The image of the screen is frozen in an exact hour: 01:23:45.It is a documentary that is passing in a video that is just above the driver, but in this little bus that Zigzaguea dodging potholes on a route in northern Ukraine, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has just exploded again.Each minibus with tourists again tell the story and show the atomic fungus again, with the precise time.This week, Chernobil has exploding 60 times a day.
The bus left Kiev an hour and a half ago.He takes two Ukrainian girls, a young man from Kazakhstan, a Polish girl, a Colombian lady and her German husband, a Californian boy, another Belgian, a couple of Chinese, a French man, a couple of Canadians and an Argentine journalist, the envoyof Clarín.Only one among all of them paid 450 extra grivnas (the local currency, about 15 euros) for a white plastic suit to get on the clothes and protect yourself better from radiation.Two more optionally chose a small yellow apparatus, somewhat smaller than a mobile, which measures exactly how much radioactivity is there where one walks.That speech emits an acute beep that will become upset with the passing of the hours.
Is it that it is still dangerous to visit Chernobil after 33 years of the explosion of the Four Reactor of the Nuclear Power Plant of what was then the Soviet Union?It was the largest atomic accident in the history of humanity, and at that time it was valued that the devastating consequences would remain for ... 20.000 years.
The guide tells us that we will be exposed to a radiation not exceeding that which would produce a couple of radiographs, but that in some places that intensity could triple.Then we will see that it is indeed like that.The secret will be "the exposure time".A few minutes, sometimes less than five, they will make that potential danger become harmless.
The same doubts travel with us during the way, but seeing the young Ukrainian guides (none of them were born when the explosion occurred in 1986) to go from here to there for almost 12 hours, nice and carefree, suggests that perhaps perhapsThey are right, and to go around the ghost peoples around the four reactor is how to move between a thorax and one tibia and fibula.
We must not know nuclear physical, after all, to come to go for this desolate corner of the world that, one day, was the epicenter of the drama of humanity.
The guides give us extra help: a small device that hangs us from the neck before leaving and that works as a kind of magnet that absorbs the radioactivity superior to normal.Something like a tiny portable lightning rod that will save us from contaminating if we walk, for example, too close to metal objects.
The Chernobil nuclear power plant, or what remains of it, is in Ukraine, 110 kilometers from the capital Kíev -an active city where the avenues cross underground and a modern metro network carries everywhere by a plastic cospelCeleste- And less than 20 kilometers from the northern border with Belarusian.
It is traveling on a highway that leaves Kiev and that immediately transforms into a contradiction round route, then on a rural road without arbit.On the sides, the first bolt buildings - White Elephant Type - that survive the Soviet era, then small farms and finally buped forests.Every so often posters appear on the presence of bears and wild boars.
The first stop is before a barrier booth that looks like the border crossing of a 70's movie.It is.Although on the other side we will continue within Ukraine, we will have passed a limit: the 30 kilometers of the exclusion zone, where no type of tasks is allowed except for the guards, a handful of swallow residents, the workers who measure the radioactivity of the radioactivity of the radioactivity ofThe plant, and tourists who arrive in buses, such as ours, authorized by the Government, at a rate of 60 per day.On average, 1.000 daily tourists, 40% more since HBO launched its series on the subject with a Global Record hearing, even superior to that of the Titanic Game of Thrones.
In the control there are armed guards who ask for passports and compare the special and individual permissions that each one had to manage previously with the tourism company that leads to the place.A pass to go and return to Chernobil costs about 140 euros on average, including lunch.The excursion hard eleven and a half hours: it leaves at eight in the morning and returns at half past seven in the afternoon.
In Chernobil there are a couple of hotels to spend a night with a shared bath, but the stay cannot extend too much, and the guards are to control that everyone who enters comes out.
*Clarín infographic
A military jeep with two guards approaches the Argentine journalist who had taken a photo, from afar, from the first border booth.One of the guards asks to see the photo while telling him to delete it.The other is just shouting: "Don't fuito, no photo!", And accelerate.The journalist sees that the jeep moves away and keeps his mobile.Try to understand what could be wrong in that photo taken 30 meters from a barrier with a face of face -free guards stopping minibus.Do not understand.He doesn't erase her.
