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THOUGH Chernobyl has entered our vocabulary as a byword for scientific hubris and unnatural catastrophe, the place itself has become a mostly forgotten corner of our shrinking planet, visited only by the most ghoulish of tourists.
The looming 20th anniversary of the nuclear meltdown that made it infamous has seen the world's media cautiously revisiting the dead zone, but for the most part, we are happy to stay out of this cursed place. The radiation that saturates the land is invisible, but Chernobyl itself remains shrouded in rumour and hearsay.
Of all the stories to emerge in the aftermath of the accident be they whispers of government cover-ups or horrific mutants Elena Filatova's has probably travelled both furthest and fastest, which seems appropriate as this self-proclaimed "Gamma Girl" from Ukraine confesses to a love of powerful motorcyles. "Good girls go to heaven, " she writes on her eponymous website. "Bad ones go to hell. And girls on fast bikes go anywhere they want." For Filatova, this apparently meant twowheeled trips into the heart of the dead zone, 130km north of her hometown of Kiev, gunning her black Kawasaki ZZR- 1100 along the long-deserted roads there, weaving in and out of derelict roadblocks and taking pictures of what she saw. Despite the lingering radiation, Filatova believed that if she zoomed in to dangerous areas, then zoomed out again within the supposedly...