When visiting the Allradmesse in Bad Kissingen 2016, we had almost made up our minds to buy the cabin for our truck from Krug Expedition. We had spent 5 years of researching and evaluating numerous cabin builders already and we were convinced that this was exactly what we were looking for. Since KRUG was a ‘no-name’ brand back in 2016 and I could only find one reference customer who we could talk to, we decided to have meeting with them in Bad Kissingen and then visit the KRUG factory in the Ukraine before signing a contract. First I had to get oriented and check GoogleMaps to locate the Ukraine – my old school atlas still showed Kiev as part of the USSR. When doing some research about flights and things to do in the Ukraine, I realized that the Nuclear Disaster Zone of Chernobyl is only about 100 km from the capital of Kiev.

The day of this nuclear catastrophe on April 26, 1986 is still burned into my memory – remembering the geiger counter that we got from our university ticking away, when checking the radiation of our soccer field. I was a student in Germany at the time, living around 2,000 km away from Chernobyl. The explosion of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl brought up radioactive substances to an altitude of 1.5 Kilometer in the air. The wind took the radioactive cloud as far as Scandinavia. During the day of the accident, the direction of the wind changed to westward. The second contaminated cloud thus flew via Poland to Czechoslovakia and further to Austria and Germany. As far as we know today, there is no place in the world where the radioactive clouds from Chernobyl were not present. Contaminated clouds flew all around the world. On TV we saw conflicting news – was it safe drinking milk, or playing soccer outside after the first rain? It was really an eerie time.

Nonetheless I was curious to see this historic site and we combined our KRUG factory visit with some sightseeing in Kiev and a Chernobyl Disaster Zone Tour, as the highlight of the trip.

I never thought of Kiev as a tourist destination, but was pleasantly surprised  with the flair, architecture and laid back atmosphere. Before our visit I started to catch up on Ukrainian history – there are a lot of  interesting sites – like Maidan Square, the center of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution or the byzantine style Saint Volodymyr’s Cathedral.

After spending a day of sightseeing and strolling through Kiev we got picked up by a KRUG driver the next morning in a brand new LandRover to take us to the Krug factory location in Cherkassky, which is a 2 hour drive. We were greeted by Victor, the KRUG founder and a dolmetscher who was translating from Russian to German for us.  I then had to translate from German to English for Emily. We ‘inspected’ the very organized and very clean KRUG factory buildings and looked at a finished cabin on an MAN truck and some cabins that were in the building process. After discussing some details with Victor and Joerg, who was our sales contact, we chatted with some of the engineers who were working on 3D Cad computer drwaings. Most of them are from the nuclear power-plant- and airspace industry. As Victor explained, the economy took a dive after the independence from Russia and due to high unemployment, qualified labor is currently cheap in the Ukraine. We were impressed by some of the 3D cabin samples and the level of detail they could show us on the computer screen. Working with 3D drawings proofed to be an essential tool and ‘lifesaver’ during our cabin build process. KRUG provided us constantly with updated drawings, showing cabin details with measurements from all perspectives, which we had to review and sign off, before the actual construction started.

Victor and Joerg invited us for a nice lunch and after all our numerous questions regarding to the cabin build were answered it was already time for our 200 km return trip back to Kiev. Continue reading “Visiting the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Zone …”