worldtravel 2013 Revisited - 2015 Issue Three
Luxurious Abu Dhabi Romania’s Epic Mountain Roads Ghost City Pripyat
Ibiza
Island Of Two Halves
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The Massive Vidraru Dam In Romania
Contents worldtravel Abu Dhabi 2
Ibiza 8
Gran Transylvania 14
Ghost City Pripyat 20
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BU DHABI
Words & Photos by Jamie Brown
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f Abu Dhabi evokes nothing more than thoughts of hot weather and luxury in your mind, then this article is well worth reading. It will provide you with the best information on Abu Dhabi and the must-see attractions that this magical city has to offer. Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is located along side the Persian Gulf and bordered by Saudi Arabia and Oman. Abu Dhabi lies on the coast of the Persian Gulf and is the second most populated city of the United Arab Emirates, after Dubai at nearly 2.5 million people. If you like hot and sunny weather, Abu Dhabi posses a hot climate that prevails all year round. Temperatures in summer between the months of June and September will reach over 40 degrees Celsius and yet in winter the temperature will rarely drop below 13 degrees Celsius, even at night time!
The city offers many good reasons to be visited right from the unparalleled shopping experience to highly comfortable accommodation. Excellent attractions include historical monuments, museums, libraries and unbelievable architecture. Amusement locations include Ferrari World and also the Yas Waterpark. A waterpark in the desert? Yes. Al-Hosn Palace is the architectural highlight of this place. Commonly known as White Fort it is the oldest building in the city. Modern architecture is everywhere in Abu Dhabi, and you would expect nothing less from such a young city. The Capital Gate Tower is one of the tallest and more unusual buildings in Abu Dhabi. It is the tallest purposebuilt leaning building in the world. The Aldar HQ building is an odd one too. It looks like its just a big circle. Take a dhow cruise in Abu Dhabi. What is a dhow, you ask? Well it is a traditional wooden sailing vessel
Aldar HQ Building
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that was once used by traders sailing the Arabian Gulf to transport heavy items like fruit. These cool-looking vessels are also used as a venue for lavish dinner cruises. This is your chance to sail over the Persian Gulf with someone special, while enjoying a delicious five course meal.
“Temperatures in
winter rarely drop below 13 degrees, even at night”
Run along the Corniche. This waterfront area paralleled by a main road is what Abu Dhabi is famous for. If you shy away from any form of exercise, not to worry, the Corniche can just as easily be enjoyed from one of the cafe’s, parks or beaches that surround the promenade. While there are many beaches to pick from, a new beach opened in 2008, and is worth a visit.
Capital Gate Tower
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The ABPD Bugatti Veyron
The ABPD Lambo & Ferrari
Inside Ferrari World
Outside The Heritage Village
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The Etihad Towers
Yas Waterworld Visit the Abu Dhabi Heritage Village. This authentic replica of an ancient Bedouin village is situated near the Abu Dhabi Breakwater and showcases Abu Dhabi’s rich cultural heritage. The Marina Mall is nearby, to address your must-do retail therapy. And if you can’t take the heat anymore and are looking for any excuse to get out of the unforgiving sun Submission,
the Marina Mall houses an indoor Ice Ring where you can go ice skating. Ice skating in the desert? Yes. Hotels in Abu Dhabi are among the best in the world. Le Meridian and Crowne Plaza are some of the options amongst many fabulous hotels. One of the more picturesque hotels is also the Yas Hotel on Yas Island. It lights
up in different colours at night. It also sits atop of the marina and the Yas Marina Race Circuit where a Formula One Grand Prix is held annually. Abu Dhabi is an incredible city and makes for great viewing in person, day and night. It is a must visit location and most recommended in the Middle-East of Asia.
