I can honestly say I don’t think I ever expected to write this sentence: I recently spent a day touring Chernobyl. Yes, you read that correctly. I visited the site of the catastrophic nuclear reactor

meltdown. Surprisingly, I’m somewhat behind the trend. In 2016, 40,000 visited the site — there’re a few companies offering daytrips and even three- to five-day overnight stays. The exclusion

zone is about 90 minutes by car from Kiev. Even more visitors are expected in 2017.

I was only 2 years old when the accident occurred, so, admittedly, I didn’t know too much about the incident and all the related fallout. I do plan to cover my experience in depth in a 2018 issue, but I wanted to share some pictures from the day on the blog. In many spots, Mother Nature reclaimed the land, turning former four-lane highways into one-lane passes. It is really amazing to see.

Our daytrip included a visit and a meal in Chernobyl, 30 kilometers from the reactor. We saw the Radar Duga-1, which received signals for Russia about potential U.S. missile attacks during the Cold War. Then we visited Kopachi, a kindergarten where our Geiger counters measured the highest amounts of radiation of the day. More than 30 years later, the counters were beeping incessantly in a place children went the day after the accident. We stood in front of the Chernobyl Power Plant and saw the sarcophagus over reactor No. 4 before wandering through Prypiat, the town built 3 kilometers from the power plant as a place for the employees and their families to live.

Today, it is a ghost town.

— Kimberly Krol, editor in chief