The three of us are crouched, huddled on the icy roof of apartment block number 15, watching the sharp torch beams of the Ukrainian police department scan the buildings of Lenina Avenue, downtown Pripyat.
I'm not sure if they are looking for us, or are just beginning a routine patrol of the city but our earlier close call has me expecting the former.
A distant guard dogs bark bites through the frozen air as I light another cigarette and wait.
I don't know why I wanted to go to Chernobyl. Having an abandoned city all to yourself sounds pretty cool; until you think about the decaying Cesium 137 and other atomic nuclei that litter it's streets and fields. The very cause of it's abandonment. Maybe it's just a draw to some kind of adventure which has brought me here. That instinct to be alive; to see life and do all I can with it has brought me to a place that only breeds death.I'm not sure if they are looking for us, or are just beginning a routine patrol of the city but our earlier close call has me expecting the former.
A distant guard dogs bark bites through the frozen air as I light another cigarette and wait.
A clean energy; a technology that had been used in the past for destruction had been secured by the workers and its power was being distributed to industry and homes for the greater good of all. Almost a Utopian metaphor for the communist ideals of the unions governance something terrible was about to happen.
At 01:23 am on the 26th of April 1986 an accident occurred during a scheduled experiment resulting in fire, explosions and the release of at least 5% of reactor number fours core - some 5200 PBq of radioactive materials - into the environment. The vast majority of this was deposited around the power plant, an area now known as The Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, which spans two countries of the former Soviet Union, countries now known as Ukraine and Belarus.
The driver pulls up adjacent to an apartment block - one of the ubiquitous 'Panelny Dom' buildings, utilitarian, mass produced housing units built in the latter days of the Soviet Union that spill across the suburbs of Kiev. The car windscreen is cracked in two places and the brakes squeal like a dying cat as the car comes to a stop on the icy back road. The driver introduces himself in broken English and calls Kirill, our Stalker contact who we will accompany on this trip.
Introductions are brief as Kirill hauls his backpack into the tailgate of the car, my cigarette scatters red incendiaries across the tarmac like an asteroid hitting the earth's crust as I push myself into the back of the silver sedan. It's close to 10pm when we set off from the Ukrainian capital, through the window the dark edges of the city limits give way to bleak villages, Grechka fields and scattered shops with men drinking vodka outside for the rest of our two hour drive. Clint Mansell's soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream ominously plays through the car stereo as we approach the small village of Cheremoshna at the edge of the exclusion zone.
From here the road patters out into a rough sandy track through pine forests. The exhaust scrapes the ground as we pass the last houses at close to midnight. I ask what the locals think of us. "If you are on foot they will call police, in a car we could be anyone, we could be the police" I doubt the logic of this statement as we grind along the track in a clapped out old Lada but before long we are parked up in the icy grass next to a derelict dairy farm.
It's good to be moving after the nervous tension of the car journey, without lights and under a starless sky we make our way across the floodplain of the Uzh river. A bed of marsh grasses and weeds surrounds us as we quickly approach the first section of river. We remove our boots and strip down to boxer shorts in the sub zero temperatures and tentatively make our way across the first section of frozen river. Kirill warns that the main body of water is yet to come - over the sandy island in front of us - and luckily the ice holds as we each carry our heavy backpacks over the frozen river. The next section of river is faster moving; only an island of ice, attached to some reeds, sits in the middle of the crossing.
Kirill goes first and breaks the ice island brandishing a stick, but a few steps on the river deepens and he's submerged almost to his chest - the bottom of his rucksack under the ice cold water.
He quickly crossed to the other side, looking miserable as Nick and I hitched our jackets up to our armpits and held our bags above our heads. I'm not sure how much he's downplaying it but Kirill says his bag isn't too wet and we dry off as quickly as we can and move off along an old dirt track through the disused sluces and flood pans.
The ground is frozen with crystalline droplets of ice settled on the grasses as we march onward towards the first buildings of the exclusion zone. Huge warehouses and a water tower mark the end of a dirt track and the start of an old tarmac road. The buildings are the remains of one of the collective farms built in the reclaimed areas of the Polesie Marshes during the 1920's when thousands of acres of marshland were drained to aid food production for the soviet people. From here the old maps I have show a shorter route through the woods to a small village; so we take that and head into the darkness.
It's striking how slowly things grow here, I don't think it's due to the radiation but rather the intense cold and lack of rainfall. Back home an abandoned space is webbed with ivy and fast growing deciduous trees within a few years but here, especially in winter with the leaves stripped, the forlorn old branches spread slowly across the tracks and through the windows of the collapsing buildings.
Our first night is spent in an old farmhouse. A dusty old shell and it's cold.. oh so cold. Kirill hangs his wet fleece out to freeze and we offer him spare clothing but he says he's OK. The cold here is different to back home, not such a bitter cold but a deep cold. A cold that gradually seeps into everything, freezing your boots solid overnight and your water bottles as you walk. There isn't much left in the village. This close to the perimeter everything of value has been striped - copper wire or electronics are long gone and all that remains are shoes, posters or books. Belongings with no monetary value. Left in the dry buildings they don't decay and fall apart to the touch but you are always aware of the dust collecting in every corner. One grain of the Cesium 137, Strontium 90 or Americium-241 which were expelled from the reactor 4 fire and spread across northern Europe could be lingering somewhere and the constant awareness is not conductive to sleep.
The next morning we set off early from the farm to head further into the exclusion zone.
During the day the roads are risky but by sticking to forests and frozen bog we could move through the zone with impunity. It's a slightly longer hike today but the ground Is easy, the basin of the Pripyat river is incline free and the soil a soft sand. We cover ground quickly following the footprints of wolves through the pine forest. Although we don't see much wildlife we see it's presence everywhere we walk through the tracks of deer, Elk, Przewalski's horse and grey wolf. At one point the wolf tracks condense around a few droplets of red blood in the white snow. A kill site.
A quick dash up the embankment and across the road, all I can hear now is my heart beating at a thousand miles an hour so we run for another hundred meters into long grass and well out of sight of the road.
We joined a raised track above the frozen bog and stop to rest next to a small village so explored a few houses. Exploring in the zone is still possible; beyond the photo perfect setups of gas masks and rusty ferris wheels the villages on the periphery of the zone provide a real frozen in time snapshot of village life in the CCCP - We're probably in the most traveled section but looking at the maps i'm drawn to return to see villages hidden deeper within the zone.
As we explored the dull thud of a car door broke the silence of the overgrown buildings and after a hushed discussion we set off across a barren area towards the deep pine forests.
Last edited:
