Visiting Pripyat, Chernobyl

December 10th 2019 was my 40th Birthday. Around a year before the day I realised it wasn’t going to be a great day to have a 40th birthday, a Tuesday in December, wife at work all day, kids at school. So I decided I would do something interesting rather than just spend it on my todd. I’ve always been interested in the accident at The Chernobyl Power Plant in Ukraine. I started my professional life as a science teacher so with a natural interest in science – the whole fallout of the explosion of a nuclear reactor and the efforts needed to contain such an event held a lot of interest to me.

I’ve also always been fascinated by the idea of ghost towns, places in our world that are frozen in time. I’ve never been to Eastern Europe before and to visit a country that had a history of communism in the old Soviet Union was another factor that held a lot of interest for me. So I decided back then I would visit Pripyat for my 40th birthday and booked a private tour of the exclusion zone for myself and a friend.

Below is a selection of photographs telling the story of my trip to the Exclusion Zone.

Croatia