Leaving Fortress Europe (Poprad to L'viv)

---

---

We've finally reached Eastern Europe. Robin and I had thought we would spend my birthday in Budapest, but we decided Hungary is too developed and in the EU, so visitable at any time. After meeting another intrepid Scottish Cyclist who was heading here we decided to follow his example and we are now in L'viv!

Ukraine!!!

Everybody in Poland looked at us in horror and said 'ohh Ukraine it is impossible!' when we told them that we were thinking about coming here. I can understand why they have this reaction and I think I would find L'viv very shocking if I just arrived here fresh from the EU/West out of a train or a plane. However we arrived in the best fashion - on bikes!

The cycle across the steppe was a great acclimitisation to this country. Farmland stretches out for all the horizon, but there is plenty that is not being farmed and it is full of wild flowers and insects. We saw a long eared owl on the way here and harriers and many different types of Shrike. The strip farms are full of people gathering hay and ahead appeared a moving haystack - oh, there are two horses pulling it, but at first view the horses were obscured by the size of the hay pile! These horses all have foals running along side as well! This is the traffic on the road together with huge russian army-style trucks and many rattling old Ladas. The occasional blacked-out windowed mercedes rushes past (mafia?), but even they have to stop for the horses and hay!

The road quality is not great, however on the main roads a reasonable pace can be maintained as there is not much traffic and there is a huge hard shoulder/verge suitable for rickety local bikes and horses! Most traffic has loads of room to get round us and if it doesn't it beeps so we can get out of the way on to the wide verges. This is much nicer than in Poland where there were many more cars that scraped past you at speed and expected you to plummet off the atrocious Polish road on to the divet of a verge. At least in the Ukraine the verges are OK for cycling! In fact in many places thay the best place for it as the roads are more potholes than tarmac, and you have to weave all over the place to find a decent line. As every other vehicle also does this it makes for some interesting riding!

The actual approach into L'viv was hectic, we came onto a three lane highway and thought cycling might be a problem- Oh no anything goes just be careful of the mini buses who pull up anywhere to pick up and drop off passengers, and trucks and cars using the inside lane as makeshift car-park. A quick stop to survey the scene revealed the true nature of the L'viv traffic 'system' - nobody gives way or has any priority anywhere, including the trams. Instead it is all one giant game of 'chicken' and whoever pauses or hesitates first looses and has to give way, the same is true for crossing the road as a pedestrian. We adopt a 'no fear' attitude and plough on at high speed regardless of any other traffic or pedestrians, all of whom get out of our way just in time! Ha -ha! Despite this apparent anarchy I have not yet seen a single accident and there are hardly any traffic jams or hold ups, everything manages to keep moving all the time.
Maybe the west can learn something here?

As we got closer to the city cobbles appear and the traffic grinds to almost a halt, we manage to weave through but the cobbles are more like the giant's causeway than a road and at one point the tram lines are 7 inches proud of the rest of the cobbles! We pause to gather our senses after they have been rattled loose by the cycling and realise we haven't got a clue if we are even in the centre, or what the sign for centre looks like in Ukrainain Cyrillic!

Robin quick thinking gets out our cyrillic decoder and writes out the adress of the tourist information centre on a scrap of paper, we then ask "where is' in Polish and poinnt at what he has written. We are very chuffed when this works - people can read it and give us directions!!

We love it here, the simple things like reading the word 'Products' on a shop front is such an achievement that just going about trying to cope with Ukrainain cytrillic is fun! We find the tourist centre, I am not really sure information should be in the name! They are not very helpful to the Polish and German couple who are there before us but we mange to buy a map in cyrillic and latin and set off to the notorious Hotel L'viv!
This is the only recommendation in the lonely planet, not that we have it. I am glad actually beacause having to rely on yourself rather than the guidebook has meant we seem much more able to cope with the craziness of Ukraine than other tourists we have met. Maybe it is the bicycle frame-of-mind to just go slow and observe what the locals are doing; it is much easier than trying to find things like info centres, ticket offices and tram maps -- I am not sure there are any of these things here!!

