Yellow Geiger counter in hand, the guide announces that radiation levels are 35 times higher than normal. Welcome to Chernobyl, the site in 1986 of the worst nuclear disaster in history and now an attraction visited by thousands of tourists every year.
Nearly 25 years after a reactor at the Soviet-era plant exploded, the irradiated zone around Chernobyl is attracting curious visitors from around the world, from nuclear specialists to ordinary tourists, willing to pay US$160 a day to visit the zone.
Described by US magazine Forbes as among the “world’s unique places to visit,” Chernobyl last year hosted about 7,500 visitors, according to official figures.
On one recent trip, a small bus ferried tourists to the edge of the zone, forbidden to those without special permission. At the entrance, each signed a form promising to respect rules aimed at preventing contamination, including not eating or smoking outside, not touching anything and not sitting on the ground or even putting down personal belongings.
The tourists signed the form with nervous laughs. A young Belgian psychologist, Davinia Schoutteten, admitted to being “a little bit scared” of the radiation and said she planned to throw away her shoes after the visit.
She moved forward with the other tourists nonetheless, heading toward the infamous reactor, now covered in a cracked concrete shell. The Geiger counter registered radiation levels of 3.9 microsieverts, against a normal level of 0.12 microsieverts.
After taking pictures of the reactor, the tourists headed to the abandoned city of Pripyat, built only 3km from the nuclear plant to house its personnel and from where 50,000 residents were evacuated the day after the catastrophe.
In the city, time was frozen. Soviet-era signs hung from buildings near a rusting fun park. Books and bits of toys sat in abandoned apartments. Hundreds of gas masks littered the floor of a school cafeteria.
At the entrance to a classroom, a lesson plan for the next week — including classes in reading, math, Russian and natural sciences — was written in black and red ink on a piece of paper still pinned to the wall.
“It’s very sad. I can’t help but feel very sad,” said Bobby Harrington, a young woman visiting from Australia.
“[It is] very beautiful and poetic but the whole tragedy makes me feel very uncomfortable with photographing it,” she said, adding that she felt like she was intruding by seeing abandoned homes.
“It’s too early maybe. There are a lot of people still alive ... It’s the voyeuristic element that I feel uncomfortable with,” she said.
But other tourists felt no hesitation about the site being made a tourist attraction, saying it was a testament to a historical event.
“I always wanted to see this place, since it happened. It’s a very important part of our recent history,” said tourist Karl Backman, a Swedish musician.
“I do not think it’s bizarre. It’s no different from the Coliseum, where people died ... or from Auschwitz. It’s history,” he said.
The disaster occurred on April 26, 1986 at 1:23am, when one of Chernobyl’s reactors exploded, contaminating the then-Soviet states of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus with the fallout also spreading to other parts of Europe.
Thousands of people known as “liquidators” from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus have died since taking part in the bid to limit radioactive fallout after the catastrophe.
The death toll from the Chernobyl disaster is bitterly disputed, with a UN toll from 2005 setting it at just 4,000, but non-governmental groups suggesting the true toll could reach tens or even hundreds of thousands.
In Ukraine alone, 2.3 million people are designated officially as “having suffered from the catastrophe,” including from higher cancer rates.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and