Chernobyl

The countryside outside Kiev to the north reminds me of nothing more than Thetford Forest, particularly that part just after Mildenhall before you turn off to Go Ape: sandy soil, long straight roads flanked by forestry-commission lattices of fir trees. The road goes ever on and on; there are silver birches planted by the sides of the roads, and then the fields roll, hedgeless, empty of visible labourers and not obviously filled with rows of carefully-weeded crops, to the horizon. The landscape rolls a little - it's not Lincolnshire, if only because there are no huge drainage canals.

After a couple of hours in a minibus, you get to the checkpoint for the First Exclusion Zone; at once the road becomes less well-maintained, and the fields themselves are filled with young silver birches. Twenty more kilometres to the Second Exclusion Zone to pick up a guide and head up to the power plant itself.

Radiation levels are a bit above ambient - three microsieverts an hour at the plant visitor centre, fifteen for a minute or so as the bus drives past a place where it rained at a particularly inopportune time on 26 April 1986. The visitor centre has a fantastic fold-out model of the current state of the plant's interior, as far as it's known - only 60% of the rooms have been explored since the accident, since several of them were hurriedly filled with concrete in the first days of the clean-up without seeing what lay beyond.

What is known, and what the guide described with some terror in her voice, is at least two hundred tons of melted fuel rod mixed with molten rock; at the start of the accident these glowed white hot with nuclear decay, they're now 40 degrees above ambient and the worry is that water can now get in and leach soluble fission products out. The sarcophagus is not watertight; there is a plan to build a huge sealed structure to cover reactor and sarcophagus alike, but the last time I saw that plan the completion date was 2007, and the completion date on the plan on the wall of the visitor's centre is 2012.

The plant sits there under its sarcophagus, square and grey apart from some new yellow steel reinforcing-buttresses which keep the west wall from falling over under the weight of the hastily-installed beams which hold up the hastily-installed roof. The sarcophagus took 206 days of 24-hour work to build, and apparently 90,000 workers: I can't see how they'd fit in, though I imagine all the concrete parts were prefabricated in parallel throughout the Soviet Union, and that an enormous number of workers came in, got their lifetime's permitted radiation dose in a single construction procedure and then left.

There is a never-commissioned fuel storage facility a few kilometres down the road; apparently nobody told the French company building it in the Nineties that Chernobyl's fuel rods were twenty centimetres longer than the standard. You can see the nearly-completed Reactor Five and the start of work at Reactor Six; had all gone to plan and the Soviet Union not fallen, there would be twelve reactors at Chernobyl by now.

Then to Pripyat itself. It's a ghost town, you've seen the documentaries, you've seen the children's play-park rusting away and the secondary school with books discarded on the door, Soviet posters warning you not to swim in unknown waters hanging on the wall, and a copy of a twenty-year-old Pravda browning gently in the corner. It's still pretty striking to see it yourself.

They check you before you leave the Second Exclusion Zone; so for the first time I *know* that my shoes are not radioactive.

Less radioactive parts of Kiev

I have exhausted the cultural sites in my guidebook, though I'm getting the impression that it's not a particularly good guidebook. Sunday was the Sofiya Cathedral, an enormous green-domed edifice with eleventh-century wall paintings and mosaics inside, and a gilded carved-wood altar-screen. Someone in the nineteenth century installed cast-iron floor tiles with alternating motifs of crescent moons and Stars of David; a chance to trample competing religions underfoot rather than an ecumenical measure, I suspect. Some twelfth-century sculptures of dragons very much in Viking knotwork style: the hostel was filled with Scandanavians on Tuesday night, who were very keen to point out that Kievan Rus, and hence Ukraine, was essentially a Viking settlement project. I had a rather expensive steak that evening: Kindzmarauli Georgian wine would I suspect have been more a success than the Georgian wines on which I attempted to hook Cambridge two years back.

Monday took me to the parks along the west side of the Dneipr: the huge monastery complex, with a really striking collection of Ukrainian folk art in primary colours which reminded me of the best sort of Sixties children's-book illustrations, and some amazingly obsessively detailed flower-paintings by Katerina Bilokar, Ukraine's answer to Gauguin. It's about the only part of Kiev which has been recently painted; the walls are white, the roofs and the windowsills are a deep green, the spires are gilded, and the trees are painted white up to chest height. The lower monastery is famous for its mummified saints; these aren't really worth the visit, you get to walk by the light of a guttering candle along a two-foot-wide corridor, at the sides of which sit glass boxes containing sets of robes in which the saints are said to be.

Further along the parks you get to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, with the gardens filled with field-guns, tanks and helicopters. There is an angle from which you see both the sixty-metre titanium statue of Mother Russia with sword and shield, and the ICBM that the museum has on display: a definite sense of 'never again, by whatever means that takes'.

I fell in with the crowd and ended up dancing and drinking until 3am, so Tuesday was distinctly subdued; coffee and a German Breakfast (bacon and eggs; the English Breakfast on offer was porridge with honey; I think the coffee shop needs some cultural consultancy); errands from one side of the city centre to the other to pick up tickets (I got the timing completely wrong; I could have been on the train to Lviv now but am in Kiev another 24 hours), a quick trip to the Marinski palace (blue, shut for renovation until 2010) and the Parliament (grey, glass dome reminiscent of the Reichstag, surrounded by journalists setting up for live pieces for the 7pm news, not open for visits).