Ukrainian parliament insists on developing the Exclusion Zone as a tourist destination and including individual areas in the UNESCO World Heritage List. For this purpose, it is necessary to create a high-quality basic infrastructure, improve the operation of checkpoints, modernize the electronic system, and place appropriate signs.
Besides, last year, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – the president of Ukraine – signed a decree on the transformation of the Exclusion Zone into a Chernobyl visit center for people from all over the world, assuring that large funds will be invested in it. He also promised to cancel all bans on visits and filming near the Nuclear Power Plant itself, where the accident occurred in 1986. So, Trips-to-Chernobyl will offer a lot of benefits for those who visit Chernobyl today.
The initiative to add the Zone to UNESCO was put forward by the Ukrainian National Committee back in 2017. Then the Chernobyl area was nominated in the list of cultural and natural objects of worldwide importance by UNESCO but didn’t receive the title.
What were Pripyat tours before?
The Exclusion Zone has been attracting the attention of adventurers for years – also due to its weight in pop-culture (the famous computer games S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the book series of the same name, science fiction films and TV series, which are set in Chernobyl). As for the previous year, in the first eight months of 2019, about 107 thousand people have visited the territory, 80 thousand of which turned out to be foreigners.
Despite the fact that the Exclusion area of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station has the status of a prohibited territory for free access, you can visit Pripyat without any problems. Thanks to Trips-to-Chernobyl you can change from different interesting routes the best suitable for you and have a wonderful adventure! Pripyat, perhaps the most popular place in the region, was previously legal as part of organized tourist groups who ordered special routes, forcibly disregarding some interesting locations.
At the same time, illegal immigrants drove into the zone en masse, bypassing the checkpoint and hiding from local patrols. They actually had no restrictions on locations, but if they were caught, the daredevils were threatened with various kinds of punishment, including criminal – if artifacts from the Zone were found during the inspection.
Is it dangerous to visit Pripyat and Chernobyl almost 35 years after the accident?
According to Vladimir Gubarev, a journalist who worked in Chernobyl immediately after the disaster, and the author of dozens of thematic books, tourists wishing to visit the abandoned territory are not in danger if they don’t violate the established safety rules. However, he especially notes the influence of weather phenomena on the radiation background, due to which the radiation level in one particular place can increase several times in a matter of hours. It is necessary to control the indicators of dosimetrists. Thus, only well-prepared guides can provide Pripyat tours.
This structure is already developing. Tourism in the Exclusion Zone has been carried out for many years, everything is already established there. You can even download a book about tourism to Chernobyl on the Internet and be aware of the rules of visiting this area.
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