They gave him only 10 seconds.

"The driver didn't want to do it, he wanted to wind up the windows and floor it through there as quickly as he could," Mr Briton said.

"But they told me that I could get out of the car for 10 seconds, so I grabbed a quick photo."

The red forest is one of the most affected areas within the Chernobyl exclusion zone and is named for the red tinge the trees have, which shows how much they were poisoned.

Chernobyl has experienced a 40 per cent increase in tourism since HBO's Chernobyl aired on televisions, a docu-drama that depicts the events leading up to and the aftermath of the disaster.

The nuclear power plant explosion devastated the village of Chernobyl, along with the city Pripyat and more than 350,000 people were permanently resettled due to the high levels of radiation.

More than 30 people died as a result of radiation exposure related to the power plant's explosion.

While simple curiosity drew Mr Briton to Chernobyl in 2015, he admits that he was a different man leaving the area than what he was going into the nuclear-affected area.

"It's just as significant as 9/11 [September 11] is for the United States," he said.

For Mr Briton, who visited well before there was any idea of a TV show in the works, he said he had always been fascinated by Chernobyl and the Soviet Union, from when he was a child.

He said he was intrigued by their culture and how it differed from his own, and when he saw YouTube documentaries of people inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, he knew he had to get there.

"I think once I'd seen the YouTube videos, I was just so fascinated, I really wanted to go there, but I had a different attitude on the way out than on the way in," he said.

Mr Briton visited Chernobyl for two days and visited the site of the nuclear power plant along with the town of Chernobyl and the city of Pripyat, which is two kilometres from the power plant.

After the disaster, the entire city of Pripyat was abandoned and have not been able to return due to the radiation levels still there 33 years later.

It takes a bit of jumping through hoops to even get into Russia, Mr Briton said there is a common practice for people to only be allowed to visit Russia "on the invitation".

However, this can usually be obtained through a travel agent or accommodation booking.

Mr Briton said it was an "eye-opening" experience, particularly visiting abandoned city Pripyat.

"It's completely silent there, not even any birds or anything," he said.

"But all the structures are still there; they have cranes with chains that are just dangling in mid-air."

He said he felt it important that he visit the site alone, and spend the two days there with only one other tourist, a tour guide and a driver.

They only saw one other tour group once during the whole experience.

While not on the same scale, Mr Briton described his emotions as similar to the ones he experienced when visiting Auschwitz in Poland.

"I was kind of grieved about how much was lost, you could tell that families were torn away from the place they loved," he said.

Chernobyl the town was similar to a small mining town like Pioneer, which was a temporary village to house all of the people who worked at the power plant.

He said visiting Chernobyl made him more aware of the human lives that had been affected by the disaster.

"A lot of the houses and buildings have been ransacked but there are others that still have things in them, just like the stuff that I have in my kitchen," he said.

"But they have just had to pack up and leave."

He said the TV show had done a good job depicting the scale of the disaster and also at recreating some of the more famous places.

"They get the heart right, that heavy feeling you get when you're there," he said.

Mr Briton said he encouraged anyone who was interested in history to visit Chernobyl and said he hoped the spike in tourism would help the country's economy.