Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/3EkyJbVXPc6gTUBj7
Given COVID, I’ve somewhat changed my calculus to now focus more on the places that I really want to see, regionality and (to a certain extent) weather be damned. That said, once I hit an area I want to see, I’ll probably still stick around and see all other cool things in the vicinity. For a long time now, items 2-4 on my bucket list (with #1 being Virunga National Park in the DRC for gorilla trekking and a hike to see the world’s largest lava lake) have been Petra, the silk road cities of Uzbekistan, and Chernobyl. Jordan has strict COVID regulations now where even if you have spent the past 14 days in a green country (which Turkey was), you need a negative PCR test on arrival and a 7 day quarantine. Uzbekistan is forcing 14 day quarantines unless you’re from one of like five countries, of which Turkey was not a part of. So that narrowed my next destination to Ukraine, where Turkey was on the green list and no PCR test was even required before getting in.
Prior to this trip, my holy trinity of tourism was the temples of Cambodia (specifically Preah Khan but even the others in the Angkor complex, Koh Ker, and Beng Melea), Ladakh, and Kenya. Ever since I first went a few years ago, Cambodia has always stuck out to me as the coolest place I have been to when it comes to man-made stuff, and my recent visit last December only reinforced that. I might have to expand my trinity to a Mount Rushmore because Chernobyl was one of the coolest places I have ever been to. It totally lived up to my hype and then some.
I’ve always really been into the whole concept of nature reclaiming territory, which is a large part of the appeal of the Cambodian temples for me. Chernobyl is basically this concept on steroids, and it’s honestly mind-boggling how much nature has crept back in just over 30 years. It makes the work done by archaeologists to uncover jungle temples in Central America and Asia even more impressive knowing how quickly this nature creep is.
I went through the company SoloEast, which was apparently the first company to offer Chernobyl tours way back when, and they even took Top Gear back when they visited. I did a two day trip, but to keep the costs down I did a group tour on the first day and a private tour on the second day. Luckily, my group tour was only me and 2 others, so it was almost like a de facto private tour. The guides were fantastic, and because the exclusion zone was more or less empty due to COVID (50 visitors each day as opposed to the ~1k that would have been there), we were able to sneak into more buildings than usual (since going indoors is technically frowned upon/not allowed). Overall I can’t recommend this company enough – I got like 8-9 hours of sightseeing in the exclusion zone each day. In regular circumstances I think it’s totally worth ponying up for the private tour because I can’t imagine this being anywhere near as cool a trip if I was in a group with 15 other strangers while there were 1k+ total guests in the zone, since we wouldn’t have been able to trespass then.
I’m kind of going to go stream of consciousness here since I just want to get everything down. But some absolute highlights include:
- Using flashlights while sneaking into the sealed off hospital basement, where we saw the equipment used by the firefighters the night the reactor leaked. I forgot the name of the units, but on a per hour basis, a typical city has a radioactivity reading of .15 (as in, if you spend 1 hour in that location, you will get .15 units of radioactivity), a flight has ~2, most of Chernobyl had ~5, and an x-ray has 2000 (again, this is for 1 hour of x-ray exposure without the vest they give you). We saw readings of up to 1.2k on some of these boots down here
- Speaking of the hospital, just walking through one of the floors where we saw an eye doctor office, a gynecologist office, and a ward for newborns with all of their cribs
- Various different classrooms with slowly peeling away lesson boards, posters, and soviet propaganda
- A couple of completely broken pianos
- A handful of taken apart and rotting Lada cars (Ladas are these typical shitty Soviet cars)
- A kindergarten where we saw these creepy dolls lying around
- Gas masks just hurled everywhere in one or two of the schools
- Walking in a broken down basketball court and having my feet sink to the ground because I was breaking the soggy wood as I walked across (this sounds more dangerous than it was)
- Going into a few military buildings to see their control rooms
- Seeing a bunch of drawings by little kids scattered about in a classroom…I did move them around to get a picture of 5 drawings
- On my 2nd day, the private tour, my guide ran into another guide that he knew who was also leading his own private tour. This other guide lived in Pripyat between the age of 9-17 until he was forced to move out by the government after the reactor leak, and he was able to point out his old apartment (which was inaccessible as it was caved in)
Just in general, wandering down the hallways of abandoned apartments/offices/military buildings/hospitals/schools and peeking into rooms to get a snapshot of what was there when the whole town was abruptly told to leave with one suitcase and that’s it. It’s just the coolest feeling to kind of intrude into the past and see what’s left. I’m generally a sucker for 70s/80s Soviet decor (I really got into it after seeing the movie Goodbye Lenin in my History of Berlin class in college), and to see that setting in a dilapidated state was wonderful. It’s so eerie to take in the whole atmosphere while there…a city of 115k that was told to leave with just one suitcase per person because of radiation. Apparently a big reason the area is so run down is weather related – the cold winters and hot summers plus constant humidity leads to water getting into cracks, expanding into ice, and then melting every year. It felt like straight out of an apocalypse movie or one of the Last of Us video games. It really puts into perspective the fleeting nature of humanity – a city of 150k is almost swallowed whole in 30 years. This really is going to be one of those rare places that I will constantly reminisce about…now I really want to go to the Fukushima site when I make it over to Japan. I could easily spend another week in Chernobyl but that would be obnoxiously expensive as I’d have to do a private tour each day for that (no groups were available due to lack of tourists), but this is definitely a place that I would come back to again in the future.
