Here we go again. On to new adventures in the zone! In Part V of our Chernobyl tour, we visited the legendary Pripyat Amusement Park and its iconic ferris wheel. From there, we walked through a field of weeds and roses and reached the city's former football stadium. After a short walk through the empty streets of Pripyat, we also discovered the beautiful former public swimmingpool, Azure.

Today, we are leaving Pripyat – but not before we get some awesome rooftop views on the landscape.

Please be Quiet in the Library

Our bus drives up to one of Pripyat's many abandoned apartment buildings. From the outside, there is nothing special about it – it could stand in an other Eastern European town and wouldn't raise any eyebrows. That's the beauty of communism, I suppose.

However, this one used to host a small library on its first floor – which we just entered. There is still a desk and a couple of chairs in the library room, and the floor is full of books and booklets, Soviet newspapers from the 80s (many issues of Pravda) and even a couple of vinyl disks.

I found this one still in its paper cover and pulled it out – it looks absolutely perfect. I bet my liver that this vinyl would still play if someone tried it out. The title on the paper cover is "Zabavnye Skazki" – Funny Tales.

I put it back in the cover before I left.

You can also find some sort of library cards on the floor, which contain the personal details of the people who were borrowing books here, I believe. This one belonged to a woman called Anyuta Markova and according to the nationality field, she was Russian. Fun fact: In Russian, "nationality" refers to ethnicity and not citizenship, and although we are in a Ukrainian town, most people were identified as Russian in the library cards I found here.

Just Checking Out Some Apartments

These post boxes are in a better state than the ones in my own apartment in Minsk.

And up we go. This is going to be a bit of a climb, since we want to get on the roof of this 16 storey building and the elevators have been out of service for a while. Well, in fact the elevators have been removed long ago and the shafts are full of furniture that was taken out of the apartments and thrown down there. I don't have a picture of it, but there was actually a whole piano inside the elevator shaft.

Most apartments are completely empty because all their furniture was purposefully destroyed after the evacuation. Yet, you find the occasional stove or couch in some of them. To my surprise, almost all of the doors to the apartments are still intact, yet no door is locked and you can enter any room you wish. One of the guys in our tour group actually used the toilet in one of the bathrooms.

Personal items are quite rare, but I found these old bottles (no idea what they contained) and a few vials with nail polish in some other room – still sealed!

This is one of my favorite pictures from the Chernobyl Zone. I can very well imagine that these clothespins haven't been touched since their owners left. There is just something human about little things like these.

On Top of the World

Now this is going to be the most amazing part of our whole trip! We have reached the roof of the building, from where we get the most spectacular view on Pripyat and the surrounding area.

We can cleary see the Chernobyl NPP and the new sarcophagus of reactor No. 4 in the distance (the latter was still under construction when these images were taken). It's very hard to make out, but you can actually also see the Duga-1 Radar Array we visited in Part II on the very far horizon as well – secrecy my ass!

Do you notice how some trees are actually almost taller than the houses? It's absolutely crazy. Only on the rooftop you feel like you are in a real city, because every view angle on the ground is covered by a curtain of trees and vegetation. You barely see the houses when you are on the ground.

This is the house right in front of the one we are standing on. The dead and empty windows are quite bone chilling. Here, more than anywhere else in the zone, I became very aware that I am standing in a real ghost town.

This is the view towards the Belarusian border, which is just a bit to the North of Pripyat. I'm not that far from home, actually.

Our Final Destination

It is time to climb down from the roof again and get back in our bus, where we drink a glass of water after all the exhausting excercise we had on the stairs. We leave the houses and trees of Pripyat behind and return to a place we have already glimpsed in Part V – the exploded reactor block No. 4 of the Chernobyl NPP, which threw all the places we have visited so far in eternal slumber when disaster struck it in 1987. We are not allowed to get too close and everyone is strictly advised to wear clothes that cover all parts of the body when we get out of the bus.

Although this is one of the most polluted and radioactive places of the zone, it is also by far the busiest in the whole Exlusion Area. Many workers are going in and out of the gates that lead to the reactor and the new sarcophagus they are working on, which is meant to seal reactor block No. 4 for the coming centuries. We were some of the last tourists who saw the old sarcophagus before it was covered by the new one in 2016.

Here is your's truly yet again near the monument that was errected as a reminder of the Chernobyl tragedy and its victims. I like the dooming clouds on the background, which add to the atmosphere. However, we didn't stay there for more than 10 minutes. Unlike in the rest of the zone, the radiation levels near the reactor are truly dangerous if you are exposed for too long.

There was also this statue near the reactor which was taken out of Pripyat, it is one of my most favorite personal photographs. It used to stand in front of the Pripyat Cinema and was used as a movie studio logo by local film makers. Now it stands near the graveyard of the scientists and personal of the NPP who died on the day of the catastrophe. A very strong symbol which is like the zone itself – beautiful and terrifying at once.

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I hope you stayed with me from Part I up to now and enjoyed the tour! I will follow up with a short post on the whole Chernobyl tour and some astonishing images (this time not my own) tomorrow. Follow me for many other upcoming Eastern European travel blogs and other amazing content and please, resteem this post if you liked it. :)