It is easy to imagine wild boar charging through the corridors of the town’s school, where moss and small shrubs are already exploring cracks in the brickwork.

The first textbook I see seems deliberately placed. Photogenic in a shaft of dappled light, it sits next to a standard-issue pupil gas mask — a relic of the Cold War. But then we enter room after room of discarded books and tumbled desks.

Some have been looted, but many classrooms are as they were on the day of the explosion, the blackboards showing the morning’s lesson. Textbooks depict proud Soviet workers heading to their jobs in nuclear plants. Pupil collages display pictures of Lenin. It is both fascinating and poignant. And, suddenly, I feel like a voyeur.

Click.

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

Maxim is keen to correct us when we refer to ourselves as tourists. “I deal with visitors only,” he says. But we are tourists. In the swimming pool someone poses for a photo, pretending to dive into the long-emptied deep end.

When we explore the rusting funfair, a Polish man swings on the collapsing Ferris wheel, knocking down a shower of grimy water. By this stage, Maxim is ignoring our less egregious radioactive excesses.

This is a recent tragedy. The kitsch 1980s wallpaper is still intact on the apartment walls. Pripyat’s roads are still raised above their surroundings, a foot of radioactive topsoil having been removed in a desperate attempt at decontamination.

And the railway bridge across to Chernobyl still bears the load of tourist buses. On the night of the accident the residents of Pripyat went to the bridge to watch.

With uninterrupted views, it provided the best line of sight for viewing the reactor. It also offered an uninterrupted route for the radiation — they were severely exposed. It is now known as the Bridge of Death.

Click, click, click, click.

For something invisible, radiation is strangely charismatic. In the brief time that we spend near the reactor we are unlikely to receive a dangerous dose.

But whenever we pass low branches we make sure that we duck. Before we get into our minibus we stamp the dust off our feet.

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