So, a little under two years ago, I organized a trip to Chernobyl with my local friend group.
It started kind of as a joke, like "what if we all went to Chernobyl, haha," but after thinking about it a little we all realized how practical of an idea this actually was.
So I started asking around. After doing some research, we decided going on a "legal" tour with a licensed guide was the best option. A lot of the licensed guides are known for being very permissive and looking the other way in terms of allowing explorers into the buildings and other off limits zones. We opted for this over a "Stalker" tour for three main reasons:
1) Licensed guides have cars and can drive through the security checkpoints that populate the Zone. That means they can take you to more places more quickly. In particular, this meant we could get to some of the most rural location.
2) The licensed guides had a reputation for being very permissive and accommodating. This turned out to be even more true than I expected: there were only a few things our guide didn't allow, usually things that were admittedly very much a hazard to our health (climbing Duga, going into some of the very most collapsed or radioactive sections, etc).
3) Most importantly, on a legal tour you can shell out for a half day long tour of the actual Chernobyl plant. Most of my friends who went with me have an engineering background so this was very appealing to us.
An explorer friend recommended a specific guide as the "best" for explorer types - meaning, I think, most permissive. I won't mention his name here but he was a fantastic guide, through and through. I really hope he's doing ok.
We ended up committing to the full five day tour. What followed was easily the best trip of my life; we got to run through nearly fifty really incredible locations during that time. I got as many photos as I could, though sadly this was back when I didn't know much about photography and was simply relying on an old phone camera (though mercifully a pretty decent phone camera by 2021 standards). We were also pretty time crunched at a lot of spots, especially the schools. As such the photo quality often isn't great, though I'm still happy with some of my shots from there.
Two years later, I think I'm finally ready to write up a big thread for the whole trip. I've decided to split it up by day to make things more manageable. I promised to make this thread in my 2021 YIR as an appendix but I kept procrastinating. Recently, though, as more and more time passes, I've realized I'm starting to forget some of the details of what happened and when during the trip. That motivated me to record this, so maybe I can look back on it in a few years and remember the good times.
Enough talking, lets jump into it.
1) To enter the zone, we had to pass through a checkpoint. They gave each of us a dosimeter that we were instructed to wear around our necks like a necklace at all times, to measure our accumulated radiation dose. Once we were through the checkpoint, our guide took us to a nearby abandoned village as a quick mini-stop to wet the appetite.
Something that I immediately noticed was that while everything of value had long since been scrapped, tons and tons of personal artifacts from 1980's Soviet life were left behind, and there was no graffiti. This will be a recurring pattern.
2) After that, we stopped by Chernobyl Town. We got a few pics by the famous sign.
We also visited this monument dedicated to the 94 villages that had to be deserted in the wake of the disaster
And the monument dedicated to the firefighters
There was also this pretty cool curated graveyard of unique vehicles that were used in the cleanup, but had become to irradiated for further use. All pretty touristy, but cool
3) After that, we headed off to the main location for the day, which was the Duga radar array and surrounds. The Duga array was an enormous apparatus meant to detect incoming ballistic threats from far out. The very powerful array often blasted 10hz radio waves at very high power, leading to complaints from radio operators all over the world. The "Russian Woodpecker" was such a nuisance that some radio manufacturers started installing hardware filters in the their electronics to mitigate the effects.
The road we drove down to reach the array had bumps at regular intervals. Our guide told us this was so that seismometers at the military base could detect if vehicles were incoming.
The scale of this array is difficult to convey. The antenna spanned 700 meters in length and 150 meters in height, which was difficult to wrap my head around.
I think this elevator was supposed to take you up.
Next, we were supposed to explore the control center for the Duga array, but our guide was notified by another guide that some sort of representative was near Duga. I didn't fully understand why, but apparently it would be bad to trespass in front of them, so we delayed seeing the control center for a few hours.
In the meantime, we explored the nearby "hidden village" - a semi-secret town for those who worked at the Radar.
4) Our first stop was an old fire station. It was mostly empty, but had one really neat thing: a scale model of the town and of the Duga array!
I love the Duga miniature
It also had a few cool posters
5) Next, we hit up our first school of the trip. We thought it was amazing at first, though it paled in comparison to some of the schools we saw later in the week. In general the schools around the Zone were what surprised me the most in terms of quality; I wasn't expecting much from them, but a lot of them blew me away.
This is where we first started seeing these crazy antique gas masks. There were a few here. Little did we know we would see thousands before the week was over.
6) After wrapping up at the school, we headed to the small town's recreation center, which consisted of a theater and a gymnasium. I really, really wish my photo of the theater was crisper, as it was actually rather nice.
7) At this point we finally got word that the representatives were finally gone, which meant we were game head back to the Duga control center.
One of the most noteworthy features was this kilometer long corridor, which I think holds some sort of record for longest hallway?
It wasn't too long before we found the control room. Unfortunately it was very stripped, but still worth a look.
There was also this crazy propaganda room.
Probably the coolest part was the educational section, which had a ton of space age murals and some crazy displays.
Some of the educational sections included interactive panels, though most had been ripped off by scrappers.
My favorite part was this display illustrating how radiowaves travel over the ionosphere by bouncing between charged layers of atmosphere.
You could also get a decent view of the array from the top of the control center.
After that, we packed up for the day and passed by the array one last time.
That was pretty much it for day one. We did a lot less on the first day since we spent the first half actually getting into the Zone and getting checked in, but we still saw a decent amount. It breaks my heart editing these old photos knowing I could do so much better if I shot this today, and that I might not ever get the chance to reshoot these places. But it is what it is - this is what I've got.
Hope you enjoyed. Day two coming when I have time to put it together!
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