As I wandered around the ruins of Prypiat, formerly home to 50,000 souls and now left to decay slowly until its eventual collapse and burial, the words ‘ghost town’ have never seemed so apt. Dressed up against the biting cold, we are 100 km outside Kiev, in an abandoned town which is like a mausoleum of Soviet culture. Five years ago major looting stripped most of the buildings of the possessions that had been left behind here and they now stand empty.

The former inhabitants were workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which is why no-one is particularly keen to live here any more (or for the next two hundred years). Chernobyl was unknown to the rest of the world until, in 1986, reactor number four became the root of the biggest nuclear disaster in history. There is a restricted 30km exclusion zone and only a few hardy souls stay inside. Exploration is an eerie and chilling experience, although not so eerie and chilling as knowing that our bodies are insidiously being invaded by radiation.

After attempting to eat some barely-edible local soup, we meet 77-year-old Maria Shylan. Shyland moved back to the village of Parishev in 1987 after a year away. It was formerly home to 500 people and now just 18. She grows and farms most of her own food and laughingly asks our guide why we aren’t scared of radiation, before offering us a glass of homebrewed moonshine with a raw egg in it. We leave the zone and drive towards the sunset, stopping first at Contamination Control to make sure our clothes won’t glow in the same way as the sun.  

<This whole trip was brought to you by Clerk & Teller and Black Tomato>

C&T recommends:

• Drink: Moonshine provided by Maria
• Vittles: Potatoes / fish / eggs – if you dare
• Songs in our head: Ghost Town – The Specials
• Link: news.bbc.co.uk/
• YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjo43Tk4318
• Reading: What’s On Magazine (www.whatson-kiev.com)