Thread: Holidays to Chernobyl - Отпуск в Чернобыль?!

I don't see anything like a blasphemy or disrespect in visiting Chernobyl as a tourist. It is already a history. I don't have contemporary statistics about cancer. AFAIK now radiation is low and the normal "incubation" period of radiation cancer is 3-4 years. My grandmother died because of cancer in a 3 years after the accident, it was a burst of cancer at that time all over the Ukraine. Some problems still exist (like nobody knows exactly what is going on under the sarcophagus). But the peak was too long ago to be an actual disaster.

One can remember museum in Auschwitz. Or how Roosevelt proposed Stalin to keep ruined Stalingrad as a museum area. It's a memory and warning.

Villages around Chernobyl were evacuated in a hurry and everything was left as it was, like if people suddenly disappeared, and than everything decayed with time. It makes a feeling of Apocalypse. There is even a popular PC game on the virtual reconstruction of that town (Припять). Now that area is quarantined.

http://www.tema.ru/travel/chernobyl/

I see your point of view too, it-ogo.

It's true that it's a bit of the world frozen in time.... and now beginning to decline. I saw a documentary about it about a year back. Agree that it is fascinating in some respects.

But actually going yourself, is different.

Seems like being a tour guide in Chernobyl would be very lucrative work. If someone takes a group of five to this village near Chernobyl, he'd make 5000 dollar in a day. Not bad! I can see that there'd be lots of people who'd want to support this as a tourist destination.


The comparison with Auschwitz is a good one.

Personally I never understood people who want to visit concentration camps either! The people who deny the holocaust ought to go... But that's mostly extremists anyway.

I will never forget chatting to a girl in Israel about this, many years ago. She was working nights stapling products in a shop (really hard work) in addition to going to school during the days. The reason was that she needed to save money to go to Poland (Aushwitz) with her youth group. She wasn't going anywhere else in Europe, just there... That, to her would then represent Europe! No doubt she already knew Auschwitz, so it just seemed like rolling in tragedy and misery. Of course it wasn't my business how she spent her holidays, but it stuck on my mind.

By the way, you should not say "gloat on it" like I did. I don't think that's the right way to use that expression. Just "gloat" is how it should be used, I think. The rest is implicit. I sometimes forget that I ought to write in my best English here, not allow myself to slip into pidgin English...

Have you seen any of the video of Pripyat? I find it fascinating!

Do a search, you can find plenty.

$1,000 for a day there? no.