Carpathian corner

I'm now on the final leg of the trip and have passed through the Carpathian mountains on my way to Lvov, where I am now, currently residing in the Stalin-built Hotel Kiev: hot water from 6 - 9am and 6 - 9pm, make up your own bed, steal your own toilet paper. It's not actually that bad, it's in a great central location, just by the opera house and that's the main thing. Although it's true about the water, bed and bog roll...

So to get here... I took the train from Kiev, sharing my compartment with three women who never stopped talking until they fell asleep. Then one of them snored so loudly that people in the next compartment kept banging on the wall to wake her up. She would stop for a couple of seconds and then start again even louder. In the morning she looked as fresh as a daisy while others up and down the carriage were bleary-eyed and quiet.

We had arrived in Kamyanets-Podilsky, a small town on the edge of the mountains not far from the Moldovan border. The reason for coming here was the old town, which is built on a natural rock island formed by a bow in the river. To get there you have to cross a road bridge which lets you see how far down the water / ground is through strategically-placed holes in the footpath where the bridge is crumbling away. For someone who hasn't run since school, I crossed that bridge fairly niftily I can tell you. The town itself was empty and run down. The only people about were wedding groups paying their respects to various churches and monuments. There were plenty at the Polish cathedral - where a statue of the BVM sits on top of a minaret, proof that there was a mosque here long before a church - making lots of noise and then just as quickly they were gone. No wonder the statue of Christ sits with his head in his hands by the gate.

All roads here lead to the castle, which isn't built on the natural fortification, but across another bridge, again, built by the Turks. Here, after queuing behind a man trying to buy tickets for a group - '34 children, 6 students, 5 adults, one with a beard, 3 cows and a chicken please. Oh, and a discount for the unemployed...' - I finally paid my entrance fee and entered what turned out to be one of the best castles I have ever been to. This wasn't just because the walls were high and it was in a - fairly - good state of repair, but because you could go anywhere you liked. I chickened out of the highest walls and the deepest, darkest dungeons, but the Russian kids swarmed everywhere like ants, mindless of the crumbling masonry and slippery steps. I liked the well a great deal. There was no sign, just some steps leading down into a dark, gloomy, chilly underground room. There was a bright light that shone down into the well - hung low enough so that you didn't get the glare from it - so you could see all the way to the water. Having no string or ruler, I had to use the old fashioned schoolboy method of gobbing and then count how long it took to reach the water: 8 seconds. I'm still working out how deep that is, but it's pretty deep. Outside, scores of newlyweds were milling round, having their pictures taken in the rain...

From there I moved to Chernivtsi, a very German-looking town close to the Romanian border and got a room at the Hotel Kiev. This turned out to be something of a mistake as they had plasterers in the rooms on either side of me who started work at seven in a morning and instead of having a tea break to start with like any normal workers, they chose to lump furniture about for half an hour until I was fully awake. This made the day very long as Chernivtsi isn't the most sight-filled city ever. There were plenty of churches to keep me busy and they had a supermarket! With real food!! Oh the joy of being able to inspect food before buying it, of being able to look for ages without some straggle-haired old haridan staring at me like I was going to rob everything, of emerging with my purchases in a Tesco bag for life and seeing the looks of jealousy of all those people carrying cheap purple Sainsbury bags (Someone, somewhere must have hijacked a lorry-load of these as they're everywhere).

Ivano-Frankivsk was my next stop. Here it didn't stop raining for the whole of my visit and I spent a long time in my hotel room watching taxi's trying to run down pedestrians and staring at the back of the Ivan Frank statue. It wasn't long before I got a bus to Lvov and ensconced myself in the Hotel Kiev here. Lviv - L'viv, Lvov or Lwow - is a very pretty town. It was fairly undamaged during the war and as a result possesses a great number of original buildings that make wandering around a treat. I spent two hours in the Lychakivsky cemetary wandering round looking at the tombs and graves of people I had never heard of, while the rain pitter-pattered through the leaves on to my umbrella. It's the greenest, serenest, most calming place I have been to in the whole of the last two months. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the town which, for all it's architectural glory, is clogged with traffic. The worst culprits being the busses and marshrutka vans that carry people from place to place. The amount of fumes they spew out is unbelievable and it makes me realise how much cleaner even somewhere like England is.

So this is possibly the last entry for a while. I will take a bus tomorrow from the bus station here to cross the border into Poland and head for Lublin. I have already stashed any remaining cash and will change the rest of my Hrivna into zloty later today, just in case there's a customs guard with a money-collecting ambition... Six hours on a bus, luxury!

I feel like chicken Kiev tonight...