We pay 90 UAH (10GBP) for a twin room with a sink on the top floor of hotel L'viv - an enormous concrete block in the centre of town, built during the Soviet era with all the grace and majesty of a typical Soviet power station. In fact the building does vibrate quite a lot and I'm not sure that there isn't a power station of some kind in the basement! The lifts are an experience; they rarely stop at exactly the same level as the floor but are fortunately only an inch or two out so far! Despite there being only 7 floors there are buttons for 16 in the lifts, but we are nowhere near brave enough to see what happens if you press 8 or above! The beds are just, and I mean just, long enough for us to fit into them but there is lots of hot water in the single shower for each sex on the floor, the cockroaches are free (OK only one so far) and the floor lady is not too formidable (in true ex-soviet style there is a lady on each floor who apprently cleans and stuff inbetween watching telly all day).
Apparently we could find a room for half the price in a private house or a student halls but we only learnt this later and Hotel L'viv is in the centre and they have a secure room for our bikes.

Starving after missing lunch in trying to cope with the city traffic we hit the streets, (there are pletny of ATMs in L'viv, but we had not seen any before this! Good job we had changed some Polish money at the border.)
We fall straight into a street market full of old ladies in from the countryside selling their garden produce literally on the pavements. Erika is in heaven and we make it back to our room laden with a litre of home made soured double cream, a litre (!) of blackcurrants, 1 kilo of homemade cottage cheese, eggs and various veg incuding some free and unidentified herbs and fire up the camping stove in the room for a feast!.

The bread here is also fanatastic. Very heavy flours and dark filling loaves for about 20 pence - we gorge on egg butties!

L'viv is amazing - the city has so much history and literature, but we know nothing of this without a guidebook. That was until we met a friendly polish guy called Artur who has a website about Ukraine for tourists. He took us on a tour of the sights of L'viv. Lots of churches; it is the first time I have been into an orthodox church and they are beautiful, mind you most of the churches are beautiful here. Even the ones that were neglected in the Soviet era when the museum of Atheism held sway! Most of the churches were turned into bars, shops or warehouses, except for one large orthodox church that became the 'Museum of Aetheism'! On independence it was re-named the Museum of Religion but is now back to a fully functioning and restored church. Many of the other still show signs of (state sponsored?) vandalism and the murals and frescoes have been allowed to fade and/or scraped off. Many of the churches have also changed religions at least once, so you now have catholic style pulpits halfway up the wall of an orthodox church, but with no stairs to it 'cos they dont use pulpits in orthodoxy and have taken the stairs away. such changes of religion have also been the cause of much destruction of the opriginal or former artwork etc. as it changed or defaced to suit the new church. All very interesting. We also learnt that L'viv was really a Polish city, and along with most of Western Ukraine was part of Poland right up until the Second world war. Stalin then got to work changing the population dynamics so that instead of being 65% polish there are now very few poles left here....
We also visit the Armenian church which is only just starting to be restored. I imagine any Armenians here probably suffred a similar fate... The synagogue is a total ruin however.

Apparently UNESCO gave lots of grant money to aid restoration of key historic buildings but "nobody knows where the money goes" and UNESCO then started to put in place the process of withdrwawing the World Heritage Status!

Really that is about it for L'viv, we have been feasting and sleeping, it's been hot and we have been acclimatising to Ukraine. I think we plan to head south and see some castles and other towns before heading to Romania at the border town of Siret.

Robin and I were thinking about how the recent countries compare, I don't know how you figure out which is more prosperous than the other. Between Germany Czech, Slovakia and here the people all look alike, very trendy clothes, mobile phones and all that. However the food here is of better quality than lots in the UK and more affordable. Why do we spend a fortune to eat junk food when wholesome bread and veg can be so good and cheap?

Yes the infrastructure is not here in Ukraine. The rubbish collection and the street maintentance does not really seem apparent.

