Ukraine, part two
On Sept 7th I woke up at 4:30am and made my way to Simferopol airport, where I had a morning flight back to Kiev. I'd booked an apartment through a company and they also organized a driver for me, so getting from the airport to my apartment couldn't have been easier. This was the place I stayed at, right off the main street, very convenient for everything. Not sure if I did anything special on that day, mostly just a bit of wandering around and eating and resting... the most common activities on this trip, apparently :D
Sept 8th was kind of a highlight (if you can call anything connected to a gruesome event like this a 'highlight'), my scheduled trip to Chernobyl exclusion zone. It's one of the earliest Big World News that I properly remember following at its time (23 years ago already, unbelievable!) and of course, it was kinda close to home as well... But in case you've forgotten the details then Wikipedia will tell you!
It's about 2½ hours' drive from Kiev so we had time to watch a pretty good documentary about it in the car. It followed everything in chronological order, interviewed some surviving 'liquidators' (those people -firemen, solders, civilians- who went in to clean up the mess. I don't remember exact figures anymore but a whole lot of them are dead by now, and about half of surviving ones suffer from various permanent illnesses) and Chernobyl refugees and so on. Very informative and interesting.
But unfortunately, our group had the misfortune of getting the worst guide in the universe for this trip. I'm not kidding. This guy showed up, but besides that all he did was smoke cigarettes or take naps or simply look bored, he didn't talk to us or show us anything or give any instructions or do a goddamn thing that a 'guide' is supposed to do. Oh wait, he did mumble something in the microphone about three times during the tour, but it was basically to let us know where it's allowed to take photos and where not - I didn't hear him say anything else. At one point he took a loaf of bread from his bag, shoved it to the first person sitting behind him and then left the car. Imagine that; the whole group of 15 people sitting in the minibus, one guy holding a loaf of bread and no one knowing what the hell we're supposed to do with it. Then, finally, someone remembered reading somewhere that people feed fish on this trip, so we though hmmmm, maybe that's what the bread is for? And sure enough, when we got out the guide was already long gone towards a bridge, obviously throwing something into the water...
And another time, when we arrived in Pripyat (the abandoned ghost town), he got out just to open the bus door for us and then went back to his seat, taking a nap. Not one single word of where we should go, what there is to see, how much time we have at this particular spot, whether we'll move to another spot later or just stay here. So people wandered off, there was an abandoned hotel and a restaurant and some blocks of flats and a very overgrown park around them all, so it wasn't easy to figure out where to go and what to find there. Eventually people took their time and spent so much time wandering around that we were half an hour late for lunch, which made the guide very angry and he miraculously found his long-lost ability to speak when he complained to us about being late and "not paying attention". Seriously, WTF?!?
(Now, I could write a whole other post of customer service in general in Ukraine; people have no problem whatsoever of yelling at you, rolling their eyes if you don't understand what they say, or literally throwing your change/purchase/whatever at your face to get rid of you. Most of the time I can't help but be amused by that - hell, if I'd have been allowed to behave like that and show my true feelings back when I still worked in customer service, who knows I might still be working there, rolling my eyes and snapping at stupid people ;) But even so, shouldn't a tour guide have a tad more responsibility and communication skills than this, especially when the tour price is far from cheap and when it's aimed at an extremely important site like this?)
So, what did we see out there? In Chernobyl we drove along a road that was full of abandoned, overgrown houses - plus one house where the owner had moved back in, painted and decorated his house really nicely and even put a sign on the wall stating that "the owner of the house lives here". So yes, some people have returned to live and they're allowed to, even if it's not exactly a recommended thing to do.
After that we stopped in a bay with some rusty boats in the water, but I can't tell you what that place was or why we stopped there, because obviously the guide didn't bother telling us.
Next, a quick stop at the monument dedicated to the first firefighters who got to the scene and went in to stop the fire (which, allegedly, could have led to a much more powerful second explosion that would've wiped out half of Europe. According to the document we watched, this was kept as classified information until 2006 - I definitely don't remember hearing that before), without knowing they entered a lethally radioactive zone. I think they all died within a few weeks of the incident?
