My name is Elena. You will not find anything for sale on this site. Instead, you will find the truth of the camera for free.
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Biking
I have a motorcycle and the absolute freedom to ride it wherever curiosity and the speed demon takes me. I have ridden all my life and owned many different bikes. I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big Kawasaki Ninja that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips.
I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations is through the so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides without encountering a single car or living soul. The people are gone now and nature is reasserting itself in blooming plants, woods and rippling lakes.
In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now.
Roengens.
To begin our journey, we must learn a little something about radiation. It is really very simple, and the device we use for measuring radiation levels is called a Dosimeter. If you flick it on in Kiev, it will measure about 12-16 microroengen per hour. In a typical city of Russia, America or Europe, it will read 10-12 microroengen per hour. 1,000 microroengens equal one milliroengen and 1,000 milliroengens equal 1 roengen. So one roengen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roengens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach.
This sort of radiation level can not be found in Chernobyl now. In the first days after explosion, some places around the reactor were emitting 3,000-30,000 roengens per hour. The firemen who were sent to put out the reactor fire were fried on the spot by gamma radiation. The remains of the reactor were entombed within an enormous steel and concrete sarcophagus, so it is now relatively safe to travel to the area - as long as we do not step off of the roadway....... and so long as action is taken in the very near future to rebuild the sarcophagus, which is crumbling away.
The map above shows the radiation levels in different parts of the dead zone, which I updated for our local biker club lately. The map will soon be replaced with a more comprehensive one that identifies more features.
It shows various levels of radiation on asphalt - usually on the middle of road - because at edge of the road it is twice as high. If you step 1 meter off the road it is 4 or 5 times higher. Radiation sits on the soil, on the grass, in apples and mushrooms. It is not retained by asphalt, which makes rides through this area possible.
I always go for rides alone, because I do not want anyone to raise dust in front of me. I have never had problems with the dosimeter guys, who man the checkpoints. They are experts, and if they find radiation on you vehicle, they give it a chemical shower, and this eat ya bike. I don't count those couple of times when "experts" tried to invent an excuse to give me a shower, because those had a lot more to do with physical biology than biological physics. next page