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!