However Slovakia had the best roads so far since Germany and apparently we were in the poorest part of it (the east) - maybe it was just because there were less cars that the roads were better. Anyway there were buses everywhere, this is much better than Britain! Robin and I have defintiely promised ourselves a trip back to Slovakia as it was cheap and there are so many beautiful national parks and castles to see in a relatively small area.

I supose I had better go back to where the last blog ended and let you all know where we have been so you can keep plotting our route on your maps. We spotted a map of Europe the other day- We are East!! yes :-)

We left Poprad late in the day and visited yet another Tesco Hypermarket - they are taking over!!! They are quite an experience though, nothing like going to Tesco's at home. You can buy everything here and if things got really desperate we reckon we could probably bivvy out for a night in their tent display section! In Krakow they had a team of people on roller blades armed with mobile phones and crash helmets and knee and elbow pads - if the barcode didnt scan properly the cashier phones one of them, waves the item in the air and they then speed off to check the price!!! In Poprad the fish section had massive aquarium tanks with enormous live trout and carp swimming around - fresh fish indeed. Eat your heart out Jamie Oliver.....

Stocked up we headed east then south in fading light to Slovesky Raj (Slovak Paradise) National Park to find a free camp for the night. As the park is famed for its steep gorges a flat campsite was not so easy to find! Next day we cycled through the park on a back road admiring the forests and meadows - Robin was particularly impressed with the wildflower meadows, one of which claims to have 70 something higher plants per 1m squre quadrat. It was at a junction in the woods here that we made the final decision to go towards the Ukraine and so we turned east rather than south towards Hungary. Deciding there is no real need to hide in thw woods in slovakia we camped in a fallow field that night and enjoyed being out in the open with a view fro the tent.

Next morning was wet and so we made a late start to avoid the worst of the weather before stopping at Spissky Hrad - the largest castle in 'Middle Europe' which has celtic origins but has been occupied and expanded by just about everyone since then. A very impressive castle though on top of a terterine (?) hill and we spent hours here looking around and watching gofers running about. Sadly the weather deteriorated again and we got a thorough soaking on the cycle onwards, forcing us to stop early and cheekily camp under a cherry tree in someones farm strip. It was still soaking wet in the morning but we de-camped to a bus shelter for breakfast before seeking refuge in another Tesco's in Presov forcheap internet and a Ukrainian map (which we didn't find). We did get lots of useful info on Ukraine and L'viv and thus armed we left to find the rain had finally stopped and we could at last make some decent progress northeastwards. Some 40km onwards I stopped at a junction to wait for Erika in order to decide our route. She didnt appear. I cycled back to find her pushing her bike along the road and crying as her bottom bracket was half hangin out and her pedals had jammed. We had a cup of tea and some chocolate while deciding what to do. We had spotted a couple of decent looking bike shops in Presov but everyhting was closed as it was Sunday. We walked back into Giraltovce, the last small town - well Erika rode my bike while I ran along pushing her broken one! - and stopped at the bus station. Failing to decipher slovak bus timetables we asked a lady when the next bus to Presov was, she couldnt understand them either but did phone the bus company on her mobile for us! There was one late bus back but we decided it would be better and cheaper to stay near here and get a bus in the morning, hopefully we could also leave our luggage and the good bike behind too if we did this. We checked out Hotel Alfa, the only hotel in town and got a double room with a balcony for about 8GBP!! We had met some locals on the way here who had offered us a drink at it was just as well as Jozef, the english speaker amongst them, helped translate for us at the hotel and arrange for us to leave stuff there in the morning while we went back to Presov. A quick wash and change later and we joined Jozef and co in the bar - again we are overwhelmed by Slovak friendliness as they wont let us pay. We discuss politics and all sorts - Jozef explains that east Slovakia is very corrupt as you are meant to get free health care but in reality you have to pay to see a docter etc. or else wait forever. We explain that we have the same system in Britian only we dont call it corruption, we say it is capitalism which made him laugh a lot. We moved to another bar after visitng his mother as it was her 50th birthday and we were force fed birthday cake in return for singing some Scottish and Welsh songs! The night ended late and we went bak to the hotle to discover we were locked out!!! We refouind Jozef and he then went to another bar to retrieve the night porter who was out drinkiong instead of working! I reckon we were the only guests there, and probably the only guests for some time....
Giraltovce is a great little town and I would recommend hotel alfa as you will certainly have the place to yourself (not that there is any alternative mind...) There are no 'tourist' attractions here at all but if you want to experience small town slovakian life then you wont find a better place than this. In common with most of eastern slovakia the town has a large Roma population and Jozef and his friends confirmed that there is a real divide between the Roma (who they call gypsies, I think in a derogatory manner) and slovaks. Everyone complains about roma being lazy and not working, but then admit that they would never employ them anyway! The Roma are a distinct ethnic group, very dark skinned and dark haired which shows their connections to India. The only Roma we meet are small boys or old men begging outside supermarkets, moslty they just seem to hang around with no purpose othewr then to be scorned by slovaks. We did some Roma women working in Presov as street cleaners but this and cheap manual labour seem to be their only options in life. Maybe now they are EU citizens they can push for more equal rights. We have not seen any traditional, travelling Roma at all, in Slovakia they are all living in state apartments etc. and apparently in some towns there is clear segregation between Roma and slavs/slovaks.

