Rudi Goritschnig (80), who was diagnosed with bowel cancer and terminal liver cancer in 2016, has travelled to every continent and almost every country, including North Korea, Ecuador and Iraq.
And now the intrepid octogenarian has returned to his Gorey home from one of the most epic trips he has ever undertaken.
‘I travelled to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine, including visiting Chernobyl,’ said Mr Goritschnig, who embarked on his adventure after booking the itinerary through Lupine Travel, a UK-based company that also organised his North Korean trip last year.
‘In the Ukraine I stayed in Kiev and then went to Chernobyl for two days. I stayed overnight in the Chernobyl hotel, on the edge of the exclusion danger zone.’
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
On 26 April 1986, the plant’s reactor number four exploded, leading to a huge radioactive fallout.
In the days that followed, the nearby city of Pripyat, which housed thousands of the power plant’s workers and their families, had to be permanently evacuated.
More than 30 years later, the amount of radioactivity has dropped to relatively safe levels and tours regularly take place in the region, although there are dangerous radioactive hotspots in the vicinity.
‘We had to have a prearranged visa and a guide,’ explained Mr Goritschnig, who looked round the abandoned city of Pripyat after the tour bus drove his group through the Red Forest – one of the world’s most contaminated radioactive zones.
‘The city of Pripyat is ginormous and about 50,000 people were evacuated and never returned,’ he said. ‘We saw abandoned supermarkets, sports halls, the abandoned Azure swimming pool and an empty football stadium.
‘We went to Pripyat amusement park too. In 1986 it was brand new and due to be opened in May that year, but then the nuclear explosion happened – the Ferris wheel has never turned.’
The 80-year-old also walked to a distance of 100 metres from the destroyed power plant core.
Today it has a sarcophagus structure and a giant US$1.5 billion ‘safe confinement’ shield covering it, to prevent dangerous radiation leaking out.
‘It is as big as a football stadium,’ he added. ‘We were all given Geiger counters to measure radiation levels nearby and I met an 83-year-old man who always refused to leave Chernobyl. He continues to live in the area with his chickens and he grows his own vegetables.’
Mr Goritschnig, who also visited a Soviet missile launch camp and took a 15-minute underground lift journey to its defunct missile control bunker, said that after he arrived back in Jersey, his doctor told him he had ‘two or three weeks’ left.
‘I’ve got one more trip and God knows where I’m going – it’s the one trip I’m going to do without a map,’ he smiled. ‘But I’m going first-class.’