One of the differences between Russian train travel and that of Ukraine is that, when you wake up on a Ukrainian train, your face isn't covered in feathers from a leaking pillow. So gone are the days of waking up looking like Foghorn Leghorn's mange-ridden older brother. And dreams of eating birds whole. The other big difference is that when you get out of your pit in a morning, you leave the tidying up to someone else. Luxury. I had swapped my lower bunk for the top one as the woman who had originally got the top one couldn't climb up there easily. I don't know why she didn't just change the ticket. Everyone else seems to.

When you buy a ticket in England, you state where and when you want to go, you pay your money, you get a ticket. Job done. In Russia, they have to do it all differently. When you're a Russian, you queue up, dodging from one to another in the vain hope you'll get served sooner than the regulation half hour wait. When you get to the window, you ask for a ticket to where you want to go. You're asked when. You say when. You ask how much, they tell you. You complain it's too expensive. They say, tough, do you want it or not? You say yes. They give you the ticket. You argue again about the price. You pay. You get your ticket. Then you move away from the window and allow the next person in line to get the first half of a carefully rehearsed Russian question said, before butting back in and telling the cashier that she has given you the wrong train / seat / date / price...

Kiev is expensive. I had decided to pick a hotel and not let my jaw drop when they told me how much it was, just to stay where I wanted to. I think it was worth it. I got a double bed - no more falling out in the middle of the night - with a real mattress, so no waking up with a creaky back. The towels in the bathroom all match and the small one is not cut from a worn larger one. The shower is a shower, attached to the wall, with hot water. The toilet is not made from concrete, and neither is the paper. So for the last two nights I have slept like a log and enjoyed my stay, even if it has cost me a fortune.

It would have cost me a lot more if I had fallen for this scam too. I walked out of the hotel on the first morning, freshly arrived from Odessa. I was walking up the road when a twenty-something bloke walked right in front of me, immediately stopped and bent down. As I moved around him, my best 'tut' forming, he stood up and showed me a wad of money - including dollars - held together with a bulldog clip. He asked if it was mine and I said no, then he said that we could share it, '50 - 50' as this was 'an old Russian custom' and it was only fair that I get something. It was when he got the money out for the second time that I realised this was a scam and I started to walk away. Just then another bloke appeared, said something to which I looked blank, and then said to me', 'Do you speak English?' to which I shrugged, looked even blanker and shook my head before walking off. They didn't pursue it, and I have since learned that this is a way of swapping a foreigner's real money for the fake stuff they have. I have been on my guard since then, with the result that a fifty-ish woman stopped me in the street earlier and asked if I could help her. I was just about to stop when I thought better of it, said no, and walked on. Maybe she was genuine, but I didn't hang around to find out.

Kiev has been a whistle-stop tour of the churches and monasteries, and anywhere inside as the weather's been foul. It's a nice city, but big and sprawling and I prefer the smaller places. So tonight, I will board my, hopefully, last overnight train to Kamyanets-Podilsky in the south west at the edge of the Carpathian mountains. This is supposed to be where Ukrainian is spoken as opposed to Russian and it will be nice to see some real hills for a change.

Odessa - and more stroppiness

I decided to stay at the Passage Hotel. From the outside it looked lovely, baroque architecture, lots of statues, filigree ironwork on the balconies, pigeons on the television aerials. The girl on the desk was honest.

'There is no hot water.'

'Do you have a room though?'

'Ýes, but there's still no water.'

'Do I get a discount because there's no hot water?'

'Do you want the room or not?'

It was actually hot enough in the room to fry an egg on the tv (which was, quite frankly, the only thing it could have been used for as there was only a fuzzy black and white picture) and the lack of hot water didn't matter that first day. After rescuing a spider from the bath and flushing the rest of the dead insects down the plughole, I had a shower and then moseyed on out to see what Odessa had to offer.

The first thing it had to offer was a Dutch cafe that did proper breakfast. Omelette! Toast!! Real coffee!!! I thought I'd died and gone to Groningen. Breakfast here became a ritual and set me up for the day and I was very grateful. The cafe was also the scene of a strange incident. As I was downing my second coffee, a man came in: bearded, oldish, dressed in black t-shirt and jeans. A few minutes later he went out. Then he came back in again with a woman. Then they both went out. A few minutes later they came back in again. This time they sat down and ordered. The woman got aq glass of ice into which she pured water from a bottle she had in her bag. The bloke spent the time on the phone. When his soup came, he played with it for a minute, then called the girl over. She removed the soup and returned it shortly after, now steaming. This seemed to satisfy him for a minute. Then he called her over again. Holding up a bread roll - and at one point bouncing it on the table so that she could see it wasn't fresh - he had another go, complaining about the bread. There was also something wrong with his salad but I didn't understand what. Finally, with a wave of an ID card, he called for what I can only assume was the complaints book and spent several minutes writing before signing it off with a big flourish. Then, not yet done, he asked for the phone number of the establishment which was duly brough to him. He phoned the number. The phone behind the bar rang. The girl picked it up. He looked across to see her talking to him on the phone. He lost his rag completely, left his own number and firm instructions that the owner was to call him first thing in the morning and apologise for the poor level of borsch, bread, salad and service. With that he left, the woman followed. I didn't notice when she came in if she was wearing them, but when she left, she had on a pair of black leather strangler's gloves...