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ISLAND OF T
Ibiz
Words And Photos
It’s not all cocktails and dancing that Ibiza is known for. The
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TWO HALVES
za
s By Jamie Brown
ere is also the island itself, a tourist attraction in its own right. worldtravel | 2013 Revisited
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his gorgeous Mediterranean island is actually a part of Spain, not that anyone cares. Throughout the island you will see the typical all-year-round autumn-brown landscape with scarcely placed trees and bush, a bit like the Australian outback, but brown, not red. You will also find the unusually rectangular shaped and white painted architecture all over the place. Honestly if you found one euro outside of every white building in Ibiza, you’d be able to solve the euro crisis. However people in formal clothing with slim glasses will tell me that the buildings are a ‘cream’ colour. It is known as the White Isle anyway. Well, maybe you couldn’t solve the Euro crisis. There are only around 60,000 residential homes in Ibiza, so €60,000 will not be enough to fix a continent’s financial issues. But still, you’d be amazed anyway when driving through a narrow street in Sant Antonio for instance. Say
you went back in time a few years and arrived on Career de Ponent on Sant Antonio’s beachfront, you would instantly know you’re in the Mediterranean, which would be nice. Better then Christchurch a few years ago I suppose. No one wants to be involved in a natural disaster do they? Weirdly, the largest built up areas are called towns and the smaller villages are called cities. And since I was just talking about Sant Antonio, we’ll start there. Sant Antonio is a beautiful harbour-side town with a marina full of sail boats. This makes it the perfect location to watch the intoxicating Ibiza sunset which is guaranteed on every clear evening. Originally Sant Antonio was a fisherman’s town, and in their place we find; an egg. No really, there is a giant egg in the centre of the town’s main roundabout to remember the claim of it being the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, the famous Italian explorer. Every year on August 24 there is a fireworks
e Hill
Dalt Villa Fort on th
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Puerto de Ibiza
display to celebrate the fiesta of Saint Bartholomew, which is best viewed from Passeig de ses Fonts. The nearest of popular beaches is Cala Salada, which is about 5 kilometres from Sant Antonio. There you will also find remains of old fisherman’s huts. The main town in Ibiza is locally called Eivissa, which in English is known as Ibiza Town. It is the largest of the island’s towns. The most interesting of places here is the Dalt Vila fort, which is a large fortification on the hill and surrounded by huge walls. It was built over approximately 31 years from 1554 to defend Ibiza from the invasion of pirates. Yes, pirates. Within these walls you will find some marvellous 5-star accommodation and the famous Dalt Vila cathedral which you can visit. Also within the walls are some great museums including the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Archaeological Museum. In the second weekend of May each year there is a medieval fair to celebrate
Paradise Beach at Portinatx
this great place as a world Heritage site. I should also tell you since rugby is the national sport of New Zealand, every year in June is the Ibiza Tens rugby competition held at Can Misses Stadium on the outskirts of town. Santa Eularia is the second largest of the towns, and amazingly the location of the only golf club on the island. But it’s not like they haven’t put all their balls into the basket, they have. There is an 18 hole course and a nine hole course in the same area, both have remarkable views of the surrounding land and the nearby Mediterranean. Santa Eularia is best known for its small markets where many people go to buy locally made goods. Around Santa Eularia are many beach resorts including Es Canar. Here you can go on one of those pedal-powered boat contraptions and catch The Ibiza Express. The Expess is a road-going train that will take you on three tours to popular and historical areas from Platja Es Canar.
Sant Antonio Harbour
The Ibiza Express also runs between Port de Sant Miquel and Portinatx in the north. These are two of the most gorgeous beach resort towns, cities or whatever they’re called. You will find in Port de Sant Miquel some very large hotels resting against the hillside such as Galeon and Hotel Club Cartigo.
“It was built to defend Ibiza from the invasion of pirates. Yes, pirates.” Near Sant Miquel you can go see Cova de Can Marca, which are amazing caves unlike any we have in New Zealand. The road to Portinatx may seem normal until the moment you come round the hill and see the sea. Further around you will find the magnificent Paradise Beach, where the name says it all. Enough said.
