Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 disas-
trous 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 in-
to 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 pass-
port 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.
