Let’s Talk Tourism

(*all sources listed at end of post*)

It may not be a surprise to most, but Chernobyl has been a tourist attraction since the 1990s, scarcely a decade after the disaster. Why?

Why turn the still-radioactive site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster into a tourist attraction?

Not quite, but they have the gist of it.                      Image Credit: Spectrum Journal 33.2, March 1991

The above image is an editorial cartoon from the March 1991 issue of the Spectrum Journal that was published alongside a short blurb describing the proposal to turn the area into a tourist site to attract foreign currency. Apparently, Soviet visitors had already been paying freelance guides to see the area for an unspecified period of time. Despite the incredulity of many, nicely illustrated by the cartoon, Chernobyl has undoubtedly piqued the curiosity of thousands since 1986. Understandably, not everybody gets why.

I remember being in a grade 10 French class with a guy who had visited Chernobyl. I don’t remember much of what he said about it, but the fact that a 15 year-old can off-handedly say “oh yeah, Chernobyl? Neat place. Quiet as hell,” is intriguing and somewhat worrying.

A quick google search for “tour chernobyl” reveals several websites dedicated to tourism in the disaster area. This apparent accessibility has led to multitudes of photojournalists and vloggers (both professional and amateur) exploring the site and posting their experiences online.

Case in point: a “chernobyl exploration” YouTube search reveals almost 18’000 video results.

 

Let’s look at one of these websites! What are the conditions we have to meet to be able to TOUR CHERNOBYL?

Victim Website of Choice: Chernobyl Tours by SoloEast Travel (www.tourkiev.com)

Spoiler Alert: They say it’s safe. (Also: Eurovision special offer??)

First off, SoloEast travel offers tours to not only Chernobyl, but also to a nearby Missile Base (if you consider 300km South of Kiev nearby) and even a Military Tour where they take you to a shooting range “to shoot the legendary AK machine gun while in Ukraine!!!” (three exclamation points necessary for emphasis). That’s nice and all, but let’s just focus on their Chernobyl tours for now.

They offer one-day and two-day Chernobyl tours. The tour pages themselves don’t offer much information, so let’s check the FAQ.

… I never knew the first two were selling-points.

According to the website, SoloEast started hosting regular tours to the Chernobyl area in 1999, claiming to be the first travel agency to do so (I think they key-word here is regular). They also warn about websites/companies that offer tours but end up cheating prospective tourists out of their money.

While they insist that the taking the tour is safe and that the likelihood of your clothes becoming contaminated is “very unlikely”, they do require participants to buy insurance for the equivalent of $10 US dollars, as well as suggesting that women 5+ months pregnant do not join the tour. We can look at the effects of radioactivity from Chernobyl on infants and children in a later post.

There are lots of rules for touring Chernobyl with SoloEast, some of which are:

• No open shoes, shorts or skirts
• No sitting or placing photo/video equipment on the ground
• No taking items out of the area
• No animals
• No drinking water from the area
• No touching “structures or vegetation” (so, don’t touch anything)
• To leave the exclusion zone, one must pass some radiation tests

At the bottom of the itinerary page for the two-day tour (I could look at both tours’ itineraries in more detail, but that’s not exactly my focus here), they list their motto: “Maximum freedom for photographers / Maximum information for curious”. I can only take them for their word, but it’s an honourable sentiment.

Okay, this is neat and all, but what does it have to do with my first question: Why?

What is the allure of disaster tourism? Chernobyl is not an isolated incidence of disaster-turned-tourist-attraction. An article in the International Business Times dated December 1, 2011 notes a marked increase in disaster tourism during that year, citing examples such as Christchurch, New Zealand, the Tohoku region of Japan (where the earthquake/tsunami combo hit in March 2011), and even tours of areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Called a “perverse curiosity” by the International Business Times, I’m not entirely sure those two words explain the phenomenon which is disaster tourism.

I can’t explain why people are drawn to disaster areas like Chernobyl in a single blog post. When I try to think of reasons why, I find myself thinking of other examples of people succumbing to what some may call a “perverse curiosity”, like the draw behind the gladiatorial battles of Ancient Rome, or tours into North Korea. The question is not easily answerable. That could be a blog post of its own one day, who knows?

The questions I’ll end with are as follows:
Would you go on a tour of Chernobyl?
Would you take the travel company I looked at in this post?
Why or why not? 

Me? Hell, I would, and I’d probably go with SoloEast, too. I can’t exactly say why I would go to Chernobyl in the first place, but I feel it could definitely have something to do with my morbid curiosity and somewhat shoddy self-preservation instincts. (Sorry, mum!)

Sources:

“Chernobyl – A Tourist Hot Spot?” Spectrum Journal 33, no. 2 (1991): 22. EBSCOhost. Accessed February 22, 2017.

International Business Times. “Chernobyl May Soon Reopen to Tourists as Disaster Tourism Grows in 2011.” International Business Times, January 2012. Accessed February 27, 2017.

https://www.tourkiev.com/

YouTube (search results)

(I own none of the source content; I do not claim ownership of source content; if you see I have used your content and wish for me to remove it, please let me know and I will do so. If I need to be more specific in citing websites, please let me know and I will do so.)