Odessa's beaches were not the miles of golden sand I'd heard they were, although I didn't, I must admit, spend the hour on the tram going 5km out of town to find them. I made do with the lightly littered local beach, in the shadow of the container terminal and a direct stopping-off point for Odessa's sewage. No wonder the Russians sunbathe standing up, it's so they can't smell the stink from the water. How anyone could swim in the water is beyond me, but swim they do, without even face masks. Or an ambulance standing by.

Wednesday 1 June was Children's Day and was celebrated by a parade through the town. This consisted of several groups of kids from school or church groups, some older youth dressed in traditional costume, stiltwalkers, a couple of bands (who didn't actually play anything), some thin-as-a-rake bellydancers, four scruffy men on big motorbikes, a pony and trap and... a llama. Everyone made they're way to the front of the Pushkin museum where a stage had been set up and various dances and groups were singing and playing. Instead of watching this, I decided to go and try to buy a phonecard...

What is it with post office staff? On this front, Odessa is as Russian as Volgograd, but even more ignorant. Having failed to buy a card at the main post office, due to a queue of two people, neither of whom seemed to be doing anything except block the window, I went back to the smaller post office I'd used the day before to get stamps. I asked at a window and was pointed along to the next window where two girls sat staring into space. Before I even said anything the girl behind the copunter looked up and just said, loudly, 'No.' I smiled in that I-am-foreign-and-do-not-believe-you way, and asked for the card. This time she almost screamed 'No' and I felt my last thread of patience with the Russians fray. 'Where?' I asked. That brought on a torrent of abuse, containing one word I understood - English. To be spoken like that by anyone is bad enough, but when it's a jobsworth teenager... The thread snapped. Ýou are incredibly f****** rude' was the only thing I could come up with, but I said it loud enough for the whole of the post office to fall into a deathly silence. You could have heard a fly fart. When I looked round, a young bloke was grinning, which made me shrug at him. 'They've finished for the day,' he explained. He then helped me to buy a card from the other two women - one of whom gave the young girl a talking to and got a similar response to the one I'd got - and when I said thank you, both smiled. The card I bought won't work in any phone I have tried it in, neither can I use it at the post office call centre. Ideas for revenge can be sent via the normal channels...

Sevastopolifragilistic...

And so I left the Crimea. I wouldn't have taken the bus but there were problems with the trains on my day of travel so it was easier to go by chara. Sevastopol's bus station is a relatively sedate affair, buses are well marked, and there's lots of signs in the windows of the buses to give you an idea of where they're going. Some even post the times too, although they always wait five minutes extra for stragglers. I sat in the waiting room out of the sun for a while before getting on board my bus. A mid-20s male came in while I was sitting there. He had a white t-shirt on that said 'Lyndsey's Lovely Ladies' on the front. When he went out a few minutes later, I noticed it said 'Amorous Anne' on the back. He didn't look like he was part of a hen night posse, or that he would ever be in the future. Maybe he didn't have a clue what was written on the shirt, or maybe a relative - or even Lyndsey herself - had sent him the shirt as a gift...

So promptly, fifteen minutes late, we left Sevastopol. It took nearly two hours to do the 90km to Simferopol - where we stopped for almost an hour while the driver drank tea and smoked - although I do admit we were delayed slightly by the two old women, one old man and a dog who had decided to herd twenty or so goats across the main road just as we were approaching. It got dark after that and they switched off the dvd player and everyone nodded off. I woke up at five the next morning, a crick in my neck and the knee of the woman next to me in my side, to find that we had already reached Odessa, where we were due in at eight. Luckily it was cool enough for me to walk into the centre, checking the way by asking the street sweepers in my terrible Russian. One man I asked looked puzzled, then asked if I spoke English. I said yes and he smiled, told me which tram to take - the number five - and, as he held up his left hand to make sure I understood, I noticed the top half of his first finger was missing. He was a salvage engineer he said, and had worked all over the Black Sea and Mediterranean. He was due to go to Suez in a month to try to raise a tanker from the bottom of the canal. I wondered how he'd lost the finger. He had been to England only once, he said, a trip that had consisted of sitting for ten hours at Heathrow airport waiting for a flight to Kiev. He watched me walk to the tram stop and waved as a tram came along and I waved back through the dusty back window as I trundled off into the early morning sun.