Chornobyl Tours Explodes World Travel Market
I think I found the smallest but probably one of the busiest travel trade stands at the World Travel Market in London this week.
Perhaps also one of the scariest of places in the world to visit and this is to Chornobyl nuclear power plant that exploded 30 years ago and bathed a huge swath of Northern Europe in fallout!
A plucky but interesting business has for a number of years been running hundreds of tourism trips to the former power plant and the nearby town of Pripyat where most of its workers lived.
The Chornobyl Tour company in Kiev or Kyiv organise tours around the complex that take in the Soviet history of that time, the wild life, ecology and technical and engineering oriented tours of some parts the power plant itself.
The screened reactor building. Chornobyl the nuclear disaster site in the Ukraine. (Picture by: Chornobyl Tours)
Frantically handing out leaflets, brochures and maps and some of their nuclear warning signs were particularly popular reminders and successful marketing by them as the thousands of visitors over three days filed past!
Being so infamous in recent history it is hard in some ways to understand why people would want to visit a former nuclear disaster area. However, such a places do attract visitors for many reasons. Places like S21 the infamous prison in Phnom Penh and to some degree Auschwitz near to Krakow the extermination camp of millions of Jews do fall into a similar category it seems.
Deserted town near to the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. (Picture by: Chornobyl Tours)
Abandoned places around the globe and perhaps areas for dark tourism do appear to have an attraction to a certain type of tourist. And I for one do appreciate and share an interest in such places from a keen travel and historical prospective.
I recently visited a nature park set up around a group of former coal mining slag heaps near Lens in northern France not someone’s ideal holiday choice. One would never guess that it provided a great vantage point of some of the former key battle fields of the area and a perfect place to mountain bike too.
Chornobyl the nuclear disaster site in the Ukraine. (Picture by: Chornobyl Tours)
My recent tour of a legal cannabis factory in Canada could nearly fall into that class too?
Getting back to the Chornobyl team, “Is it safe”, was the obvious first question?
Kateryna Aslamove the Chief Deputy of the company assures me that the routes used to access around the exclusion zone and on one of their day trips is like the radiation dose that one could expect would be equivalent of a one-hour flight at high altitude!
Chornobyl the nuclear disaster site visitors. (Picture by: Chornobyl Tours)
The explosion of visitors did not trouble this company. As when you consider that some of the huge stands at the travel market can cost tens of thousands of pounds or even more. However, theirs was almost the minimum size that was possible but the busy team from the Ukrainian company were at times under siege by travel agents and press.
Nature Is Reclaiming Chornobyl
According to Katerina although the town has now been long abandoned after the incident in 1986, nature has certainly regained a foothold and the radiation in some ways is less harmful to some of the nature and plants than the humans that once occupied the area!
Visitors on their way to the Chornobyl nuclear disaster site in the Ukraine. (Picture by: Chornobyl Tours)
The tour company offers on one, two, three or four day tours and they like to explain in detail what happened, how it happened and how the people lived at the time up until they had to leave?
A day trip to the exclusion zone costs $99 and as well as wearing clothes that fully cover and stout boots the other essential is your passport no id no entry!
