Maxim, our tour guide, is not having a good day. “Your bag, your bag!” he shouts across the car park. One of my fellow tourists has left a rucksack on the ground.

“You are by the biggest radioactive leak in the world,” he scolds, “and you leave your bag on the soil to pick up dust. If it is contaminated you will have to leave it in the exclusion zone.”

He tails off, momentarily distracted. A Polish couple are sitting on the grass, posing happily for a photo in front of the great rusting hulk of Chernobyl. “Your trousers! Your trousers!”

Click, click, goes the Geiger counter.

Why we should all be going to Chernobyl

The UN is encouraging ecotourism to the former disaster zone to help the area get back on its feet

Twelve of us are here for the Chernobyl tour. Nine Poles, a couple from Kentucky and myself. Maxim assures us that we are safe. “Maybe two or three visitors become contaminated every year,” he says.

“They are always the ones who are most afraid.” Maxim has this theory about radiation, you see. He thinks it’s like children and animals — it gets you only if it knows you’re scared.

On April 26, 1986, one of the four reactors at Chernobyl exploded; 300,000 people were forced from their homes, scores died and thousands more live with the threat of cancer. Many of those came from Pripyat, a town of 50,000 people evacuated a day after the blast and now the main attraction for tourists visiting Chernobyl.

Click, click, click.

Pripyat is what the Apocalypse will look like. Driving down Lenin Street, between rows of tumbling tower blocks, we avoid fallen trees.

The Communist Party headquarters is just visible behind 20 years of forest growth, displaying the logo of an atom. The angular concrete of a restaurant beyond is softened by a small copse on its roof. This is the apocalypse, and the apocalypse is leafy.

On the way into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Maxim explains that it is now a wildlife reservation.

He talks as if this was a positive decision by a benevolent government, rather than the inevitable byproduct of evacuating 3,000sq km of irradiated forest. Nevertheless, there is now a thriving population of wolves and Mongol ponies, and wild boar roam the thoroughfares of Pripyat.

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