The small bus continues and one understands that it is in an exclusion zone.The only thing our bus crosses is a military vehicle.And nothing more.Not even other tourist buses.So for a while, until the stop that marks that the exclusion zone, now, is only ten kilometers.Which means that we are at that distance from the reactor that exploded.
Very close to this position is the population of Chernobil and, beyond still, Pripiat.The second control again verifies and scoring passports.The bus already advances through roads between one -directed thick forests.If someone came from the front there would be no place for two vehicles, or departing on one side where the thick.
No one comes.There is the third control.
Pripiat, they tell us that he tells a cartel in cirilic alphabet.Shortly after being there, we will see that if death chose his house on earth, that site is this.
Pripiat was a model garden city with apartments and modern public buildings that regulated the social life of the workers of the nuclear plant and their families.There was a school, hospital, police station, offices, a sports center with basketball, a stadium, an amusementMoscow and dream of the elite of Soviet athletes.
It was a small paradise between the green of the forest, with trails that connected the buildings between sources and pedestrian roundabouts upholstered with multicolored flowers in summer, and of small snowy pines in winter.
Now it is a ghost town, chamuscado, dark, semi -decided among the vegetation that is gradually devouring it.To bite.
The Chernobil Central exploded in the early hours.None of its 50.000 inhabitants never lived there.
Therefore, there are still the hoses of the firefighters still rolled next to the ladder that reaches the entrance of a public building.Or half written notebooks lying on the floor of the school.O Hospital's raising operating room.Or the Cunitas of the Nursley where there were newborns who later suffered diseases due to radioactive rain that followed the initial disaster.In those thirteen cunitas death was born.
Many of those boys were recommended to be medically outside the Soviet Union.They were treated in Cuba.
Below, in the subsoil of this same ghost hospital, there are still the costumes of the 29 firefighters who first arrived at the reactor to turn off the flames with water, thought it was a common fire.Most of them died devoured by the toxicity of what was at that moment the most dangerous place on the planet.Those costumes still emanate very high levels of radiation.
Pripiat is a city bombarded by a storm of uncontrolled atoms that burned it, even when it was not set on fire.The halls of the buildings are a collection of rubble and darkness, where the thickness of the forest is putting the light rays of a diaphanous day with 30 degrees with 30 degrees.It is an intense and very humid heat.It has more than a missionary jungle than of Russian Estepa.
It is suffered by the group that meets Rajatabla the slogan of being dressed without sandals, or shorts, or shorts, or short -sleeved t -shirts.The more covered, the better.But the heat is recess.And it is increasingly difficult to walk away from metal objects.The floor is upholstered from thousands of small pieces of sheet or steel that look like rusty smoking paper, only some weigh almost half a kilo.They rained from the throat of the atomic volcano and there they stayed until today.
The recommendation is to wash the clothes on the way back, but above all the shoes.You have to put the soles under the tap.We will do it.
The splendid day does not encourage or relieve the knot that grows in the throat.The general atmosphere is first curious, followed by melancholy, and then mutates towards a deep sadness.It happens at the exact point where one understands that it is not in a museum, nor in a filming set, but in the heart of the naked tragedy.There are shoes there.Farther, a plastic doll.Closer, a jacket.Even more hand, a supermarket cart abandoned by someone when he had to flee.Here, at hand, a spoon inside a plate.Only soup and man, woman, child, adolescent?that ate it when everything ended.
If it were not for the relentless advance of the beautiful and cannibal thickness of the forest, or by the dust of the years, or by the cobwebs of the ghostly corners that abound -the elevator holes give the void and are a deadly trap in the gloom-, anyone would believe that Chernobil exploded two days ago.So the horror was frozen, and it still feels.All things are here.Only things, but nothing more.
And how do tourists not steal the written notebooks, the spoon, the plate, the wrist or the thousand and one objects scattered everywhere - like those girl sandals in the nursery - that dimension the size of the human tragedy?
