BYAMPOD BLOG: RADIATION, CHERNOBYL, and UKRAINE

I was flicking through the channels on the TV (pages of a Web Magazine from 2007) on a Sunday in Milwaukee in the rain (on a Saturday night, on the toilet), and behold: my 34 year-old face loomed out at me! I genuinely recoiled. 

I've already recounted the story of how I ended up with VIP passes to that year's Marillion Weekend by visiting Chernobyl, but had completely forgotten writing about it for The Web. With all that's been happening over the past few weeks, I've obviously been thinking a lot about my Ukraine trip. 

Might finally be time for that long over due Digi episode about it. 

But anyway... if you hadn't already seen this over on Facebook, I thought I'd share it here as well. 

I'm not sure whether the Radiation t-shirt is in poor taste or not. I wasn't sure at the time either, but I couldn't not do it. You may also notice in the pictures that my hand is in some sort of cast thing. That's because I broke it by answering the front door. 

You'll probably also notice that I've changed a lot since then. That's because it was 16 years ago. People do change as they get older. It's a whole thing! Mad, I know. 

It probably doesn't need saying that visiting Chernobyl was deeply affecting. There had been real gung-ho, this'll-be-cool, atmosphere in the van on the three hour journey there from Kyiv. On the way back, nobody said a word. 

It was completely surreal; to be somewhere so iconic, but iconic for a terrible tragedy. I suspect all of us on that trip had slightly approached it like we'd be visiting a sort of post-apocalyptic Disneyland, but what we got was something closer to Auschwitz. Just awful. 

Like... right in the shadow of the reactor, there's a visitor's centre. The rest of the exclusion zone is pretty much as you'd expect, but there - right next to the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history - is a little tourist information building, with a model of the reactor, and a woman giving a talk about what happened. 

Then outside, as we were taking photos, our cameras stopped working... there was a heavily pregnant dog just wandering around... Far from being a dead place, the exclusion zone is full of life. Aside from the 200 or so - mostly elderly - people who moved back after being evacuated, the thing that hit me when we first got out of the minibus was the noise; insects, birds... there are wolves and bears and boars living there. 

It was so green and overgrown. It seemed like we were in the middle of what had always been a forest, but between the trees you could just make out houses; it had been a town, but nature had reclaimed it. 

At other times, it was genuinely scary. Passing through the Red Forest - so called because in the wake of the disaster the trees had turned red and died - and watching the Geiger counter rise and rise and rise, as weird, gnarled, mutated trees flashed past the windows.. 

Or when it rained in Pripyat - the town cleared of 30,000 people after the reactor blew - followed by blazing sunshine. Our guide, whose permanent cough was impossible to ignore, began to panic; the sun would cause the rain to evaporate, which would cause radiation to rise up. 

We had to rush back to the minibus. It had been waiting for us in the iconic abandoned fairground... but we'd lost the two Argentinian photographers who were part of our group. We parked up in the middle of an intersection, surrounded by trees and tower blocks, as our guide repeatedly pressed the horn. It echoed off the empty, crumbling buildings, his rising panic all too evident, as he kept glancing at the radiation levels. 

Plus, I loved Kyiv. Really, really loved it. It was a beautiful place that also felt deeply poor.  We spoke to lots of people - we were there only a year or so after the Orange Revolution - and it was clear that the country had yet to find its equilibrium. 

There was a lot of anxiety about the future, and whether they'd done the right thing. More than one person - back then - felt that Ukraine would benefit from being a dictatorship. Yet at the same time there was a real sense of carefree abandon. 

The Westernisation that has clearly continued was already evident. We went to a bar - the first of many - after we returned from Chernobyl, and there was a skiffle band playing covers of songs by Depeche Mode and Gorillaz.  We could've been in East London.  

That night we walked through Kyiv's central square - it was a Saturday night - and kids were drinking, and kissing, and letting off fireworks at one another. Two years on, it felt like they were still celebrating freedom.

I hope they get it back.