At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

Ryan and Laura play with kittens after our tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Although they were incredibly cute, we did not take them home as souvenirs.

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, July 2007 Since the Ukrainian government recently announced that the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl disaster site will be open for tours beginning in 2011, interest in touring the region has exploded (along with traffic to my blog). Media reports have been rather erroneous, however, as private companies have actually been [...]

Yesterday, news outlets reported that you would be allowed to tour the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant beginning in 2011. I was a bit surprised by this, considering I had done just that in 2006. According to the Ukrainian government, however, the tour I went on was “illegal” and a “threat to my [...]

This abandoned building was a restaurant until the city of Pripyat was evacuated following the accident at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The sign on top of the building, which reads PECTOPAH in Cyrillic, means “restoran” in Ukrainian and Russian (and “restaurant” in English).

These decorations were hung on the lampposts in Pripyat in preparation for the 1986 May Day parade that never occurred due to the explosion at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

An abandoned apartment building in Pripyat, Ukraine, a deserted city located 3km from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The city’s 50,000 residents were evacuated shortly after the Chernobyl disaster, and the city has been uninhabited since.

In the city of Chernobyl there stands a simple memorial to the liquidators who rushed to reactor number four in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The firefighters who initially responded to the disaster on the morning of April 26, 1986 were unaware that they were entering a radioactive environment, and rushed to the plant [...]

View of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant from a bridge leading into the deserted city of Pripyat. Taken during our July 2007 excursion to the exclusion zone.

Interview with Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz on his experience as a kid living in Ukraine during the Chernobyl accident. I’m seeing Gogol at the 9:30 Club in a few weeks and can’t wait. One of the best concerts I’ve ever seen was their show at Coachella in ’07.

The Battle of Chernobyl is by far the best documentary I’ve seen on the disaster and ensuing cleanup. This documentary contains a lot of footage that’s never been shown before, including scenes of the poor liquidators forced to stitch together their own “anti-radiation” suits and then shovel radioactive debris off the roof of the reactor. [...]