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In December 2017 I did a little trip to Chernobyl. I’m not the type sitting on a beach and doing nothing but baking in the sun. I can do that at home too. So when a friend asked around who would be joining to see Chernobyl and Prypjat, I just spontaneously agreed to visit the the town where 1986 everything went wrong.

We took a flight from Zurich to Amsterdam and from there to Borispol airport in Kiew, Ukraine. We missed our connecting flight in Amsterdam so we had to wait 10 hours at the airport just to get into a cramped aircraft. Well, finally we arrived somewhere around 01:00 in the night and got transfered to our stay in Kiew, the Ibis hotel. I must say the Ibis was really nice. We ate around 2:30 in the morning and the Borsch soup was just perfect. We booked our 3 day trip through CHERNOBYLWEL.COM. The people there were really kind and very helping. My friend needed a VISA so they helped him out with the administrative stuff. At the first day a mini bus with our driver and our guide came to pick us up at the hotel (very nice!).

On the way to Chernobyl we got to see a video about how things unfolded in 1986. Of course we already informed us before we booked the trip. Youtube was a good source for that. The time we picked of the year was perfect. You get this cold, the mood, the mist. We were lucky and got plenty of snow. You must be of an adventerous kind to find joy in going to a foreign country, not speaking their language and just looking for rotten things. Entering Chernobyl was really strange. You had to pass checkpoints. That was not the weird thing. The really weird thing was the lack of sound. When we were staying next to the Duga radar station you would think your ears would fail on you. No noise, nothing. Occasional wind that vibrates on contact with Duga but apart from that.. just quiet. As soon as we got to the reactor building and the suroundings I started shooting my camera. And the result of it you can see below.