Crossing The Border Into Ukraine

---

In the morning their offsider arrived and she spoke good English, sorted out money and things. I was going to go for a walk around but didn’t get to it, just checked my email. Couldn’t see the big dog that they had, well I assume he was big going by the barking he had been doing last night when I turned up. Before I had left Australia Monica has said to make sure I had some warm clothes and good shoes as it was minus 15 the night before and they had a foot of snow. Well not today… yes it was cold outside but not cold enough for snow.

The train was due to leave Suceava station (“nord”) at 1pm so I was surprised when they said it was a short walk away. Turns out if I had of turned right when I walked out of the station and walked less than a km I would’ve gotten to the hostel. And not paid the stupid taxi driver. Realising I was going to be on the train for a long time and would be hungry by the end, I bought some big pretzel things and a bottle of water from the small shop at the station. And almost missed this train as well, it snuck in to a far “platform” while I was in the toilet. Just got on about a minute before it left, did my trick of “Scuzzi, train?” while showing my ticket to a railway worker, who then walked me over to the train by going through other trains in-between. A pain when you remember I’m climbing up all the stairs from ground level then back down the other side of the train carrying all my gear with me.

Travel tip: Playing “stupid tourist” does work, but just not all the time.

This train is an old school Russian train. Makes sense seeing my travel on the train is just part of its 3 day journey from Sofia to Moscow. The only thing I can read is a sign saying “Russian Train Company”, the rest is all in Cyrillic, you know, with the extra squiggles and things like “Space Invader” aliens. There seems to be two carriage attendants instead of one on this for some reason, some bloke who looks like a drunk, and what you call the stereotypical large Russian woman, a bit like Nurse Doris on “The Simpsons” - “More testicles mean more iron”. Its pretty funny how when you are at the station and the attendants are on the platform they are wearing their uniform, looking all professional, then once the train gets underway they are walking around barefoot in their undies lol.

The booth has 3 Romanian guys in here who are on their way to Moscow for a month, with a friend in the next booth as well. They are all ethnic Hungarians though they were born and breed in Romania. Two are from the same small town in Transylvania, not sure where the others are from. They all speak some English and we are managing to communicate OK. The first thing they said when they found out I was Australia was how much they had loved Steve Irwin. No shit, they loved the guy, started talking about different animals they had seen him catching and talking about. I gave a bit of an explanation about sting rays, and the differences between crocodiles and alligators. In my diary I have a diagram of where in Australia his zoo is, and the barb on a sting ray’s tail.

Currently we are going through Ukrainian border control. These guys got hassled big time first by the Romanian officials who seemed to be concerned about their passports or something and by the laptop Adrian has, and now getting hassled by the Ukrainian border control, who look a bit meaner in military uniforms and weapons. Should’ve seen the surprised look from the Romanian officials when they saw my Australian passport - “Ahh Ost-ra-li-en, you are a long way from home, yes!” Another guard heard that and turned around and asked me if I knew Ian Thorpe lmao. Didn’t tell him that if I did I would be too ashamed to admit it. While they were searching the Romanian guys’ bags I heard something like “pistola” mentioned a few times. Later Adrian told me they get hassled because they do a fair bit of travelling to nearby countries and when the border control see the stamps in their passports they assume they are drug dealers or up to no good. Then another said “I only get up to no good when we get there” and made a rooting action.

The Ukrainian guard was more interested in Newcastle and Sydney than checking to see if my visa was in order. I swear about 6 others came along to see my passport, might have been the first Aussie one they had seen? Now we have a 2 hour wait while they change the under carriage from the rest-of-Europe-wide gauge to the Soviet gauge. It seems this is done by jacking up each carriage like the mechanic does your car, then using some pulley cable on a moving small crane thing to pull the old one out and the new one under, before the carriage is dropped back down. I took a picture of the crane thing out of the window in the corridor and heard someone yell “Hey!!” I turned around to see an angry looking guard with a baton and seemingly gun bulges under his coat pointing at me. “No photo!!” I quickly put my camera away. I hoping they don’t give me drama when they come back about my customs declaration. I ticked “yes” to the Drugs question before realising there was a medication question further down below and putting an arrow down to that. It was a bit confusing… “Yes Mr Angry Looking Ukrainian Border Control Guard, I’m smuggling drugs”. I hope I don’t get in trouble for smuggling in Panadols lol. I also had to put down what currency I had with me, the lady had a bemused look as she read mine when she walked away, I had AUD, AED, Euro, HUF and LEU. Meanwhile I hope I don’t need to go to the toilet as they are “out of service” while the changeover happens. Oh the toilet, you should see it, what a deluxe job that is, I so hope I don’t need to have a shit until I get to the hostel in Kiev. I’ve seen toilets in war movies that looked in much better condition than the toilet in this carriage.

~
No drama with the declaration. No so simple for one of the boys though. Turns out he should've had a transit visa for Ukraine and they weren’t going to let him through. He was kicked off the train and sent back to Bucuresti, the only place in Romania he could obtain a transit visa from. After the undercarriage was changed they came and handed back our passports and did another quick poke in the bags of the Romanian boys. Now the train is stopping and starting, apparently to test the brakes are working after the change over.

~
The boys pulled out a large sports bag and smiled. “Dinner, you come and eat with us”. Turns out they had more than enough food for the four of them and with one having been kicked off, that was for me now. They had everything from roast chicken to olives to potato salad to some weird salsa type thing that wasn’t too bad. And they wouldn’t take no for answer on the food, no the wine was OK though lol. It was obvious they had done this trip before; one of the boys had studied in Moscow for a while. He also said later on in the night they stop and get hookers on board, they do a strip where we were sitting in the cafeteria area and you take them back to the booth for a shag. Sounds pretty sweet to me.

Travel tip: Always take some food to share on a train with you, especially an overnight train. Or alcohol, vodka seems to keep everyone happy in these parts.

After dinner Adrian played a movie on his laptop, some Chinese kung fu movie with Romanian subtitles. Wasn’t too long before I was asleep in the slightly-too-short bed, my head was against the top and my feet flat against the bottom, ended up sleeping with my knees bent up. Not too good for them. When I woke the other two were still sleeping and Adrian was out in the cafeteria with the laptop. Went out there and a chat with him that was fairly typical of young Romanians.

He was rather frustrated about the situation in Romania, wanting to be able to have more of a go at working on forging a successful career. He works as a sales manager for Umbro clothing, bringing home about 800/month, his wife adds in 200/300. Of this 200 goes just on heating, then they have rent, 2 cars to run, all the other expenses. He really wanted to get a business up and running, he had a few ideas but needed some capital to get them started, something he couldn’t save. He must've done some research into and how other countries do things, because he complained that the government there doesn’t do anything like small business incubators like in Australia and western European countries do. The best way to get things in Romania is to be “connected”. He said with Romania joining the EU in 2007 he could move with his wife to another country and work on getting a business running there, but he was Romanian, and wanted to stay in his home and help his country move forward and improve.

---

Comments

[anonymous]

interesting