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Beutiful Sunset to the Wes
What about outside the, uh, urban areas. Some of the sights in rural Ibiza are some of the best that are on offer in the Mediterranean. Well firstly there is Es Vedra which is a giant rock that stands tall off the coast near the small village of Hort in the South West. It’s a lot better than it sounds, trust me. It’s a great location to watch the famous Ibiza sunset. Not too far from here, and the airport for that matter is Ses Salines, where you’ll find very large salt ponds. Here you will also find two of the largest beaches on the island, called Platja de Ses Salines and Platja des Cavallet, obviously. Also in a couple of places there are the remains of clubs that were built, but never really lasted. One in particular called Festival Club was finished in 1972 and closed in 1973. It is located in the hills near Sant Josep. Speaking of clubs, it’s about time we moved on to the nightlife half of the island, Ibiza is globally known for.
Beach at Port de Sant Miqu
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There you go. The ones to blame, or the ones to thank for this modern nightlife in Ibiza, were the hippies. Yes! Those free thinking, drug smoking hippies gave birth to the clubs as the international tourism boom was happening in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. After the demise of the previously mentioned Festival Club in the hills the clubs became centred between Ibiza Town and Sant Antonio. There are many small clubs including gay clubs. Unfortunately I cannot report on any of these because I like to think I wouldn’t enjoy it very much, to be honest. Fortunately I can however and will report on the larger, more corporate clubs such as Pacha, Privilege, Amnesia, Space, DC10, Es Paradis and Eden. The club season is restricted to the summer months from May to October. What this does mean though is that every club and every club promotion has massive opening and closing parties either end of the season.
Feeling Blue at Amnesia?
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The first Pacha club opened near Barcelona on mainland Spain in 1967 before it moved to Ibiza early in the 1970s. Now Pacha Group is a huge franchise with seven other locations across Spain, four in Brazil and ten others scattered across the globe, one of those is just across the ditch in Sydney mate!
“The floor opens up and reveals a pool. How cool is that!” Pacha Ibiza however, remains the main headquarters for the franchise. Pacha is the only club in Ibiza open in winter, albeit only on weekends and with no big parties. Pacha’s biggest events are F*** Me I’m Famous on Thursdays with David Guetta, Insane on Fridays and Pure Pacha on
Amnesia’s Foam Cannons
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Saturdays which sometimes has Bob Sinclair and Martin Solveig. Swedish House Mafia had regular gigs at Pacha before the group split up in March, 2013. Privilege Ibiza is officially the largest nightclub in the world and it’s located about halfway between Sant Antonio and Ibiza Town. First it was an outdoor swimming pool and bar in the 1970s before it was sold and renamed as Ku in 1978. Ku was dubbed the greatest disco in Europe because of the outrageous open-air parties. Ku was transformed into a huge indoor club before it sold in 1993 and renamed as Privilege. The premises are compared to a hanger with a 25 metre high roof and a 10,000 person capacity. Privilege has its regular weekly parties every day such as The Face of Ibiza on Tuesdays and Don’t Let Daddy Know on Sundays. Sometimes there are special performances from the likes of LMFAO and Far East Movement.
David Guetta at Pacha
Amnesia is located about a kilometre by road away from Privilege. In fact you can see Privilege from out front of Amnesia. If you want to go to Amnesia, I would suggest taking a spare shirt, because the unique thing about this place is that at certain times foam cannons will spray foam into the main room. It will go everywhere. At least you’ll be clean afterwards I suppose. Amnesia’s most popular night is Thursdays with Cream Ibiza, featuring some of the world’s biggest DJ’s. Paul van Dyk, Deadmau5, Calvin Harris, Example and Benny Banassi all perform at Cream Ibiza. Space & DC10 are both located just south of Ibiza Town and within close proximity of the airport, which is irrelevant unless you wanted to live it up before flying home at five in the morning. Space has the biggest opening and closing parties on the island, shifting outside to the car park to accommodate for 15,000
Privilege from the Outside
partygoers. Space used to have 24 hour Sundays before the local government restricted clubs finish time to 6am at the latest. In 2005 Space was made bigger with now a 6000 person capacity within seven rooms. We Love Space Sundays is definitely the place to be on Sunday nights in Ibiza. DC10 is a small but enthusiastic club with the crazy Circoloco Mondays. Even though it’s right next to the airport runway, you’ll certainly hear the planes, but they won’t remove the fun. The biggest clubs in Sant Antonio are Es Paradis & Eden. They are conveniently located across the road from one another. Es Paradis – Is Paradise. That’s what it is. It is located in a pyramid with amazing decorations, lights and gardens. Some nights Es Paradis has water parties where the floor opens up, yes the floor, and reveals a pool underneath. How cool is that! There is a changing
Dancing Girls Inside Pr
ivilege
room to change into swim gear, which is encouraged. With a capacity of 3000 and if it gets a bit busy you can just pop across the road to Eden. This place was recently brought by a Dutchman and refurbished so is as good as new. Those are the bigger clubs of Ibiza. There are many more smaller and underground clubs such as Ushuaia which also has David Guetta’s F*** Me I’m Famous but on Mondays. There’s also Delano and there is Sankeys. I wouldn’t wear a soccer/football shirt here because you might get mauled. Unless you support Manchester. So that is the White Isle. You might just want to go and live it up clubbing all the time, which is fine. You might just want to go and experience the picturesque landscape, which is fine. Either way, Ibiza is an island which has culture, history and a good time. Ibiza is an island of two halves.
