My alarm interrupts an unbroken eight hour sleep. Feels more like two. Staggering out of bed, I pick my discarded clothes off the floor, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, then drift through to the tiny kitchen with its faux marble panelling for a wake-up mug of sweet tea. I barely have time to savour the drink before we’re gathering our bags and strolling out the door.

I deliberately travel very light when travelling. I don’t want to spend my time worrying about suitcases going missing, nor dragging unnecessary weight around with me - Danny, for example, brought several huge books with him. I usually make do with just two sets of clothes and plenty of deodorant. I concede that it’s a little unpleasant, but I hate carrying more than one bag whenever I go away (though I make an exception for my tripod in its case). Naturally, I counter this by taking far too much camera gear - and lenses weigh more than socks! I carry every piece of gear my legs can support. More lenses than I’ll ever use; more batteries than my numerous memory cards could make use of; battery chargers for my phone, camera and laptop; card readers (two, in case one breaks); cables for everything under the sun (just in case both card readers break); lens hoods; a variety of cleaning utensils; tripod attachment for my phone (for video recording - I’ve never used it), and a menagerie of other random bits and bobs. The predictable result is that the weight and space saved by hardly taking any clothes is more than compensated for, both in weight and bulk, by a ludicrous mass of camera equipment. I find myself most regretting this approach on long, relentless days with few breaks - days like this one.

I’ll need as much energy as I can get, so I devour my plate of chicken, cucumber and tomato with all the fervour of a sprinter representing his country in the Olympics. After gathering our gear and filing out onto the damp street, we’re greeted by a spectacular sunrise - the nicest I’ve seen for months. The entire group assembles to watch red bleed across a vivid blue sky, bringing life to the day and creating slivers of light on nearby puddles and window panes. Like yesterday, tired looking men and women drift to the train station in almost absolute silence. It’s almost like a funeral procession, even conversation between members of our group is scant; perhaps they’re more serious after the previous 24 hours. I presume the train travels here straight from Chernigov, some 40km due East of Slavutych. It arrives at the platform empty, save for the driver, so it must not stop at any other town or village on the way. We board - I stand - and are soon rattling past miles and miles of cold, quiet swamps and marshes as far as I can see. It’s October, so there are no flowers in bloom, but the landscape beyond my condensation-smeared window is so bleak that I cannot imagine bright colours ever trespassing here. Despite this, the land of northern Ukraine is some of the most fertile in Europe, so the view may look very different during spring.

After arriving at the plant, we take a bumpy bus ride to our first stop of the day: a barren, muddy waste-burial ground 10km east-south-east of the plant, called Buriakivka. It was the principal site used by the Liquidators to bury low-level radioactive waste in 1986, such as buildings, household items and a wide variety of vehicles. There are 30 long, covered ditches in two rows of 15, each roughly 150x50 meters in size and containing 22,000m³ of material. Only one remains empty, the rest appear as grassy mounds in the landscape, and the vehicle graveyard in the south-east corner of the site is where I now find myself. “We only stop five minutes here, this area is very radioactive,” Marek announces through our translator, his sombre face staring at each of us. “When I say five minutes, I mean five minutes. Do not touch anything. When I shout ‘time up’, you run - not walk - back to the bus.” My heart sinks. There are hundreds of vehicles here, all lined up in neat, organised rows across a vast open space. Where do I even start? First I spot the armoured personnel carriers that ferried soldiers around Chernobyl, of the same type used by the first chemical troops to arrive. Next, the bulldozers I’ve seen in documentaries and Igor Kostin’s photos that dug up villages in the exclusion zone - they were too contaminated to save. I race around without pausing to consider composition in my photos, nor even really looking at my subjects for more than a few seconds. I can spend all the time in the world studying them later. Snap, run, snap, run, snap. Endless nondescript, olive-drab trucks, the occasional gutted bus, tankers, trailers, sections of airframes. Fire engines, their red paint almost indistinguishable from the rust. How many of their crews are still breathing? Surprise! Part of an STR-1 remote-controlled Moon vehicle used to push graphite and nuclear fuel off the roof of Unit 4. It’s smaller than I expected, but I am ecstatic to see this, and it’s the only item I pause to look at properly. When I point it out to a fellow photographer nearby, he looks at me, confused - he doesn’t understand the significance and presumably doesn’t even know what he’s looking at; a pile of junk. There’s something almost mythical to me about that roof. It sounds like a legend told around campfires: the radiation was so high that even this robot - designed for use in space, the harshest environment known to man - succumbed, and the desperate sacrifice that followed when humans replaced it. Too soon, time’s up. I haven’t even covered half of the vehicles here. Some distance from me I can see pieces of helicopters nestled among more weird and wonderful pieces of history, but there’s no time to photograph them. One day.

Danny, Katie, Dawid and I are all seasoned urban explorers, with years of experience. I have snuck into and photographed abandoned hospitals, schools, mansions, hotels, castles, various types of mill, power stations, train stations above and below ground, distilleries, churches, entire villages, and - my personal favourite - a once Top Secret, Cold War jet engine testing facility named the National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE) Pyestock, hidden within a forest west of London. Even with all that experience, I have never been anywhere remotely close to the scale of Pripyat. Today we have 6 hours in the city. It’s obvious that, as with all of the best places, there is far too much to see and do, and far too much ground to cover in the time available to us. Upon leaving the bus we head south, straight past countless high-rise residential buildings, brightly coloured wall murals and unusual structures I can’t identify. Buildings I’d ordinarily spend an entire day in are ignored altogether in favour of more interesting targets. Our first stop is Hospital Number 126, where the first stricken operators and firemen were brought on the night of the accident. Akimov, Toptunov, Dyatlov, Perevozchenko, Pravik, each of them spent some time here. I wish I knew which ward they had been admitted to, or if any of their medical records remain amongst the thousands of papers lying scattered in every room. I wouldn’t recognise their names in Cyrillic, even if I saw them. As I approach the hospital, with its pale brown, tiled exterior partially camouflaged by the dry, golden leaves of the trees, I spy a rusting lithotomy stirrup chair sitting alone by the entrance. I always find myself daydreaming about how these things happen. Someone, at some point during the last 25 years, has decided to drag that chair out of a room, down a corridor, through the main lobby, down the steps beyond the doors and dump it here. Why would anybody do that? Little irrelevant details like that always fascinate me. I’m aware that the firemen’s helmets, clothes and boots - still highly radioactive to this day - lie discarded in the pitch black basement, though I deliberately don’t go down to see them. The damp, claustrophobic space is like a maze. Even with my torch I’d probably get lost, and the risk of inhaling poisonous dust - far more harmful than skin exposure - is high. As with everything in Pripyat, the hospital building has been heavily looted by selfish visitors over the years. At first thieves bribed or dodged the soldiers to steal valuable items left behind after the city was evacuated, though some of them later paid the price when their loot was dangerously contaminated. For the last decade or so, many explorers visiting the area out of curiosity have also, sadly, been stealing trinkets that interest them. I understand the temptation. When a piece of history is discarded on the ground, your first instinct is to pick it up and save it, but then you remind yourself that it isn’t yours to take. It is all part of the Chernobyl story - its place is where it lies.