Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ONE
VISIT SUNNY CHERNOBYL
It began on a train. Vienna to Kiev, rocking back and forth in a cabin of the
Kiev Express.
There was a certain Agatha Christie-meets-Leonid Brezhnev charm to it. Long oriental rugs
ran the length of its corridors, and the passenger compartments were outfitted with a faux
wood-grain veneer and dark red seats that folded up to form bunks.
It's not actually called the
Kiev Express.
If it were an express, it wouldn't take thirty-six
hours. In fact, train is no way to make this trip. I bought my ticket only because I believed,
unaccountably, that Vienna and Kiev were close to each other. They are not.
I was going to Chernobyl, on vacation.
Trains are for reading, and I had brought a pair of topics:
Voices from Chernobyl,
a col-
lection of survivor interviews, and
Wormwood Forest,
an investigation of the accident's ef-
fect on the environment. I recommend them both, although when I say that trains are for
reading, I don't mean that I was doing all that much. Really I was taking an epic series of
naps, sporadically interrupted with topics.
My companion in the passenger compartment was Max, a rotund, smiling man in his
early thirties. Max spoke in a high, oddly formal voice and looked like a grown-up Charlie
Brown, if Charlie Brown had grown up in the USSR. Originally from Kiev, he now worked
in Australia as a computer programmer. He had an endearing way of stating the obvious. I
