Why Would Anyone Want to Visit Chernobyl?

We were around a hundred miles from the Zone, and already my thoughts had turned toward death. This had nothing to do with radiation and everything to do with road safety. I was in a minibus, on a highway between Kyiv and the 1,160-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl power plant. The minibus was being driven at an alarming speed and in such a way that caused me to question the safety standards of the tour company I’d entrusted myself to for the next two days. It had become clear that our driver and tour guide, a man in his early 40s named Igor, was engaged in a suite of tasks that were not merely beyond the normal remit of minibus driving but in fact in direct conflict with it. He was holding a clipboard and spreadsheet on top of the steering wheel with his left hand (that he was also using to steer), while in his other hand he held a smartphone, into which he was diligently transferring data from the spreadsheet. The roughly two-hour journey from Kyiv to the Zone was, clearly, a period of downtime of which he intended to take advantage in order to get some work squared away before the proper commencement of the tour. As such, he appeared to be distributing his attention in a tripartite pattern — clipboard, road, phone; clipboard, road, phone — looking up from his work every few seconds in order to satisfy himself that things were basically in order on the road, before returning his attention to the clipboard.

Also see: https://wycieczki-do-czarnobyla.pl/ 

I happened to be sitting up front with Igor and with his young colleague Vika, who was training to become a fully accredited guide. Vika appeared to be reading the Wikipedia article for “nuclear reactor” on her iPhone. I considered suggesting to Igor that Vika might be in a position to take on the spreadsheet work, which would allow him to commit himself in earnest to the task of driving, but I held my counsel for fear that such a suggestion might seem rude. I craned around in an effort to make subtly appalled eye contact with my friend Dylan, who was sitting a few rows back alongside a couple of guys in their 20s — an Australian and a Canadian who, we later learned, were traveling around the continent together impelled by a desire to have sex with a woman from every European nation — but he didn’t look up, preoccupied as he was with a flurry of incoming emails. Some long-fugitive deal, I understood, was now on the verge of lucrative fruition.