The tour is guided so you walk on the safe areas so to speak, around Pripyat the radiation is still pretty high but not life threatening if you only stay for a couple of hours.
We went up to the reactor and the giga reader was going mad, we only stayed for five minutes or so, apparently the workers can only work for two minutes a day in and around the reactor.
This was my first night in Kiev.
Bearing in mind I had slipped a few Ukrainian Vodkas...I was a little worse for wear. I ended up leaving one of the most prestigious night clubs alone...which turned out to be a bad idea. As soon as I left the club, I walked down a badly lit street as I saw a couple of taxis. I walked past two policemen, and bearing in mind corruption is rife in Ukraine I avoided eye contact with them (I had several warnings to avoid eye contact with them before I left for Kiev and when I arrived in Kiev), but they still shouted 'English?' to which I replied yes. They then asked to see my passport...it is against the law for any foreign national to not carry it with them. Once I gave them my passport, they started saying 'Greevna, Greevna', so I gave them half of what was in my wallet (the equivalent to £100). This wasn't enough...so they took my wallet out of my hands and took £100 sterling...so by this point I was £200 down. They forcefully put me in the back of a police car where they drove me to the closest ATM. I refused to give them my pin number so they kicked me in the leg, digged me in the ribs then gave me a couple of slaps (resulted in a black eye). This made them drive me to a small little police station about ten minutes away, not the main station in Kiev. They stuck me in a sizeable room with about 9-10 other Ukrainians who had been arrested that night. They said 'English?', to which I replied 'yes' once again...they took everything I had on me apart from my wallet. That included my camera and some petty change. After about ten minutes, another policeman came back, who I think knew what the other two were doing was illegal, so he took me out of the reprimand room and said to the other two to just get rid of me. So...low and behold they did. They drove me 10 miles outside of Kiev, and dropped me off in an area which has about 150 huge communist tower blocks (a bit like Peckham but ten times worse) on my own, at 5am with no money. I thought this is me, if I don't get beaten up by the local youths the local Mafia would kidnap me and put me up for ransom (I started to become paranoid and began panicking), so I took refuge in a local super market where the workers were completely unaware of what I was doing there. I stood by the entrance...a taxi pulls up. I thought I'll get him to drive me back to Kiev then do a runner, but luckily he spoke broken English and I explained what happened. He said this wasn't an isolated incident and this happens all the time (the average wage in Kiev is $75, so you can see why they reach these lows when Westerners arrive). He dropped me off at the Dnipro Hotel in the heart of Kiev..for the equivalent of 40p. There are some good people in the World. It took me another hour to find my Hostel, but that was own fault for not looking at my surroundings before I left for the night out.
The joys of following the England football team abroad.
