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You are here: Home / Bad Vacation Spots

Bad Vacation Spots

by John Cole|  June 14, 200511:06 pm| 5 Comments

This post is in: General Stupidity

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Someone tell the Griswolds to get packed:

Much had also changed. Now there are broken windows, rot, rusting bed frames and paint falling away in great blisters and peels. And now there are tourists, participating in what may be the strangest vacation excursion available in the former Soviet space: the packaged tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, scene of the worst civilian disaster of the nuclear age.

A 19-mile radius around the infamous power plant, the zone has largely been closed to the world since Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, sending people to flight and exposing the Communist Party as an institution wormy with hypocrisy and lies.

For nearly 20 years it has been a dark symbol of Soviet rule. Its name conjures memories of incompetence, horror, contamination, escape and sickness, as well as the party elite’s disdain for Soviet citizens, who were called to parade in fallout on May Day while the leaders’ families secretly fled.

Now it is a destination, luring people in. “It is amazing,” said Ilkka Jahnukainen, 22, as he wandered the empty city here that housed the plant’s workers and families, roughly 45,000 people in all. “So dreamlike and silent.”

I think I will go to the beach. That does remind me of this (which is now thought to be a hoax), though.

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Reader Interactions

5Comments

  1. 1.

    Frank

    June 15, 2005 at 5:04 am

    Whenever I am reminded of Chernobyl I think of the heros who worked to seal off the the reactor from the outside. The all died and pretty much knew they would die, but the managed to entomb the reactor in concrete. If they hadn’t a much much larger area would have become unihabitable.

  2. 2.

    Slartibartfast

    June 15, 2005 at 7:01 am

    From the linked article:

    Radiation will stay in the Chernobyl area for the next 48.000 years

    Wow. 48,000 years from now there’ll be no radiation? Wonder how that’s going to work? I think the half-life of U238 is a few billion years, and that stuff is everywhere. And that’s one heck of a tinfoil beanie that keeps out the cosmic and solar radiation.

  3. 3.

    Mr.Ortiz

    June 15, 2005 at 9:11 am

    I’m reminded of the throngs of tourists who line up to see Ground Zero in New York. Us locals tend to avoid it. When I finally did look, over a year later, it was almost by accident. I was temping nearby, took a walk on my lunch break, and saw a building in the distance that I knew I shouldn’t be able to see from where I was. Took a few seconds for it to register why there was nothing in the way. The one native New Yorker I know who wanted to see it was out of town on 9/11. I understand that people want to feel a connection to history, but sometimes it seems like the rest of the country is suffering from some bizzare form of survivor’s guilt. I’m going to cut this post off before it turns into a rant (if it’s not too late for that), but for anyone planning a visit, try not to be too disappointed when the only thing distinguishing ground zero from any other construction site are the viewing stands.

  4. 4.

    JG

    June 15, 2005 at 12:31 pm

    Once again if you are going to go on vacation I recommend Jamaica. I imagine most travel agencys rank it higher as a destination spot than Chernobyl.

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Trackbacks

  1. The Q Speaks says:
    June 19, 2005 at 12:37 am

    Post-apocalyptic tourism

    Always wondered what the world might look like in the aftermath of a nuclear winter?

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