finally got into our apartment later that day and I think everyone was fast asleep by 7 pm. I thoroughly enjoyed the midnight pizza snacking with Laura and Aidan though when we all woke up starving. You can get a lot of pizza for your money in Kyiv.

The Tuesday was Tour day and we were picked up early by Chernobyl Tours and our guide Sasha. The drive to the exclusion zone is about 2hrs and the time was filled with Sasha giving us the rules for our tour and a documentary about the disaster. I was feeling very excited by the time we got to the first checkpoint where we were issued with our Geiger counters. A little tip for anyone traveling there DO NOT use the toilets that are the ones just outside the checkpoint just wait until you are through then you can use the ‘nicer’ ones. Those first toilets have scarred me for life.

Sasha had a suggestion of visiting a small village for our first stop before we headed to Pripyat which is about 35km into the exclusion zone. About 5mins into our drive the best thing ever happened. I could have gone home at this point and been happy. We were driving along with Sasha talking about the people who break into the exclusion zone and walk to Pripyat when two massive deer ran across the road quickly followed by a huge wolf. Yep, a wolf. An actual wolf hunting. One of my favorite animals next to horses. I will never forget that and it has inspired a future trip to Romania next Autumn to go wolf trekking as I want to see more of them in the wild.

Anyway back to Chernobyl…

I am not going to give a step by step rundown of our tour, the photos will do that for you. I want to pay more attention to the feel of the place which I also hope the photos do.

Lots of people have asked me if I was worried about radiation. Honestly? No, I wasn’t, not for a second. They wouldn’t be letting us in there for a start and as long as you don’t go licking anything there really isn’t any risk. When we came out we were scanned to see how much of a dose of radiation we had had and we all averaged at 0.3 which is basically fuck all. You get a dose of 0.3 per hour when you fly on a plane and you don’t want to know how high the dose is for an x-ray. So no I wasn’t worried.

The next thing that struck me was how before going I thought it was going to feel like a horribly eerie, broken place and that I would feel sad. Now I know what happened there was awful, beyond terrible and it cost many lives. However, I found Chernobyl to feel very much alive. The way nature has taken this place back and is thriving actually gives me hope. Nature is remarkable and so resilient and the exclusion zone is an example of this. The Autumnal colors as well were beyond stunning.

The decay of the buildings is also remarkably beautiful, mixed with the light and shadows we were spoiled with. My creativity and inspiration was on overdrive and each building was like a photo challenge where you only had a few mins to capture what your senses were trying to process. In fact, the next time I go back I won’t take a camera as that was almost a little too overwhelming trying to capture the space and take it in as well.

My next favorite part was without a doubt the dogs. So many lovely dogs who I happily gave attention to. Tarzan at Radar Duga was a favorite and he would do tricks for treats and then there was the totally adorable puppy Baloo at one of the checkpoints who made an attempt to steal my Geiger counter. The dogs seemed to be an integrated part of the exclusion zone and much liked by the security there. We were also told that they have herds of wild horses there as well but we weren’t fortunate enough to see them.

So I won’t ramble on much longer as we all know you are here for the photos. The images below are some of my favourites from the trip including images from Kyiv also. Enjoy.