![]() ![]() I followed the upward angle of his index finger and saw a series of telephone poles, each of which had a stork nesting atop it. “Lunch,” Igor said, pointing out the side window of the bus. I was keen to avoid seeing myself in this way. As soon as I made it, I felt some discomfort about this joke, with its laddish overtones, as though I were proposing the trip for the laughs or as an exploit in extreme tourism or, worse still, some kind of stunt journalism enterprise combining elements of both. It would, I said, be a kind of anti-stag party: His marriage was ending, and I was dragging him to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for two days. He was also in the midst of a divorce, amicable but nonetheless complex in its practicalities. ![]() ![]() ![]() He was his own boss, for one thing, and he was not short of money (tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist). Of all my friends, I knew that Dylan was most likely to accept at short notice my request for accompaniment on a trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Vika, left, a Chernobyl tour guide and Kim, a visitor from Finland. Some long-fugitive deal, I understood, was now on the verge of lucrative fruition. 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. 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. Vika appeared to be reading the Wikipedia article for “nuclear reactor” on her iPhone. I happened to be sitting up front with Igor and with his young colleague Vika, who was training to become a fully accredited guide. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I was in a minibus, on a highway between Kyiv and the 1,160-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl power plant. This had nothing to do with radiation and everything to do with road safety. We were around a hundred miles from the Zone, and already my thoughts had turned toward death. ![]()
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