Then, drove past areas where there used to be villages, but all of them were destroyed due to structures being contaminated by radioactivity (also this I learnt from the document, not from our precious guide)
And the fish-feeding event: there are some gigantic (according to my guidebook: up to 2 metres long) catfish in the river near the reactors. Now, if life was a Simpsons episode they'd probably be gigantic because of radiation, but according to most scientists they've grown huge because they have no enemies and no one is hunting/eating them. Apparently the point of throwing bread at them was to get them jump closer to the surface of the muddy water so we could see them better, well, I did see a head of some that seemed to be of very impressive size indeed!
After the catfish, we drove towards the infamours Reactor no. 4, the one that exploded. But first we passed a row of new buildings that belong to current nuclear companies and one of them, I kid you not, is called NUKEM. Right next to this reactor number four, the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people, there is a big illuminated sign that says NUKEM. The irony makes my head hurt just a little bit...
We stopped at the monument (which was put up for the 20th 'anniversary' of the disaster in 2006) near Reactor number 4. There's not a lot to say about that, you see the reactor on the background and you just wonder how much radiation still exists inside there, how much radioactive debris is buried right under the sarcophagus and what could happen if... you know.
After that it was Pripyat, the so-called ghost town that you might have seen photos of. We only visited a tiny part of it but it's probably the same all over; crumbling buildings, overgrown bushes, random junk here and there, moss... Here are pictures from someone else on some other tour, with a bit of commentary too.
The tour finished off with a massive lunch; two plates of appetizers, soup, main course, varenyky for the meat-eaters and fruit & tea & some pastries for dessert. There was no need for dinner that day, I can tell you that!
On my last day I checked out the city's "number one attraction", monasteries of Kievo-Pecherska Lavra. Very beautiful churches and all - see for yourself - but I was tired and unmotivated, so didn't stay that long. I walked up to the huge statue of Rodina Mat where they also have a pretty interesting museum of Great Patriotic War, but I was still tired and not sure if anything in there would be in a language that I could understand, so I just strolled around the park a bit and then headed back to the centre - after all, I still had the most important task to take care of: buying local chocolate to bring to both work and home ;)
On the homecoming day I left the apartment at 9 o'clock (bit too early but I didn't know exactly how long it would take to get to the airport) and, after all the waiting and travelling time, arrived in my own home in Turku at 7:45pm. That's all.
Sept 8th was kind of a highlight (if you can call anything connected to a gruesome event like this a 'highlight'), my scheduled trip to Chernobyl exclusion zone. It's one of the earliest Big World News that I properly remember following at its time (23 years ago already, unbelievable!) and of course, it was kinda close to home as well... But in case you've forgotten the details then Wikipedia will tell you!
It's about 2½ hours' drive from Kiev so we had time to watch a pretty good documentary about it in the car. It followed everything in chronological order, interviewed some surviving 'liquidators' (those people -firemen, solders, civilians- who went in to clean up the mess. I don't remember exact figures anymore but a whole lot of them are dead by now, and about half of surviving ones suffer from various permanent illnesses) and Chernobyl refugees and so on. Very informative and interesting.
But unfortunately, our group had the misfortune of getting the worst guide in the universe for this trip. I'm not kidding. This guy showed up, but besides that all he did was smoke cigarettes or take naps or simply look bored, he didn't talk to us or show us anything or give any instructions or do a goddamn thing that a 'guide' is supposed to do. Oh wait, he did mumble something in the microphone about three times during the tour, but it was basically to let us know where it's allowed to take photos and where not - I didn't hear him say anything else. At one point he took a loaf of bread from his bag, shoved it to the first person sitting behind him and then left the car. Imagine that; the whole group of 15 people sitting in the minibus, one guy holding a loaf of bread and no one knowing what the hell we're supposed to do with it. Then, finally, someone remembered reading somewhere that people feed fish on this trip, so we though hmmmm, maybe that's what the bread is for? And sure enough, when we got out the guide was already long gone towards a bridge, obviously throwing something into the water...
