A Bike Ride Through Chernobyl

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Wow... that is simply incredible. As one who rides, this must have been both emotional and exciting. Thank you for sharing that with us.

that mus hve been a great experiance. i Ride bikes too, and just the peacfulness of being by yourself is ery peacefull

Amazing! Here's more:
http://animal.discovery.com/news/afp/20060417/chernobyl.html

It's fascinating seeing images and reading peoples accounts from places like this. One of my previous employers had a lot of information on the accidents that happened at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island & Windscale (a kind of behavioural safety thing) and reading about the events that lead to the accidents as well as the after effects made for very interesting reading.

I find somewhere like Chernobyl strangely attractive; part of me would like to see the mess, the ghost towns for my self - the other part of me would not go anywhere near something like that - I understand the effects of radiation and the usefulness of a dosimeter - but still...

Very interesting- thanks for the link.

wow, that was great! very interesting. I liked seeing all the russian. i hope to begin learning the language this summer in a summer language immersion program. plus it was fun reading the written things in a russian accent.

This is such a cool thing she did. I read/saw this like 2 or 3 years ago. Very interesting, indeed.

You can even GoogleEarth Chernobyl also and see reactor 4.

Wow. Really powerful to see the reactor that started it... and the carnivel was starngly interesting too...

Sadly, it may not be true:

http://www.uer.ca/forum_showthread.a...&threadid=8951
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/w...comments/1026/

Thought I would post the text from the broken link
-d


pulse 5/21/2004 6:23 PM
World > Re: chernobyl motorcycling fake!
I've been biting my tongue about this one for a month now as I prepare my own website on the subject..

On April 27, 2004 (18th anniversary + 1 day of the Chernobyl disaster) I did a tour of Chernobyl, the nuclear power station and the ghost town Pripyat. As part of this, I had lengthy discussions with my tour guide about Elena's website, and she told me a few things about it.

1) Her father is NOT a scientist. She does NOT have an 'unlimited access' pass to Chernobyl
2) She has never been on a motorcycle inside Chernobyl. If you notice, the pictures including her bike stop when she gets to the access control point. They did NOT let her in.
3) While she HAS been to Chernobyl, she did exactly the same tour I did, and she went with her husband.
4) In her original website, she mentioned she never goes inside buildings without a girl who lives in Chernobyl, who "is familiar in the ways of the atom and has good taste in shoes" and makes her living showing people around. This person's name is Rimma Kiselitsa. She works for the group Chernobylinterinform (http://www.chernobyl.info) - and was my tour guide.

Yes, I had the same tour guide in Chernobyl that Elena had.

But there's more. I'll give an example - one of the pictures on her original site was inside a kindergarden. It's a picture of a baby's crib, with a photo of Lenin, a child's gas mask, and some toys. These photos were 'staged' by Elena's husband. He found the photo of Lenin elsewhere, put it in the cott and placed a gas mask alongside then took a photo of it.

This annoyed Rimma immensely. She was not impressed from start to finish about Elena and her husband, as they seemed to be trying to take photos for shock value - not how the place really is. I had no intention of doing such things (in fact, I saw the very cott they took the picture of I mentioned above, still in the same state that they left it in), and Rimma picked up on this. She took me to MANY places she didn't even tell Elena about. As part of my day's tour, I took over 400 photographs. I watched Rimma remove the gas mask and photograph of Lenin, and put them back in their original homes.

The reason I was told all of this was because Rimma is very annoyed about the whole affair - she's getting phone calls from movie producers wanting to make movies about this "heroic" girl. She's getting people demanding the same unlimited access pass that Elena supposedly has. These do not exist, and she's sick of explaining it to people. When I mentioned I too wished to create a website, she started to talk about it all. Rimma has been featured in Maxim magazine, a number of other magazines and newspapers, and indeed the day I did the tour she told me if I got back to my hotel in Kiev on time to turn on Channel 1 at 7:30pm - she was hosting a documentry on Chernobyl (which looked interesting, but I'm an Australian - I don't speak Ukrainian. I couldn't understand a word).

As part of this, I have offered for her to proof read my website before it goes live, to make sure I have all the facts right. In return, Rimma has said that I may use an "Endorsed by Chernobylinterinform" logo on the page.

So yes, Elena's website is fake, and much of the things she discusses are complete, utter, 100% bullshit.. such as you have to stand in the middle of the road. Rimma and I strolled through parks, across fields, around gardens, everywhere. At the end of it, the machine said I had as much radioactivity as when I arrived. Bugger all. This is Rimma's job, this is her life, and she's been doing it for 10 years. She KNOWS what she's talking about, and is truly one of the nicest people I've ever met.

I'll just finish by giving a link to a panoramic photo I took on a rooftop in the centre of Pripyat - it also shows Rimma in it standing just below me (in fact, due to the way the photos were stitched together she's actually shown twice).

http://www.web-axis.net/~pulse/chernobyl/prypyat-panoramic.jpg (4mb - 13,112 x 952 resolution)

Details of the tour that I AND Elena did can be found at http://www.ukrcam.com/tour/tour_3.html - where you can also book your own tours if you're interested. By the way, it's not exactly a tour group - it was myself, my driver (in the fearsome Soviet Lada car) and Rimma. That's it. It's a private tour, not exactly a Greyhound tour of Chernobyl..

It was quite simply the most AMAZING experience I've ever had.

Tony Brown (pulse .. at .. web-axis.net)

Wow... Why would she lie? I did notice some of the images had stamps of other websites, why' is that? Still cool to see some of the photos... Even if they were modified a bit.

traded said:

Thought I would post the text from the broken link
-d

*Snip*

I'll just finish by giving a link to a panoramic photo I took on a rooftop in the centre of Pripyat - it also shows Rimma in it standing just below me (in fact, due to the way the photos were stitched together she's actually shown twice).

http://www.web-axis.net/~pulse/chernobyl/prypyat-panoramic.jpg (4mb - 13,112 x 952 resolution)

*Snip*

Click to expand...

The link to the stitched photo doesn't work anymore but it can be seen with webarchive.com. Here's the link.

Amazing! Wish I had the doe to visit it! Seems like a place to just look and think.