It was good hearty food that kept us going for the majority of the day, which was an important factor as we had decided to forfeit lunch to allow more time exploring. A while after we visited another group took a very similar trip and dismissed the food instantly. Food shows you exactly what a country is about. Our first real experience of the Ukraine, other than the shambles at the Airport, was the food. No wonder he wasn’t too happy when the baggage handling system ejected his suitcase from the plane hold at lightspeed!
But first our English fixer produced a vast quantity, and we are talking about 16 litres, of Tenants super) from his checked-baggage for us to indulge ourselves with. After a high speed race out of Kiev, we made it just in time and feeling hungry, tired and slightly dehydrated and we slowly started to retire to bed. Having left the airport at 8:30pm we faced a two hour drive into the wilderness with a driver who was more concerned with exhibiting his knife collection than the road in front of him. We didn’t fancy a trek through the undergrowth to make our visit(others have!). The checkpoints into the Exclusion Zone shut every night at 10pm sharp with a military enforced curfew blanketing the area. It was here that we nearly didn’t even make our trip. We spent an agitated few hours sweating in a marquee erected on the edge of the runway awaiting entry into the country. So far behind it had yet to leave to drawing office. As is the progress typically found with infrastructure, air flights had increased dramatically but the airport lagged far behind. Zhuliany is an old domestic Soviet airport that had undergone a period of rapid expansion. We had no idea what to expect and when we landed at Kyiv Zhuliany Airport we entered utter chaos. We felt that you would not see much, but our minds changed when one of our friends managed to organise for a group of us to spend 3 nights staying within the zone. There lays in the Ukraine the abandoned city of Pripyat, which can be your playground for a small fee, what more could you want? OK, add a train graveyard, a power station, other towns & villages, a huge military installation and the worlds second most radioactive tract of land and you have something! Chernobyl is somewhere that we have always wanted to explore, yet we have never been sold on the idea of flying 1,500 miles to be given a 4-Hour whirlwind tour of a few tourist spots and shooting off again.
As an explorer the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is hard to ignore.
Planning our visit to Chernobyl all started during a trip to Germany in 2010 whilst we were standing in an underground ammunition dump when vague talk of visiting Chernobyl started and our ears pricked up.
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