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FEATURE-Ghost towns, geiger counters-- Chernobyl welcomes you
By Elizabeth Piper

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine, April 25 - Ghost towns, geiger counters, white masks and rubber boots -- Welcome to Ukraine's much-touted new tourist hotspot, Chernobyl.

Equipped with a 13-room hotel, Soviet-style buses and a winding pot-holed road, some tourist agencies in Ukraine hope to make a buck or two out of the world's worst civil nuclear disaster by offering tours around the contaminated area.

But those adventurous tourists who have fought their fears of radiation sickness and want to see the highly-patrolled area all but deserted after reactor number four exploded on April 26, 1986, might find the staff less than welcoming.

"There cannot be family tourism here, we cannot allow walking holidays. There can only be bus tours for about four to six hours," said Mykola Dmytruk, deputy director of the agency which coordinates visits by specialists.

"As for extreme tourism, I am not sure this place is extreme enough. There is not much need for adrenaline on a bus ride...This is a place of tragedy."

Sixteen years on, the tragedy of Chernobyl's exploded reactor which spewed deadly clouds of radioactive dust over Russia, neighbouring Belarus and much of Europe is still being lived out by thousands.

Many areas still have dangerously high levels of radiation. Stories of death, illness and poverty pepper conversations. Old women and men have returned to contaminated ghost towns after becoming unhappy with government efforts to resettle them.

The staff, who battle with the stigma of contamination for living in the region and face months of unpaid wages, say the site is best left in the hands of caring scientists who monitor ever-changing levels of radioactivity and still strive to make the area finally safe.

Beer-drinking, smoking tourists, hoping for an adrenaline-boosted thrill by meandering around pinewoods and fields which bloom once again around the encased reactor are not the order of the day, they say.

"There are more interesting places in Ukraine where you can get a trip on a boat, or get drunk," Dmytruk said.

TACKY CHERNOBYL T-SHIRTS

Agencies have been offering day-trips to Chernobyl for $250 a couple, including lunch -- but make sure you are over 18, are not a hippie and do not want to make a tour of the souvenir shops before you leave.

Six people have signed up so far -- teachers hoping photographs and first-hand stories would educate their children.

For Dmytruk and colleague Rimma, long-standing workers for Ukraine's Emergencies Ministry in Chernobyl, the idea of tourists having a good time where people perished makes them shudder. They advise a visit to a adventure park instead.

And T-shirts and caps with the Chernobyl name emblazoned on the front seem a little tacky.

"The agencies say we should make T-shirts and caps with Chernobyl written on them, but surely they would be bad luck," said Rimma, a bubbly Russian woman dressed in a U.S. camouflage jacket.

"It's like buying a T-shirt with the name of the Buchenwald concentration camp on it."

She is equally dismissive of an idea by the United Nations to promote eco-tourism. The world body described much of the so-called restricted area as an "extraordinary environmental opportunity" in a report earlier this year.

"The natural environment has returned there," Kalman Mizsei, an official of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) told a news conference in February.

"It is a huge area that is very natural, with lots of wildlife and unique types of animals."

Rimma calls the idea "stupid" and launches into a joke with her colleague, Dmytruk.

"Hippies are not going to be allowed in. They'll want to lie on the grass and then smoke it," Dmytruk laughed, adding seriously that walking in the grounds without permission could be dangerous for those with a more adventurous spirit.

"The law does not stop adult people from visiting -- people who are older than 18 years and who have some kind of interest in this region...The most important thing for this region, is making it safe."

VILLAGE VISITS

But there are those, in tiny hamlets, who would not mind seeing a few new faces banging at their doors.

Seventy-eight-year-old Anastasiya Chikalovets, who was forced to leave her khatta -- a small peasant house -- in 1986 returned to the village a year later. Now 26 people live in the village, once home to more than 1,000.

"This is the place where I was born," says Anastasiya, who is known fondly by those patrolling the controlled area as Baba Nastya or grandma Nastya.

"But it is sad no one comes here and people just leave, mainly for their graves," she laughs heartily, scraping a pig's guts on a wooden bench to make into sausages later.

"Tourists would be fun. Just come."

She says life is better in the village -- a ramshackle collection of tiny cottages empty and often falling down -- than in the flat her and her husband were re-settled to.

"Radiation? What radiation? It was a ploy to get money," says Nastya, wearing a colourful scarf around her head, as she walks off to bring some home-made moonshine.

"I took some meat to market and our pork registered a lower radiation level than that meat which came from Kiev."

Baba Nastya would not be on the tour, Rimma says. Tourists would have to stay on the bus at all times, although they would get the chance to see the deserted town of Pripyat, where thousands will never be allowed home.

Yellow water drips on to the broken tiles of what was the main grocery shop in Pripyat, a town which stands almost in the shadow of rector four. The toilets have been ripped out, the refrigerators stripped bare. A small sign dangles over one of the shelves, saying "Children's Food."

The town, now surrounded by barbed wire and watched by checkpoints, was evacuated after the explosion. Many took what they could, but later others have come and trashed rooms in the search for something valuable.

Tower blocks stand empty. Apartment doors hang on hinges, the odd boot or children's toy lie underneath shards of glass. Mattresses with their springs showing sag in hallways and the wind screams eerily through broken windows and bare lift shafts.

"Now tourists could come here and see the real Chernobyl...Every person who has a child should come here and understand the tragedy. I doubt they will," Rimma sighs.

"Here you can feel the real pain, can't you?"

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