Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

Before long, radiation sensors in Sweden were picking up the downwind contamination, and American spy satellites were focusing on the belching ruin of the reactor building, and the whole world was wondering exactly what the hell had happened in Chernobyl. In some ways, we still don’t know.

My pants made nylon swooshing sounds as I descended the musty stairwell of my apartment building. I had bought a tracksuit for my weekend trip to Chernobyl, which made me look like a Ukrainian jackass circa 1990, but it was disposable in case of contamination.

By chance, I was staying right across the street from the Chernobylinterinform, from which my trip to the zone would depart. This was in the time before Chernobyl tourism became officially sanctioned. In 2011, the policy was changed so that any yahoo could sign up for a tour through a travel agent—whereas in my day, that yahoo had to…sign up for a tour through a travel agent. I really don’t know the difference, except that now the tours are officially offered to the public as tourism. Like most destinations after the word gets out, the place is probably ruined by now.

It was a beautiful day for a road trip, cloudless and faintly breezy. Nikolai, a lanky young driver for the Chernobyl authority, found a radio station playing insistent techno that suited his cheerful urgency with the accelerator, and we made our way out through the busy streets of northern Kiev. (Radiation level at the gas station: 20 microroentgens.) We followed the Dnieper River north, until it wandered out of sight to the east. The road coasted through undulating farmland, bordered in stretches by lines of shady trees screening out the rising heat of the day. In our little blue station wagon, we plunged through villages, tearing past a boy idling on his bicycle, an old lady waddling along the road, a horse-drawn cart loaded with hay.

Soon there were no more villages, only countryside and thickening pine forests dotted with fire-warning signs. Compared with forest fires in the United States, which are disastrous mostly for their potential to destroy people’s houses, a forest fire in the Chernobyl area carries added detriments. Trees and vegetation have incorporated the radionuclides into their structure, mistaking them for naturally occurring nutrients in the soil (one reason to shy away from produce grown near the zone). A forest fire here has the potential to release those captured radioactive particles back into the air and become a kind of nuclear event all its own. It’s just one way in which the accident at Chernobyl has never really ended.

Less than two hours out from Kiev, we arrived at a checkpoint. A candy-striped bar blocked the road between two guardhouses. There were signs with a lot of exclamation points and radioactivity symbols. Nikolai and I stepped out of the car and I gave my passport to the approaching guard. He wore a blue-gray camouflage uniform, a cap bearing the Ukrainian trident, and a little film badge dosimeter on his chest, to measure his cumulative exposure while in the area. I should have asked him where I could get one of those.

After a cursory search, we hopped back into the car. The barricade rose, Nikolai gunned the engine, and we left the checkpoint, traveling onward through the forest, down the middle of a sun-dappled road that no longer had a center line.

We had entered the Exclusion Zone.

At the Chernobylinterinform administrative building, in the town of Chernobyl—nearly ten miles distant from the reactor itself—we met Dennis, my escort. Standing at the top of the steps to the low, yellow building, Dennis matched the quasi-military vibe of the zone. He was in his mid-twenties, with an early baldness made irrelevant by a crew cut, and wore combat boots and a camouflage jacket and pants. The look was completed—and the martial spell broken—by a black sleeveless T-shirt printed with the image of a football helmet, around which swirled a cloud of English words. A pair of wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes.

“First is the briefing,” he said coolly. “This is upstairs.” And with that he walked back into the building.

The briefing room was a long, airy space, its walls hung with photographs and maps. A wooden table surrounded by a dozen chairs dominated the center of the room. The floor was covered with an undulating adhesive liner printed to look like wood paneling. Must make for easy cleanup, I thought, in case anyone tracks in a little cesium.

Dennis and I were alone. The summer season hadn’t picked up yet. He retrieved a gigantic wooden pointer from the corner, and we approached a large topographic map on the front wall. He began diagramming our itinerary using his tree limb of a pointer, though the map was mere inches in front of us.

“We are here. Chernobyl,” he said, and tapped on the map. “We will drive to Kolachi. Buried village.” He tapped again. “Then to Red Forest. This is most radioactive point today.” He looked at me for emphasis. He was still wearing his sunglasses.

Turning back to the map, he continued. “From here we will go to Pripyat. This is deserted city. Then we can approach reactor to one hundred and fifty meters.”

It was the standard itinerary, allowing visitors to inhabit their preconceptions of Chernobyl as a scene of disaster and fear—but without actually straying off the beaten path or risking contamination. This was, after all, what most people wanted. But I hadn’t come all this way only to wallow in post-nuclear paranoia. I was here to enjoy the place, and this was the moment to make it happen.

“Is there any way…” How to put it? “Is there any way we could go canoeing?”

Dennis regarded me blankly from behind his shades. In their silvery lenses, I could see the reflection of someone who looked like me, with an expression on his face that said, Yes. I am an idiot.

“This is not possible,” said Dennis.

“Well, if there’s any way to get on the water, or maybe visit the local fishing hole, I’m happy to sacrifice part of our planned itinerary.”

The conference room was quiet. The shadow of a grimace passed across Dennis’s face. “This is. Not possible,” he said, without emotion. He was proving witheringly immune to what I had hoped would be my contagious enthusiasm. But it’s at moments like this, when you’re trying to take your vacation in a militarily controlled nuclear disaster zone—for which, I might add, there is no proper guidebook—that you must be more than normally willing to expose yourself as a fool in the service of your goals. I laid my cards on the table.

“Look. Let’s say I wanted to go for a boat ride with some friends somewhere in the zone,” I said. “Just theoretically speaking, where would we go? I mean, where are the really nice spots?”

A faint crease had developed in the dome of Dennis’s head.

I pressed on, telling him that I was trying to approach this not so much as a journalist or a researcher, but as a tourist. As a visitor. Where, for instance, could I find a good picnic spot in the Exclusion Zone? Where did he himself go on a slow day? And if it wasn’t possible in the zone, what would be the next best thing? I pointed to Strakholissya, just outside the zone, a town that I had identified while poring over a map the night before. What about that?

“Yes, this is nice place,” said Dennis. “You can go fishing here.”

I was making progress. Fishing?

“Yes,” said Dennis, gaining speed, “but this place is better.” He pointed to Teremtsi, a tiny spot nestled among a bunch of river islands deep inside the zone. “This is a good place for fishing,” he said. “I went once. Mostly I go there to collect mushrooms.”