Glowing in Chernobyl

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Tourists have been visiting Chernobyl for years, so I wasn’t exactly petrified at the prospect of exposing myself to radiation. Did you know that when you fly in a plane, you are having a couple X-Ray’s worth of radiation? Hundreds of people live in the very freakily named Zone of Alienation, the 30km fenced off radius that surrounds reactor number 4. Since the meltdown in April 1986, for reasons that are still hotly debated, the other 6 reactors have been shut down, and the entire area is essentially the largest nuclear waste dump on the planet. Radiation has contaminated everything, which is why equipment had to be buried, and nothing could be taken out. The nearby city of Prypiat, a model Soviet development with 50,000 citizens, was evacuated within two days and today lies abandoned. People could only pack a suitcase, everything else remains as is. The ghost city is the real reason tourists visit Chernobyl, a haunting, spooky movie set where tumbleweed blows past deserted boulevards, and time stopped in 1986. Hundreds of mouldy school books are scattered on the floor in schools, paint flaking, light rusting, cement cracking from the onslaught of nature. Blackened dolls gave me chills in the kindergarten, while a scream would echo amongst the empty apartment blocks. Our Geiger Counter showed about 0.500, harmless if you don’t stick around too long, but still 50 times greater than it showed in Kiev, 100 kilometres away. In one hotzone, it cranked to 2.000, where the wind scattered the radioactive dust. I go into more detail in an article, but save to say, the entire trip is so bizarre, so fascinating, and so horrifying it’s a stand out travel experience. When troops were trying to evacuate people in Prypiat, after dozens of firemen had battled the flames in the reactor and signed their death warrants, people needed to be convinced of the danger. Radiation is a silent killer, infecting your blood, targeting the weak. Yet nature has rebounded. Giant catfish swim in the toxic river, moose, deer and boar have proliferated in the forest, birds sing in the trees. We spend the night in a nameless hotel, get drunk on cheap local vodka, try not to think about the air we’re breathing. The food, brought in from outside the zone, barely scrapes by after emptying half a bottle of Tabasco on it. Isntense Soviet iconography is everywhere, a snapshot of 1986, when the Cold War was particularly frosty. Propaganda flakes on the walls, portraits of Soviet leaders rot behind the theatre. Before we leave, we step into a Dr Who machine that checks the levels of radiation on our bodies, clothes and shoes. It’s kind of like an STD test. You know you’re 100% OK, but still… The light is green, we drive out, the Geiger counter decreasing with each mile. I just finished reading Alan Wiesman’s The World Without Us, and in it he describes a world in which humanity disappears, and our buildings, skyscrapers, prisons and schools sink back into the land. After visiting Chernobyl and Prypiat, I have seen that world with my own eyes.

We spend a night at a roadside motel. I mention this because it was owned an operated by a guy named Mikael Paplovsky, sort of what Michael Hasselhoff might become when he is fat and corrupted. Staffed by pretty young girls, Paplovsky is a pop star who owns a chain of motels and restaurants, has appointed himself a cultural ambassador, produces high quality bling videos, never married, and surrounds himself with teenage girls and more alarmingly, his babushka mother. He face is everywhere, on billboards, on screens in the restaurant, on the hotel walls, on the bottles of shite vodka he produces. When he pulls up at the hotel, the pretty young things I am talking to literally drop to their knees, hail to the king. He looks me over, shakes my hand, and leaves. I go to the bathroom and wash my hands with soap. I mention this only because in Ukraine, people got a kick that I met a kitschy tacky cultural icon, and also, a night in a Ukrainian highway motel is worth remembering.

Four weeks in Europe have whizzed by, and as I write this on the plane from Amsterdam to Vancouver, I can’t believe how much I’ve packed into the month. One week, one country, dozens of once-in-a-lifetimes, pressure, people, nature, fun. There’s only a few days to rest before it’s off to Central America, the final three episodes of the shoot in Jamaica, Belize and Mexico. The borscht is finished, but the ride continues.

KLM Flight Amsterdam to Vancouver
33,000ft, Somewhere

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