Abandoned Kansai

“Which location will be next?”
That’s the question you always deal with when doing urban exploration – what’s next? Living in Japan offers a variety of gorgeous abandoned places as you can see on this blog and others – but when I planned my yearly summer trip back home to Germany it opened a whole new continent to be explored. Well, kind of, since urbex takes quite some time and the purpose of my summer vacations is to catch-up with family and friends. Nevertheless I was looking into some explorable locations, but with the exception of a daytrip I soon realized I had to go on a vacation while on vacation – maybe Berlin and its relics from the Cold War? I looked into possible dates and prices and I soon came to the conclusion that I could go big… should go big. Gunkanjima is without a doubt the most famous abandoned place in Japan – but on a global scale there is nothing even close the Zone Of Alienation, including Pripyat and Chernobyl, famous for and created as a consequence of one of the worst catastrophes in the history of mankind: the nuclear disaster of 1986.
I’ve seen reports on TV about the Zone Of Alienation before and a little research on the internet brought to daylight that you can book tours to Chernobyl via an agency called TourKiev / SoloEast – it’s even easier than booking a flight… All you need to do is select a date, give them your birthday as well as your passport number and pay cash on the morning of the tour. Couldn’t be easier.
Exactly four weeks later I arrived in Kiev on a flight from Frankfurt with Ukraine International Airlines – one of the worst flights I ever had, it felt like straight from the communist 80s… Kiev Airport on the other hand felt like a European version of Africa. I have to admit that before my trip to Ukraine I mainly traveled in Western countries, so after growing up in Germany and living in Japan for four years it was kind of a cultural shock to me. Luckily I booked a taxi via the hostel I stayed at, so at least I had somebody waiting to bring me to the city center of Kiev after it took me more than an hour to go through customs. But while the hostel’s homepage stated that I can pay the taxi driver either directly or via the hostel, in Euro or in the local currency hryvnia of course the driver, who didn’t understand a word of English, didn’t know about that – he wanted hryvnia cash, which I didn’t have. Arriving at the hostel the young lady running the place reluctantly paid the driver and then right away yelled at me for not having any hrynia with me… “Welcome to Ukraine” I thought. (After that rough start we actually had some nice conversations, especially since I unexpectedly ended up at the hostel after I came back from Chernobyl.)
The trip to the Zone Of Alienation went very smoothly and will be the topic of more than a dozen postings in the near future, so I will skip that part for now.
Coming back to Kiev I had to learn that there was no tourist information in Ukraine’s capital, neither in the city center nor at the main train and bus terminal, so my plan to spontaneously get a reasonably priced hotel, maybe even the airport hotel, fell flat. The fact that hardly anybody spoke English didn’t help either (and I thought Japan was bad in that regard…), so I ended up spending another night at the hostel, enjoying a warm summer evening in the city center (where an open air techno party was going on all day) and taking a taxi to the airport at 5am.
Visiting the Zone Of Alienation was by far the most interesting vacation I had in the last ten years and I guess only my first visit to Japan in 1998 had a bigger impression on me. Not a trip I can recommend to everybody, but to me it was just fantastic!
(If you would like to know more about my trip to the Zone Of Alienation please *click here* to get to the “Chernobyl & Pripyat” special. For a map of the area please *click here*.)