It’s disconcertingly quiet. Although not yet winter, the famously cold eastern winds are blowing, and it feels like it is. We walk down the middle of the road; there’s no need to worry about traffic in Pripyat.

It’s an unusual tour group of eight made up of three Australians, two Poles, a middle-aged Ukrainian couple, plus our Ukrainian tour leader Natalia. In the days following April 26, 1986, 120,000 people were evacuated from towns surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, the result of the catastrophic nuclear disaster, and Pripyat was the largest of these. Experts believe the town will be uninhabitable for at least 200 years.

Tours now run through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, an area extending 19mi (30km) in every direction from the site of the nuclear reactor. On the two-hour bus drive from Kiev, I attempt light conversation with the Ukrainian husband and wife, but receive only gruff grunts in response. Each to their own, I suppose.

At the entry to the zone, we are handed Geiger counters used to measure radioactivity, a somewhat ominous gesture that I pretend not to be concerned about. The tour follows the very long, very wide gravel road which was the town’s main artery, but Natalia stops us routinely. She leads us off the bus into what always appears to be total jungle, only for an abandoned kindergarten or town hall to eventually emerge.

Soviet propaganda adorns the walls of the town hall, and a statue of Lenin remains, a reminder of the world’s biggest social experiment. A Ferris wheel sits eerily still at the theme park scheduled to open a week after the disaster, a joy-ride never ridden. In a darkly ironic twist, there are multiple piles of unused gas masks, intended for use in the event of a nuclear disaster, at the primary school.