Anyway, we caught a bus abck to Presov with the broken bike and got it fixed very quickly for free, they simply removed the crank and screwed the bottom bracket back in. whethjer this had anything to do woth the crash we will probably never know but all is well with it agasin now anyway. We got a bus back to Giraltovce in time to hear the afternoon broadcast by the public radio over the towns loudspeaker system and then headed north towards the Polish border into the iwnd, but at least it was blowing the rainstorms in the opposite ditrection for once! We passed through Medzilaborce, which is home to an Andy Warhol museum as his parents hailed from this small Slovakian town, which has bizzare statues and 6ft high tins of campells condensed soup on the main street! From here it was up and and up into the Carpathians again and back to the Polish border, before dropping down the other side and following bad polish roads to the town of Lesko. This corbner of Poland looks really nice and the mountians here are meant to look a bit like Scotland but also have wolves - maybe we will return one day. Instead we rush east and find a map of Ukraine in the last own befotre the border, stock up on food and spend our last Polish coins on ice cream before cycling towards the border and the edge of the EU.

A sign in the small village of Kroscienko indicates it is 3km to the border crossing, but just round the next bend we met the end of an enormous queue of polish cars and vans and overladen, beat up ukranian ladas. We cycle past about 2km of waiting cars, most of which are being pushed forward by hand whenever there is any slow forward progress, with thier occupants all standing or sitting around in the road in despair. We arrive at the front of the queue to see an enormous, brand new shiny border complex with massive buildings, fences and lots of fancy automated barriers and lights - truly Fortress Europe and all built with EU/German money as a condition of Poland's recent membership!
A van driver indicates we should go to the soldiers manning the first barrier to try and get through into the queeus beyond. We ask the polish soldier if we can go through and he just says "no". After a few minutes of polite questioning we are told that it is "not possible" to cross here on bicycles. Although we did raise a smile with our arguments about climate change, pollution and Kyoto they were not having it. We then explained that we knew another cyclist had crossed here a few weeks earlier without any such problems - again this was "impossible"!
As the ADF song goes we are 'banging on the walls of Fortress Europe', though not to get in, to get out!!!

