Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

We come in smooth, coasting, sliding between stands of reeds, water lapping against the metal sides of the rowboat. A host of dragonflies dances around us. They land on the dented edges of the boat, on the oar handles, on my hands. A little one lands on my nose. As I row, the oars catch on thick colonies of lily pads, rising out of the water ripe and green. They glisten for a moment in the midday sun, then plunge back under with the following stroke.

Sitting on the bow, a young woman gazes out over the water, over an expanse of marshy islands extending in every direction. The air vibrates with a shrill chorus of frogs.

A high beep breaks the reverie. Olena looks down at the device in her hand. It’s a radiation detector. We bought it in Kiev a few days ago.

“It says twenty,” she calls out. “I guess we’re going in the right direction.”

I look down at the tattered photocopy of a map, handed to me onshore by a smiling weekend fisherman. It shows part of the Kiev Sea, a broad, placid reservoir that greets the confluence of the Pripyat and Dnieper Rivers. I’m almost certain we’ve already reached our destination. Here, somewhere among the dragonflies and lily pads, we have crossed a boundary. A border guarded only by coasting herons and warbling frogs.

We have just infiltrated the world’s most radioactive ecosystem.

This is the Exclusion Zone, site of the infamous Chernobyl disaster. A radiological quarantine covering more than a thousand square miles of Ukraine and Belarus, it is largely closed to human activity, even a quarter century after the meltdown. Entry to the zone is forbidden without prior permission, an official escort, and a sheaf of paperwork. A double fence of concrete posts and barbed wire encircles it, and guards man the entrances.

On land, that is. By water, the zone is open for your enjoyment. Or if not exactly open, not so closed that anything stands in the way of an afternoon paddle. All you need is a rowboat and some way to get to Strakholissya, the town closest to where the Pripyat River flows out of the zone. You might not even need your own rowboat. In Strakholissya, after a picnic of strawberries and sandwiches, we met an old woman who let us make off with hers. When we asked her what it would cost, she seemed to take it as a philosophical question. “What would such a thing cost?” she said, refusing the money. We paid her in strawberries.

I keep rowing. The tall grass slides along the side. I warm myself in the sun. This is the rest of the infiltration plan. Only this. To peer at the dragonfly on my nose. To watch a vast thunderhead erupt from beyond the horizon, billowing into the sky.

Years ago, I spent six months in India. I saw any number of exotic sights there, from traditional villages in a remote corner of Rajasthan to the gilt sanctuary of a Buddhist monastery perched like a citadel on the slopes of the Himalayas. I watched as traditional fishermen pulled nets full of writhing fish out of the Arabian Sea for sale right on the beach. I contemplated sacred carvings in thousand‑year‑old Jain temples.

You know. The usual crap.

And then there was Kanpur. Newly awarded the title of India’s Most Polluted City by the national government–which says something in India–it was not an obvious destination. In fact, hardly anybody outside India has ever heard of Kanpur, and few people inside the country would give it a second thought. But I was traveling with an environmentalist, and environmentalists can have unusual sightseeing priorities.

What followed was an intensive, three‑day tour of dysfunctional sewage‑treatment plants, illegal industrial dumps, poisonous tanneries, and feces‑strewn beaches. The crowning moment was our visit to a traditional Hindu bathing festival in which scores of pilgrims dunked themselves in a rank stretch of the sacred–but horribly contaminated–river Ganges, collecting bottles of holy, chromium‑laced water for use back home. All this, and not another tourist in sight.

Inexplicably, Kanpur became the highlight of my entire time in India. Kanpur. I couldn’t account for it. Did I have a thing for industrial waste? Was I just some kind of environmental rubbernecker?

That wasn’t it. In Kanpur, I had found something. Something I hadn’t encountered anywhere else. I couldn’t shake it: the sense of having stumbled into a wholly unexpected place. Of having seen something there, among the effluent pipes and the open latrines. A trace of the future, and of the present. And of something else–something inscrutably, mystifyingly beautiful.

Leaving the country, I looked up Kanpur in my guidebooks to get their take on the place. Nothing. As far as Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide were concerned, Kanpur–a city of millions–was literally not on the map. It was a noxious backwater to be avoided and ignored.

And for any traveler curious enough to find a place like Kanpur interesting, well…there was just no way to find out about it.

One