"Everything is contaminated.Here each nail is radioactive, and who would want to take the pollution of Chernobyl to his house?.The ferrous border controls, which will have to pass again at the exit, seem another reason for persuasion.
The amusement park is the disaster symbol for international photographers that arrive in Pripiat.It is common that the first image that appears about Chernobyl today is a game back to the world with yellow metal baskets exposed to corrosion but not forgotten.In your chairs, harmless, is just where radiation triples.There is.It is the cohesion of the second exact between fun and tragedy.That fragile and fierce moment that we almost never see coming between life and death.
In the forests and in the skeletons of the devastated buildings you can see ants, beetles, mosquitoes, butterflies, birds and dogs.Other visitors - it was not our case - they said they have seen horses.In Lake Pripiat there are fish and the camalotes give beautiful yellow flowers.Life makes its way in Chernobil, but not everything is what it seems.
Dogs are vagabundos and it is prohibited to touch them.Most are contaminated (sometimes they sleep about those thousands of metals scattered on the ground) but have developed a kind of immunity that may make them carriers of radiation even if not necessarily victims.
Part of the soul, yes, see with the enthusiasm that they approach the small groups of humans walking through the area.As they know the routine perfectly, they even jog in front of the guides by the paths that lead to the key places.There they come and go, or they throw themselves in the shadow waiting for a caress that only they look at them.
And what do they eat?Some tourists give cookies or look for the garbage or follow the guides until someone takes care of them.Chernobil dogs can be fed, but they don't caress.
And what do tourists eat?When leaving Pripiat, there is an industrial dining room where plant workers lunch.There they serve a potato soup with green vegetables and fried chicken with white tirabuzon noodles.To enter the place, you have to go through a lavapiés and wet the footwear sole, then cross a radiation detector in which the feet and hands are resting on some marks.The detector - an individual metallic arc, such as airports - has four lights.You can only pass if it turns on to the second.Already with the third light, there will be a more thorough control of the person who could even end his immediate expulsion from the exclusion zone.
The huge reactor four continues in place, but now it does not seem the horror volcano spitting hurricanes of atoms around Europe but a meek town shed.It is a steel sarcophagus that was put in 2017, cost 2.000 million dollars and keep the reactor isolated for 100 years.The origin of the disaster is encrypted.Its consequences may not.
The Soviet Union reported, in 1987, that by the tragedy of Chernobil there were officially 31 dead.The UN believes that they are around 10.000.In the town there is still a statue of Lenin and just over 2.000 inhabitants who stay to work stop tourism or in the center deactivated, but that enter and leave the exclusion zone for short and regular periods.A week "inside" the limit that mark the barriers;Another outside.And so.
Although 33 years have passed, Chernobil has never been a common city again.No one is allowed to live there without breaks.Pregnant women cannot work within the exclusion zone and there are also no boys.Nor visiting: all tourists who enter must be over 18 years old.
In the main square of Chernobil there is an iron sculpture that represents an angel playing a trumpet, in front of a row of thin posters, with one name each.They are the 162 villages directly affected by the radiation, which began when the bureaucrats, which then directed the nuclear power plant, tried to do a security test and, to conserve the reactor, they detonated it.
The button that had to save the disaster was the one that caused it.It was called Az5 and it is still a reason for a certain sarcasm among kyiv's taxi drivers, when someone wants to fix something and worsens it, they tell him that he touched Az5.
Humor can cure, also here.
At the exit, after the last barrier, one of those guards angered by the photo of the start, check the bus with a radiation detector, while each of the passengers - including the driver and the guide - pass the test of a deviceidentical to the dining room.The right lights come on and we can all go out quietly.
Before the rural road that will later be a route, and then highway to the luminous center of Kiev, awaits a memories store with 180 grivnas t -shirts (6 euros) and breakfast for breakfast at 120 (4 euros).They also sell lighters that are activated with an inner light, as if they were radioactive.More humor in the house of death that will be impossible to forget for those who visit it.
In addition to a series, the tragedy also has souvenirs.