Beyond Chernobyl, Kyiv itself was a pretty cool city. Kyiv had a great collection of cathedrals and churches which really reminded me of the architectural style that I saw in Vladimir and Suzdal in Russia – bulbous onion domes contrasted with starkly painted church exteriors. Beyond the religious buildings (which were the clear highlight), Kyiv was a fun city to walk around but was sort of generically in a “grand European” style. Not necessarily a negative, but I suppose one of the pitfalls of travelling so much is that it’s hard to be wow’d and that I take things for granted. But overall Kyiv is definitely in the same tier of European cities for me as Prague/Budapest/Vienna – so solidly enjoyable but nothing noteworthy in and of itself. Regarding the weather – I actually didn’t mind the cold as much as I normally would since my facemask doubled up as a moderately effective scarf.
I couldn’t really tell the difference between Ukrainian cuisine and Russian cuisine, but did make it to a couple of kitschy restaurants, one of which was rustic village themed and the other of which was Soviet 1980s themed…both didn’t have any english menus and the food was great. This might partly be because I love Russia, but I do really like the simple yet wholesome food of Russia and Ukraine – I really have come to love a good bowl of borscht now. Speaking of Soviet themed, one not so surprising disappointment was the lack of Soviet monuments, but that makes sense given how Stalin led a low-key genocide against Ukrainians in the 1930s. Another fun little thing I did while walking around, that I picked up in my first trip to Russia back in 2016, was trying to learn Cyrillic. My Rosetta Stone for the language was the word Pectopah, which means restaurant (technically “restoran”, where the P is a rho, C is an s, and H is an n). From there, using those baseline letter translations, I was able to hone my reading skills in Russia over two visits, and kept doing that while walking around Kyiv (since Ukranian and Russian are very similar languages).
I also went out to bars and hung out with strangers for the first time since March in Bali! Forgot how much I missed that aspect of travelling…went with a German guy who was in my group Chernobyl tour the first day, and we just befriended and hung out with a bunch of Ukranians in a couple of different outdoor bars. One weird tidbit from this was how these 20-something year old Ukranians were big Bollywood fans, since apparently Bollywood was big in the Soviet Union and is still sort of popular in the ex-Soviet states.
After Kyiv, I spent a couple of days in the Black Sea port of Odesa. Odesa was definitely a pleasant surprise. The historic center of the city is small-ish (still like 5x bigger than Antalya in Turkey, for example), and really reminded me of a smaller version of Saint Petersburg. The whole area was filled with majestic pastel colored palaces and villas lining cobblestone streets that were shaded with trees. Odesa is definitely one of the prettiest places that I have ever visited. I also got to eat some Georgian food here again which was great as I loved having that in Russia, and went to a Tatar restaurant as well. Tatar food seemed sort of similar to Uzbek/other central Asian cuisines and it was a good change of pace from my Ukranian/Russian meals up until then. As much as I enjoyed Odesa, there’s really not much to do here after a couple of days as the historic square is quite compact, but I am very glad that I made it out here.
After Odesa, I flew out to Lviv, in western Ukraine, for a few days to end my trip here. Lviv was historically a part of the region of Galicia, which spent a good chunk of its’ history as a part of Poland and then the Austrian/Austro-Hungarian empire – it’s also known as Lwow in Polish and Lemberg in German. Because of this history, Lviv really was nothing like Kyiv or Odessa, and instead felt very “Mittel European” (i.e. like Krakow/Bavaria/etc.). My first night there, I took a quick 30 second walk from my AirBnB to the opera house (hostels across Ukraine are closed due to COVID so I had to splash ~$20/night to stay in AirBnBs), where there was a really neat water and light show out front synced up to some classical music. I’ve been really into Beethoven in particular but classical music generally since my “Intro to the Symphony” class back in junior year of college, and it was cool to hear that out here since I’ve always associated that type of music with Central Europe in particular, which western Ukraine is a part of historically. I also had what was probably the best meal in Ukraine at a Polish/Jewish restaurant called Baczewski.
Lviv was overall another nice little town to walk around in for a couple of days. Got serious study abroad flashbacks since most of my weekend trips back then were to Central European cities. It was sort of generically pretty (in a more provincial way, so not the same generic “grandness” of Kyiv), but again I’m glad that I made it out here to see. In Lviv, I went to brewery named Pravda and getting a beer called Obama there…since Lviv historically was a part of Galicia it’s much more of a beer culture here than the rest of Ukraine, which falls in line with Russia in terms of preferring vodka.
Overall, Kyiv, Odessa, and Lviv alone are enough to put Ukraine up with countries like England or France, behind Russia/Turkey/Germany, in terms of how much I’ve enjoyed European countries. However, Chernobyl was probably enough on its’ own to put Ukraine close to Turkey for me…I can’t in good faith say I enjoyed Ukraine more than Russia as amazing as Chernobyl was since one site does not make a country. But I’m definitely super glad I made it out here, and honestly wish I could have spent more time…at least another week or so checking out some of the more rural sites near Lviv and maybe a few extra days in Chernobyl. However, Ukraine’s COVID cases are skyrocketing, and back in August their PM banned all international flights for a month with like a 2 days heads up so I didn’t want to risk anything here beyond going to Chernobyl and seeing 3 cities that I’ve always thought would be cool to visit.
After Ukraine, I flew to Istanbul for one night in order to get a ~$30 PCR test in the airport (which had under a 3 hour turnaround). Spending one night in Istanbul before flying to Hurghada on the Read Sea coast in Egypt. The plan is to hang out there for a week and scuba dive – Hurghada is supposed to be a fantastic dive spot with great wildlife, visibility, reefs, and most importantly for me, wrecks. I figure that since I’ll already be in Egypt and that since their COVID cases are super low, I might as well hang back and see the temples of Luxor and the Cairo area again, plus maybe some other stuff. Tentatively thinking about spending a few weeks in Ethiopia after Egypt but not gonna finalize anything until way later.