The lost city
Is left pondering the ethics of ‘‘dark tourism’’ after a sobering tour of the town left abandoned by residents fleeing the Chernobyl reactor explosions.
Ashleigh Stewart
There’s a yellow Ferris wheel in the middle of Pripyat. You might know it from the news. You might know it from a video game.
The spindly structure with its golden pods is almost absurdly out of place, standing sentinel in the middle of a clearing. Its sparse surroundings are blanketed in snow. Man-made structures behind have been given up to nature. There never used to be woodland here.
It’s become a grim icon of what happened three decades ago – an unofficial symbol of life stopped in its tracks; just like a wheel that ceased mid-rotation.
The truth is, this wheel never started turning. Not officially, anyway. Much like the town itself, this is an icon of a life that was never really set in motion.
Welcome to Pripryat, Ukraine. Population: zero.
The world’s premier ghost town – and the setting of two levels in the video game Call of Duty 4 – lies near the border of Ukraine and Belarus.
What was once a thronging town of 50,000 people, now hosts only an unruly forest gradually claiming the town back for itself.
It’s from here, that in 1986 tens of thousands of people were evacuated as the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded.
Initially, the town’s citizens were told they’d be allowed back in three days as they formed orderly queues for evacuation vehicles.
Three decades later, and the only people to return in their droves are travellers who enjoy their holiday destinations macabre, with a side of human tragedy.
A typical tour of Chernobyl will take you about a day, and cost you about US$80-$120 ($110-$165). That includes transport from Kiev in a modern minivan, lunch in the exclusion zone, and a guide.
It’s about 10am when our minivan rolls up to the first checkpoint – the 30-kilometre exclusion zone – and excitement ripples through the 10 or so strangers of varying nationalities vying for their first glimpse of what one Polish man (of questionable repute) describes as a ‘‘radioactive wasteland’’.
There are to be absolutely no photos here, however, our guide warns.
‘‘Especially not of the guys with Kalashnikovs. They do not want to be in your photos.’’
Nonetheless, the excitement was shortlived, as we’re informed our permits to enter haven’t shown up yet – and we must wait until the authorities in the exclusion zone bring them out. How long that would be, no one knew, for here, you’re at the mercy of Chernobyl.
An hour or so later walking in circles in the snow, with half a dozen minivans’ worth of tourists sitting idle alongside us, the permits were delivered and we trundled on through for our first look beyond the barriers.
Admittedly, it looked a lot like it did before the barriers. A vast, snowblanketed landscape with the odd stray dog. Only as we entered Chernobyl town did the differences become clear.
About 100 people still live here, most of them working on decommissioning the power plant. They come in for a couple of weeks at a time to keep their radiation consumption at safe levels. It means that amid the abandoned, crumbling buildings – there’s a person walking down the road with their groceries from the one supermarket in town, or another lone person heading for the only post office – the neon lights of which hang outside it displaying not the temperature, but the radiation levels of nearby areas.
But it’s only once you pass into the 10km exclusion zone, that the devastation wrought here really becomes clear. The first pitstop sets the scene for the rest of the day: an abandoned kindergarten full of rusty old bedframes, dolls that could have been taken from the prop room of a horror film, and other stark reminders that people did indeed live here once.
The tiny woollen booties strewn throughout the building may have been the hardest to overlook.
As we leave the kindergarten, morally conflicted, we’re almost unprepared to swiftly happen upon the power plant itself – its huge steel dome looming over the countryside.
The world’s largest moveable metal structure took more than a decade to complete, and 2.1 billion euro of funding sourced from governments around the world. At 108 metres high, it’s taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty, and weighs more than three Eiffel Towers. The monolithic dome was built 300m from the plant – which was still spewing radiation from the existing crumbling ‘‘sarcophagus’’ built in haste by the Soviets in the immediate aftermath of the disaster – and then rolled into place by pistons on tracks.
It was at this point – a photo opportunity for a panorama of the plant – that my unease begins to surface. Should we be happily snapping away at a structure that brought such devastation? Is it bad taste to pose in front of it? Do I smile?
Two kilometres beyond the plant lies Pripyat – a town that would have once greeted you with towering buildings as you trundled up its access road, and now can’t be seen for the forest that’s grown up around, and through, it.
Pripyat itself was only inhabited for 16 years when its residents drove away from it for the last time. Initially marketed as a town solely to house the plant’s workers, Pripyat’s blissful reputation grew until it became the place to move to in Ukraine – a riverside oasis in the far north. On the day of the disaster about 50,000 people called the town home.
Today, it’s just tourists crunching about in the snow in the town square. Our guide points out the town hall – which was only open for a month. The supermarket next door is still scattered with rusty shopping trolleys and debris.
A short walk takes us to the macabre amusement park and Big Wheel, which was supposed to open four days after the disaster. Our guide holds her dosimeter to the bottom of one of the wheel’s golden pods and it jumps from barely one millisievert of radiation to 200, to close to 400; the alarm screeching and reverberating
‘‘People should stop worrying about the morality of visiting sites of catastrophe, disaster and suffering... They go because these places are important and interesting.’’ Sergii Ivanchuk Owner of SoloEast tours