Splendid Holiday!
This one is different. Quite so. It is meant to pique the interest of the jaded traveler. Those who have been there, seen it all, done it all. Who crave bold new adventures in places where none are likely to have gone before. Places, for example, that are well-known-to-notorious as sites, but hitherto unknown as possible destinations.This beats an ocean voyage and a cramped seat in a little submersible to dive down to the site of the Titanic. Or a long, tedious, freezing, heart-thumping, lung-bursting, brain-addling haul up Mount Everest. Nowhere near as expensive, either. Just get yourself to Ukraine, and the government tourism board will do the rest.
For a paltry $150, you too can indulge in a truly exciting, heart-palpitating day-trip to a "dead zone". A geography roasted by deadly nuclear radiation. Also featured is a side-trip to the town that held hundreds of thousands of people, workers in the USSR's nuclear industry at Chernobyl and their families, pre-nuclear-eruption.
The trip can be considered a worshipful shrine dedicated to the propensity of human beings invested with great technical professionalism tripping up, nonetheless. It's called carelessness, and the results were catastrophic. But the country's emergency situation ministry lays claim to the radiation levels having returned to normal levels.
Something on the scale of "don't worry, be happy". "The Chernobyl zone is not as scary as the world thinks. We want to work with big tour operators and attract Western tourists", a tourism ministry spokesperson expounded. No mention that 450,000 people had been affected by the big blow-up, and many have perished of radiation-related illnesses, aside from those who died instantly.
And the reactor, after all, that blew up, spewing its deadly radiation far and wide, was covered with a huge, thick cement 'sarcophagus'. Ensuring that all that nasty stuff remains inside, no longer able to contaminate the atmosphere, the ground, wildlife, flora. It's perfectly safe, see?
The guide might have other thoughts as he/she leads the tours about: "Let's leave now, it is very dangerous to be here", one of the tour guides on a recent group trip nervously advised her charges. "There are huge holes in the sarcophagus covering the reactor." It is useful, after all, to have a more intimate understanding of the situation.
Visitors anxious for a truly different kind of experience, must sign a waiver the purpose of which is to exempt the tour operator from all responsibility should they later happen to suffer some kind of malady that might be traced to radiation. Which should, actually, be enough to pick up any prospective visitors' antennae. Perhaps for some it presents as a lure.
Visitors are cautioned by their guides to take care not to touch anything. Anything, including the vegetation or the metal structures; in fact anything, ANYTHING! But go on, have a look at the four reactors. Come a little closer, you can get closer to the erupted one. And wow, listen to that Geiger counter: click, click-click, click-click-click, click-click-click-click-click.
Um, better leave.
Labels: Realities, Russia, Technology, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 07, 2011
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