My feb half term trip to Belarus and Ukraine and Chernobyl. I spent the a week freezing my bits off. I knew it would be cold, as that region is normally cold and snowy but what I
didn't know was that it was the coldest winter they have ever had in about a million years! I wore so many layers I looked like the Michelin Man. At one point I really thought I was going to lose my toes to frostbite but thank goodness for a kind hearted baboushka. She let me have her radiator to warm my feet on. These old ladies are everywhere, basically their job is to sit around guarding things and looking mean when they have to. Apart from the cold I actually had a good time. As usual I was the youngest on the trip not including the 25 year old
guide. He was cute, hippy looking but it all ended when he opened his mouth. He had this weird accent, he was from North Wales but there was a mix of Flemish, Russian and some
other accent. Really off putting when you’re trying to gaze into his eyes when all you want to do is laugh out loud.
We spent 3 days in Belarus, mostly spent time in and around the city visiting old sites where the Nazis killed a lot of people, museums etc but everything is in Russian. The best part was the overnight train to Kiev. Their train stations are so fantastic and over the top, chandeliers and wot not. Their airport is pretty grim though. My room overlooked their football team’s home stadium, Dynamo Kiev but as it was winter there were no hunky men training.
Chernobyl was an eye opener. The lady who gave us a tour was well known to the scientific world but I cannot for the life of me remember her name. She worked with the BBC when they came to do a special report and she was fantastic. She was a huge bollywood fan and wouldn’t let me go the whole trip. I was taking pictures of the site and she was taking pictures of me. She has to be one of the best guides I’ve ever had and probaly also one of the best tours I’ve been on. To actually see the reactor that blew up was amazing. More amazing was all the transport they used during the clear up that was left in fields to rot. Hundreds and hundreds of ambualances, fire engines, army trucks, rows and rows of them all left there. The town was very eerie and quiet of course as no one had lived there since the incident. They had a fairground there too and that just looked like something out of a movie like maybe some axe wielding maniac was about to come out and kill everyone. I also went to the local school and looked inside. That was so sad. Children’s books just thrown about on the floor, their shoes, the empty cots in the nursery, the odd gas masks here and there. What made Chernobyl look serene and in some places quite paceful and beautiful was the snow covering it. We were knee deep in snow and it was bitter cold but without the snow I think I would have left with a completely diferrent perception of the place. We actually didn’t have much time, our tour was very controlled by the military. So the visits in the school in particular was rushed. So rushed that my guide – the one with the weird accent – dropped his tiny digital camera in the snow. He absolutely panicked because he couldn’t find it. Everyone else were on the bus except me as I was taking so many photos, so I helped the guide look for his camera. We were frantically throwing up the snow to find his damn camera. The driver came to get us and wondered why we were late and then he joined in the search. We eventually found it but my hands were now so frozen I thought frostbite was sure to set in. Before leaving the site we still had another obstacle to pass, everyone who visited the site had to be scanned to see if we may have anything radioactive on us. What was scary was that half of us on the bus beeped and the other half didn’t but we were all just ushered back onto the bus at the same time. I beeped, what did that mean? What was the point of the scan? Am I now radioactive? All these thoughts were in my head – what a bizarre experience.
