Our tour of Pripyat took us around apartment blocks, and hotels, to the community centre, the swimming pool, school and amusement park. This used to be their home, and now itвЂ™s just a graveyard of past lives and memories. You imagine the people going about their everyday lives, happy and completely unaware of the devastation that was about to occur. Yet the other part of you starts to wonder how this town looked before the incident. ItвЂ™s impossible to understand the enormity of what happened. Part of you just feels like youвЂ™re walking around a building site with smashed windows, books thrown everywhere, broken floors and ceilings. ItвЂ™s hard to put into words exactly how it felt walking around Pripyat, and even now I donвЂ™t think IвЂ™ve completely managed to digest the experience. In true Soviet Union fashion, the streets were typically named Lenin Avenue, International Friendship Street, Heroes of Stalingrad Street. At the time of the accident, almost 50,000 people were living there. The town of Pripyat was founded in 1970 and its main purpose was to house the workmen of Chernobyl. I signed the form and we returned to the coach to drive to the town of Pripyat. When she was evacuated she was told to take nothing and that she would return in a few weeks.Д«efore heading into Pripyat we were taken into a small room to sign a waiver stating that if any one of us were to contract cancer or any other health issue the tour company was not to be held liable.ДЄs an extremely anxious hypochondriac, I was beginning to wonder if taking this tour was such a good ideaВ after allвЂ¦Д«ut there was no going back now. On the DVD they showed one lady returning back to her old home for the first time 25 years later.

We all grew silent as we imagined how the rooms looked now. No longer occupied, they had trees growing in and around them, and some were completely destroyed. Needless to say we were all starting to feel a little bit apprehensive by this point.ДЄs we approached the 10km exclusion zone I began to notice more and more derelict buildings in the distance. Throughout the drive a DVD was playing giving a history of Chernobyl and showing horrific photos and video of the aftermath, with unsettling interviews with the survivors.

It was guarded by policemen who checked all of our passports before allowing us to continue on. The first checkpoint was the 30km exclusion zone checkpoint, marked by a barrier across the road. Paying our respects to the Chernobyl firefighters who lost their lives.ДЄfter congregating in Independence Square a group of around 20 of us boarded a coach to begin the two hour trip to Chernobyl. It was probably the thing I was most excited about on my entire trip. It has been estimated that around 985,000 premature cancer deaths have occurred since that day as a result of radioactive contamination received from the incident.ДЄfter seeing some pictures of Chernobyl online and learning that you could actually take a tour of Chernobyl and the ghost town of Pripyat, I knew that I wanted to work this experience into my time in Eastern Europe. The town known as Pripyat was affected substantially and now exists as a ghost town. This cloud was then blown over most of the western Soviet Union and Europe.

The fire which resulted from these events sent a large cloud of extremely radioactive particles into the atmosphere. On the morning of 26 April 1986 at precisely 1:23am reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced an unexpectedly huge surge of power, which caused explosions in the core of the reactor. For as long as I can remember I have always had a fascination (and unhealthy obsession) with ghost towns.В There is something so unnerving yet intriguing about visiting a completely abandoned place where people once used to live before something happened to change their lives forever.

Call of chernobyl detector