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Don’t worry, be happy at Space
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GranTran Words & Photos By Jamie Brown
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nsylvania 454 HORSEPOWER. 238 KILOMETRES. SADDLE UP FOR ONE BREATHTAKING DRIVE.
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omania. It doesn’t really sound like a beautiful touristic nation. Oh but it is. What you need is a decent comfortable grand-touring sports car, preferably rear wheel drive and some form of navigation, otherwise you’ll get lost in gypsy, amish country. If you are awesome enough you could find a grand-tourer with GPS. Do get yourself a tall gypsy hat to blend in if navigation goes wrong. I’ve gotten my hands on this gorgeous two door, 4.7 litre, 454 horsepower V8. Yes. It is a Maserati GranTurismo, in white. Stunning. But it can’t just be any rear wheel drive that packs more than 400 horses. It has to be comfortable for long distance travels with bumpy roads. If you drive these roads in a Porsche for example with hard suspension made for a track, your pelvis will shatter. Gran turismo conveniently means grand tourer in Italian. This drive includes the incredible Transalpina and Transfagarasan highways, both cross the stunning Carpathian Mountains. The Transalpina is National Road 67C. Its highest altitude is on the Urdele Pass at 2145 metres above sea level. The Transfagarasan is National Road 7C and is 2034 metres above sea level at its highest point. So naturally this means they are closed during the winter months because of snow. So make sure you get your timing right otherwise you’ll have travelled to the other side of the plant only to see a ‘road closed’ sign I would recommend doing the Transalpina first from north to south, then across to the Transfagarasan, from the south to the north. One, because the Transalpina was built first during the reign of King Carol II in the early 20th century. Two, because there is a story that the Transfagarasan, which was built under Nicolae Ceauşescu in the seventies to be better than the Transalpina. But the true story is that the Transfagarasan was built for easy military access incase the soviets invaded. Why else? The starting point for my trail is from a small town called Saliste which is about 20 kilometres west of the city Sibiu. After driving through a few
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towns you will find the tight and twisty roads. Follow the 106E signs until an intersection where you head south following the 67C sign. The roads from here to the Oasa lake aren’t that great, but they only get better. Eventually you’ll come to an intersection where you go right, and then left about a kilometre later. From here though, the Transalpina turns to gold as you begin to climb. As the road continues to climb and climb, you will eventually realise that you are on top of the Carpathians, looking down at Romania. Along the top of the ridgeline there are a string on towns before you descend this amazing road. There are twists and turns up and downs and before long this incredible highway deposits you in the town of Novaci. You are now at the end of the Transalpina.