And another time, when we arrived in Pripyat (the abandoned ghost town), he got out just to open the bus door for us and then went back to his seat, taking a nap. Not one single word of where we should go, what there is to see, how much time we have at this particular spot, whether we'll move to another spot later or just stay here. So people wandered off, there was an abandoned hotel and a restaurant and some blocks of flats and a very overgrown park around them all, so it wasn't easy to figure out where to go and what to find there. Eventually people took their time and spent so much time wandering around that we were half an hour late for lunch, which made the guide very angry and he miraculously found his long-lost ability to speak when he complained to us about being late and "not paying attention". Seriously, WTF?!?
(Now, I could write a whole other post of customer service in general in Ukraine; people have no problem whatsoever of yelling at you, rolling their eyes if you don't understand what they say, or literally throwing your change/purchase/whatever at your face to get rid of you. Most of the time I can't help but be amused by that - hell, if I'd have been allowed to behave like that and show my true feelings back when I still worked in customer service, who knows I might still be working there, rolling my eyes and snapping at stupid people ;) But even so, shouldn't a tour guide have a tad more responsibility and communication skills than this, especially when the tour price is far from cheap and when it's aimed at an extremely important site like this?)
So, what did we see out there? In Chernobyl we drove along a road that was full of abandoned, overgrown houses - plus one house where the owner had moved back in, painted and decorated his house really nicely and even put a sign on the wall stating that "the owner of the house lives here". So yes, some people have returned to live and they're allowed to, even if it's not exactly a recommended thing to do.
After that we stopped in a bay with some rusty boats in the water, but I can't tell you what that place was or why we stopped there, because obviously the guide didn't bother telling us.
Next, a quick stop at the monument dedicated to the first firefighters who got to the scene and went in to stop the fire (which, allegedly, could have led to a much more powerful second explosion that would've wiped out half of Europe. According to the document we watched, this was kept as classified information until 2006 - I definitely don't remember hearing that before), without knowing they entered a lethally radioactive zone. I think they all died within a few weeks of the incident?
Then, drove past areas where there used to be villages, but all of them were destroyed due to structures being contaminated by radioactivity (also this I learnt from the document, not from our precious guide)
And the fish-feeding event: there are some gigantic (according to my guidebook: up to 2 metres long) catfish in the river near the reactors. Now, if life was a Simpsons episode they'd probably be gigantic because of radiation, but according to most scientists they've grown huge because they have no enemies and no one is hunting/eating them. Apparently the point of throwing bread at them was to get them jump closer to the surface of the muddy water so we could see them better, well, I did see a head of some that seemed to be of very impressive size indeed!
After the catfish, we drove towards the infamours Reactor no. 4, the one that exploded. But first we passed a row of new buildings that belong to current nuclear companies and one of them, I kid you not, is called NUKEM. Right next to this reactor number four, the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people, there is a big illuminated sign that says NUKEM. The irony makes my head hurt just a little bit...
We stopped at the monument (which was put up for the 20th 'anniversary' of the disaster in 2006) near Reactor number 4. There's not a lot to say about that, you see the reactor on the background and you just wonder how much radiation still exists inside there, how much radioactive debris is buried right under the sarcophagus and what could happen if... you know.
After that it was Pripyat, the so-called ghost town that you might have seen photos of. We only visited a tiny part of it but it's probably the same all over; crumbling buildings, overgrown bushes, random junk here and there, moss... Here are pictures from someone else on some other tour, with a bit of commentary too.
The tour finished off with a massive lunch; two plates of appetizers, soup, main course, varenyky for the meat-eaters and fruit & tea & some pastries for dessert. There was no need for dinner that day, I can tell you that!
On my last day I checked out the city's "number one attraction", monasteries of Kievo-Pecherska Lavra. Very beautiful churches and all - see for yourself - but I was tired and unmotivated, so didn't stay that long. I walked up to the huge statue of Rodina Mat where they also have a pretty interesting museum of Great Patriotic War, but I was still tired and not sure if anything in there would be in a language that I could understand, so I just strolled around the park a bit and then headed back to the centre - after all, I still had the most important task to take care of: buying local chocolate to bring to both work and home ;)
On the homecoming day I left the apartment at 9 o'clock (bit too early but I didn't know exactly how long it would take to get to the airport) and, after all the waiting and travelling time, arrived in my own home in Turku at 7:45pm. That's all.