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Chernobyl & Pripyat Olyanna Travel is able to organise group and individual tours to visit the site of the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl. The check point at the 30 Km exclusion zone provides an appropriately forbidding welcome for the visitor to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The drive from Kiev takes you through small villages with unpaved streets in the midst of silver birch forests and fields where people still work strip farming with hand plough and horse. It takes about 90 minutes to get to the check point where passports and documents are inspected. Thereafter you will approach the town of Chernobyl, about 15 Km from the disaster site, along a deserted highway through what has effectively become a nature reserve where fauna and flora flourish in unspoilt abundance. The first you see of the plant are the stumps of cooling towers with cranes hanging over the unfinished construction of reactors 5 & 6 which stand as they were left three years after the accident. In the distance, through the web of electricity cables suspended from dozens of pylons that converge there, you see the now reinforced ventilation stack that once precariously teetered over the concrete sarcophagus that encases what remains of Reactor 4 which exploded on April 26th, 1986. Now all is eerily silent. 
The guide may have a Geiger counter which at this point will indicate radioactivity level of about 130 micro-Roentgens (2 is normal!!). Approaching the reactor you will see simply a large featureless building now with scaffolding at one end as the project to encase and strengthen the existing concrete bunker proceeds. The original sarcophagus was built to encase the corpse of the reactor, but this is a misnomer for the radioactive material - some 200 tons of it - will continue to be dangerous for thousands of years. Driving away from the reactor site you will see the disused railway line that led to Moscow and then you will cross the western strip of high radioactivity where the level briefly goes up to over 1000 micro-Roentgens! But the most poignant testament to this catastrophe is the deserted town of Pripyat. You are free to wander among the empty apartment blocks some still with furniture left by the forcibly evacuated population of 47,000 - but most things of any value have long since been looted. 
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