“You get the impression that you are about to drive off the edge of the planet.” Get across to Curtea de Arges and from here follow the 7C, north. This is the start of the Transfagarasan. The roads do start off a little ‘straight’ but soon the mountains will come in to view and before long you’ll be climbing. A few tunnels and hairpin turns later and you’ll find yourself at the colossal Vidraru Dam. At 166 metres high it is sure to bring out the person scared of heights inside of you. It was built in the 1960’s to produce hydroelectricity. There is also a statue of Prometheus above the dam. From here the road goes twisty through the bush as it follows the perimeter of Lake Vidraru. There are some pretty badly repaired roads along here, I’m calling them worse than freshly repaired roads in New Zealand. You can bypass this part of the drive by going on the other side of the lake, however this road is narrow and unpaved. However it does take you to some amazing lakeside accommodation amongst no civilisation, such as Hotel Valea cu Pesti and Hotel Cumpana. After some miles of this ploughed road through the bush, it starts to really turn good, with steep climbs and hairpin turns on smooth roads.
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As this road climbs passed FreshPark Snow Park it just gets better and better. You then get to the point where you think you are on top of the world. But then you drive into the mountain side through a kilometre long tunnel. When you are eventually spat out by the tunnel there is civilisation. A snow resort with markets selling local goods and three or four hotels, only accessable in winter by a very long gondola. When you drive past the civilisation, you get the impression that you are about to drive off the edge of the planet. This is the perfect
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photographing opportunity, because the view down is unreal. Here you get a glimpse of the road that looks like a single piece of spaghetti that god dropped on the Carpathian Mountains. There are hairpins, sweepers and sheer drops sure to get your adrenalin pumping. Just when you think its over, it isn’t. The road goes back into the bush and continues to wind its way along the mountain range slowly heading down towards Highway One. Just look out for cows, as they aren’t surrounded by fence. They do wander along the road at times. Eventually you’ll get
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to red-house town and then Highway One and the traffic. This is journeys end and therefore time to go home and brag about driving the best roads. If time is on your side, you should by no means bypass all of Romania and take the shortest route to the start of the Transalpina. The rest of Romania is well worth seeing. There are old style buildings in very old towns which once had a high reputation centuries ago. And don’t be afraid to pull over, get out of your car take one of the many amazing short bush walks. You need to get over there and experience Romania for yourself.
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GHOST CITY
PRIPYAT B R O U G H T T O Y O U BY C H E R N O BY L
Photos: Jamie Brown Contributing Writers: Jamie Brown Alexander Nazaryan - Newsweek April 2014 Robin McKie - The Guardian March 2011 John LaForge - Earth Island Journal 1997
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he editor of The Nuclear Monitor, Michael Mariotte said “I have seen the beginning of the end of the world,”after visiting Chernobyl’s doomed landscape in 1996. “The end of the world begins in Pripyat, Ukraine.”
Set among lakes, sandy soil and forests on steppe lands north of Kiev, Chernobyl achieved global notoriety in 1986 when technicians carried out an experiment aimed at testing backup electrical supplies to one of the plant’s four reactors. The flow of water – used as a coolant to carry away the mighty heat of the reactor core – was raised and lowered. After a few minutes, there was a sudden jump in reactor power. Ten seconds later the core was blown apart by a massive explosion. Without a containment vessel, the reactor’s deadly radioactive contents were borne high into the air by the heat of the core’s burning graphite and spread over much of Europe, triggering an international panic. In the blast’s immediate aftermath, 31 plant operators and firemen died – they were not told the reactor was the cause of the blaze or that radiation levels were lethal – while thousands more people, living on land that is now in Ukraine and Belarus, people received doses that undoubtedly shortened their lives. The World Health Organisation puts it at 4,000. The Chernobyl explosion was the world’s worst nuclear accident and is the only one classified as level seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The lake was showered with radioactive debris which sank to the bottom. Today water has to be pumped constantly from the River Pripyat to stop the lake evaporating in summer and exposing its toxic sediments, which would dry out and be spread by the wind.
The Chernobyl Monument
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Once a thriving community of 50,000, Pripyat was the city that was built to house the families of workers who manned the vast reactor complex at Chernobyl. Pripyat provides the most disturbing evidence of the events of April 26,1986. Now Pripyat is centered in a 30 kilometre exclusion zone that few dare to enter, only possible with a tour group.
