The beginning
I do sneak around on the web to find inspiration for another abandoned place to travel to. Just like I did when I planned a trip to the abandoned hospital in Germany back in 2009. This time, it was stunning pictures from a Danish urbex / abandoned homepage which trigged me to go.
If you didn't guess it yet, I wanted to go to Chernobyl in Ukraine. The place that caused incredible contamination in eastern and western Europe, when reactor 4 at the nuclear power plant exploded on 26th of april, 1986.
My picture of reactor 4. The horror place, back in 1986.
May be not the most healty place on earth to visit. But 24 years has passed since the accident and I was more scared to share the plans with my wife, than actually go to Chernobyl....
All these dreams and speculations started one year before the trip took place. That's not an easy task I have to admit, because when I decide to go somewhere I want to leave right away. This is not reality and possible, because my boss thinks that I need to work sometimes too.
I started digging almost every page on the internet that had the word Chernobyl mentioned. This is a huge project I must admit, but I learned a lot by reading and I started to respect the place, like you respect a graveyard. So many died in that area and I learned that if thousands of humans didn't risk their own life back in 1986, the disaster would be bigger than anyone can imagine.
At this point, I convinced my wife that it wasn't dangerous to go there and promising a trip to Paris, helped me convinsing her 
Other family members and friends had their own opinions about my trip, but I really didn't care.
With no problems anymore at home and after using hours to study about my target place, I was ready to ask people to join me on this trip. As always when I have these stupid plans, I share them on www.fotostart.dk - the place where I normally discuss photos and other topics about photographing. Reactions was incredible and so many people were interested to hear more. Most questions was about economy and danger. Very normal questions and exactly what I asked my self one month before.
How do you plan a trip like this?
At this point, we are writing november 2009. Still 8 months before departure. Peoples interest to join is huge, but is kind of a "why plan so long time ahead? interest". Today i'm happy that I started to plan it so early - I felt more prepared than ever to visit a new place. One other user was ready to attend the trip and I contacted one of several tour companies in Ukraine, who arrange these Chernobyl visits.
I knew that others from Denmark attended a tour from the company http://tourkiev.com/ (Solo East Company) just months before my planning started. They were satisfied with their trip and I contacted Solo East Travel by e-mail. I say minutes, and I had the first answer from the company. My speculations about lazy eastern european and vodka drunken former russians was gone. This was the beginning of a truely nice "relationship" with the girls at Solo East Company, by mail of course 
I think they were tired of all my e-mails with questions about everything from power-connectors to weather forecasts. Sometimes I had to ask the same question again before getting an answer, but they always replied instantly. Thanks from me for the customer friendly service. Others in Ukraine could learn from you.
Booked and ready to go
One other user from fotostart.dk was ready to go with me and we booked the 3rd of july 2010 as the Chernobyl trip day. Just two seats were booked in the beginning, because I had no idea how many we would end up with 6 month later. After paying a small fee to Solo East Company, we were ready to find a hotel and airplane tickets. The USD currency was low at this time and we booked the airplane and hotel from an US homepage. My airplane ticket from Aalborg to Kiev and 3 nights at Rus Hotel was apx. $500 which is a very reasonable price if you ask me. Still the $160 for the Chernobyl tour had to be paid, but anyway it was ok.
And now it "exploded" - not the reactor, but the number of people who joined the trip. With-in 5 months, we were 12 people for this trip. Think about it, 12 people going from small Denmark to one of the most contaminated places on earth. I just couldn't belive it, but the tour company was happy and I even asked the price down to $150 per person. All 12 people going with the same airplane from Copenhagen and staying at the same hotel in Kiev. It couldn't be better.
Read much more in part #2
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