We started to make it obvious we were not going away in a hurry and Erika explained how far we had cycled etc. Eventually they relented a little and told us we could cross if we went on a bus. We were not too happy about this but as there was blatantly no buses around and no bus service to or from the border on either side we asked, "OK, where is the bus?"
This totally threw them and various discussions followed between polish and ukranian guards and over the radio. We were hopeful they might let us through after all. Our friendly van driver then appeared and said something to them but he was waved away. They then asked for our passports; Ha-ha progress we thought. After about another 10 minutes of radio calls we are handed them back and told we can go through with the van driver, who is now 2nd in the queue! We put the bikes in the back of his empty van and climb in front just as they open the barrier to let him and the car in front through.
Beyond this is another 2 lanes of cars queued up for the Ukranian immmigration and customs checks. People here are clearly losing it as whenever something moves forward the cars behind tyre-screech about 4 ft forwards to stop people lane-jumping. Our man is clearly a seasoned pro and does a cunning swerve into the tax-free/nothing to declare lane which is totally empty!
Chaos then follows as official after official comes to the van, checks passports and asks to look in the back. The van should technically be empty for him to use this lane but he explains this away in polish to the officials, the only words I understand being 'scottish' and 'cyclists/bicycles'. This is my cue to leap out of the van, cycle helmet & lycra shorts on, and point at the bikes and then myself. This works for about the first 4 times, until a particularly gruff looking official appears at the eindow beside me intent on interrogating me in ukrainian. I turn to the driver, who is trying to answer for me but the soldier waves him to shut up. I say in my best Russian "I am from Scotland" and he then says "Henrik Larsson?" After a second of confusion I smile, give a thumbs up and say "Yes, Henrik Larsson, Celtic" He then smiles broadly, totally changing his character "Glasgow Celtic, Rangers, Henrik Larsson" and wanders off, seemingly completely satisfied with this explanation!!?!
We then complete the immigration cards with then help of our driver, get our first passport stamps of the trip, cross another barrier and are finally inside the Ukraine!! The van takes us further up the road past all the old, 1 room wooden shack checkpoints and manually operated gates to a big shiny petrol station selling ridiculously cheap fuel (c. 30p a litre). Our driver helps us get a good rate of exchange from an illegal money changer - probably the first and last time this will ever happen! - and we shake hands and part company. He goes off to fill up with petrol and we cycle off into no-mans land on our map, but actually the ukrainian countryside full of little villages specialising in cheap booze, fuel and cigarettes.
The road makes Polish ones look good but we are stupidly happy that thanks to another friendly Pole, and also to Henrik Larsson, we did not have to go 100km north to another border crossing, even if we have been forced to 'cheat' and get a lift for all of 1.5km.

We stop at a bar for water and Erika goes in to see the single customer slam his beer glass down as his head also slams down onto the table. We push on to get well clear of the border before camping. Our van driver never does pass us on this, the only road from the border, and we wonder if he really did queue for all that time just for some cheaper fuel? We buy some milk in a bag, learning that in Ukrainian and Russian milk is 'moloko'. While Erika is getting this two old boys question me outside, I have no idea what they are asking but I try to explain in my best Russian that we are from Scotland and have cycled all the way to the great nation of Ukraine. They salute me and shake hands!

We sleep in a field figuring that no-one will mind here. We wake at 3.50am to bright sunshine and wonder if the time/clock is different here before going back to sleep. During breakfast a guy walks past armed with a rake and an enormous scythe but pays no heed to us at all. We also get fly-bys from the Ukrainian air force and their helicopter gunships, which had me diving for cover the first time until we realise we are obviously camped under some training flight path! We then cycle on towards L'viv, discovering along the way that the Ukraine is indeed an hour ahead of Poland and we have had the wrong time for the last day!

No photos I'm afraid as we can't be bothered dealing with the camera just now - when we do we will upload some onto this section so check it again!
Off for some cheap beer and vodka now - the chillie stuff is very nice! It is only about 1.50GBP for a litre of vodka here!

Hope you are all well back in Britain and great to hear from those of you who have e-mailed us. How is the flood of babies in Kendal? Would love to hear any gossip from home and any route suggestions or places we should visit in Romania/Bulgaria.

---

Photos

From the Top of Spisky Hrad
The Largest Medieval Casle in "middle" Europe.

Spisky Hrad
The Largest Castle in Middle Europe

Monument in Central L'viv
great place to sit and people watch.

L'viv Centre
Note the mid street parking.

The imfamous Hotel L'viv
This was home for a while

The Lovely Hotel George
Here you can see the contrasts that exist in L'viv