Pripyat provides the most disturbing evidence of the events of 1986. The city was built to house the families of workers who manned the vast reactor complex at Chernobyl.
central plaza, while the surrounding woods – which now provide homes for healthy populations of wolves, deer and boar – have spread over every piece of open ground.
Reactor number four blew up in the early hours of 26 April, but no one told the people of Pripyat. All that day, children were allowed to play outside, despite the plume of radioactive material emerging from the reactor a few kilometres away.
Inside the city, books are littered over the grimy floors of the main library while outside, a Ferris wheel – just built to celebrate May Day that year – is slowly rusting, as is the other wellknown amusement, the bumper cars.
Of course, there were rumours of a fire, but people had been indoctrinated to believe a reactor accident was impossible – until a fleet of buses arrived about 2pm the next day, 36 hours after the explosion, and Pripyat’s people were shipped off to camps and resettlement centres. At the time, they were told they would be allowed back to their homes within three days, but in the end they were never allowed to return. For an hour, our group wandered round Pripyat, stepping over broken glass and lumps of wood and stone, with the constant chirrup of our radiation counters providing warnings if we strayed too far. Everywhere nature can be seen to be taking back its territory. Trees have erupted through the thick concrete steps of Pripyat’s
“PRIPYAT PROVIDES THE MOST DISTURBING EVIDENCE OF THE EVENTS OF 1986.” We climb eight flights of stairs. Eight more remain. This is sturdy Soviet concrete, dusty as death, but solid. So I hope, anyway. My guide, Lena, who is in her early 20’s, has informed me that the administrators of the Exclusion Zone that encompasses Chernobyl do not want tourists entering the buildings of Pripyat for what appears to be an unimpeachable reason: Some of them could collapse. But the roof of this apartment building on the edge of Pripyat, the city where Chernobyl’s employees lived until the
spring of 1986, will provide what Lena says is the best panorama of this Ukrainian Pompeii and the infamous nuclear power plant, 3 kilometres away, that rendered the surrounding landscape uninhabitable for at least the next 20,000 years. So we climb on, higher into the honey-colored vernal light, even as it occurs to me that Lena is not a structural engineer. And that the adjective Soviet is essentially synonymous with collapse. Considering that Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t told for many hours what, exactly, had transpired at Chernobyl (“Not a word about an explosion,” he said later), you can safely extrapolate to what the Soviet populace learned on April 26: absolutely nothing. But a couple of days after the disaster, a family friend from Kiev called and said we had better cancel our planned vacation in the Ukrainian countryside. The world has seen a pronounced rise in the incidence of cancer and other diseases. The 100 million people living downwind in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia - from what Izvestia called “the greatest technological catastrophe in world history” are learning the hard way that damage done by ionizing radiation is unrelenting, cumulative and irreversible.
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The Disused Ferris Wheel
The Decaying Swimming Pool
The Bumper Cars Abandoned
The Best Slide I’ve Ever Seen How much radiation was released? What percentage of which isotopes were thrown into the atmosphere? Russian authorities initially thought that Chernobyl released only 50 to 80 million curies. (A curie is the amount of radiation equal to the disintegration of 37 billion atoms per second.) The Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois estimates 3 billion of an estimated 9 billion curies was released. Today workers are allowed to live in the village of Chernobyl, but for
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A Boathouse Has Fallen
The Monument on Entrance to Pripyat
no more than four days at a time. With all four reactors at the plant closed down, they are helping to decontaminate the land within the exclusion zone and to decommission the plant’s first three undamaged reactors. As to reactor no 4, the concrete sarcophagus that hides its wrecked, exposed, radioactive core is now crumbling and work has started on a replacement – although Ukraine has made it clear that it will need international assistance to ensure the project’s successful completion.
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This is a nation which will unfortunately have to bear the consequences of the world’s worst nuclear accident for a long time to come. For us tourists we can visit the area inside the exclusion zone on one, two or three day tours. Bookings can be made in advance through the Chernobyl Tours website. These tours may cost a bit money, but it is definitaly worth it. Experiencing a ghost city for real is something to behold and something you will never ever forget.
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