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Published: October 12th 2006
After over 2000 miles, we are now in Ukraine, the place we have been making for. But that doesn't mean that we're ready to stop yet - the country is vast and there is a lot we want to see. At the moment we are in Lviv, a beautiful city with lots of old, elegant buildings. The place we are staying in is called Hotel George, and it's pink. Naturally, this has prompted a stream of Rainbow impressions. The hotel is a huge regency building, with a distinct air of faded grandeur - sweeping staircases, grand entrances, and elaborately decorated, but the rooms aren't expensive or fancy, so we are happy. (Though there is a doorman who put our bikes inside and then tried to charge us 12 dollars (!?) for 'parking' so we took them away again).
To reach here we passed through Slovakia. It is very mountainous and fantastic for cycling. One morning as we were packing up a deer broke out of the woodland near our tent and cantered gracefully across the field through the morning mist. However, Slovakia is not to be recommended as a place for general tourism as the towns are grimly industrial (although the bars are amusing places, old men playing accordions and drunkenly singing folk songs). The roads there proved to be unexpectedly good for cycling, in contrast to our next country, Ukraine, where they are comically bad.
Ukraine has been something of a culture shock. Of course, Poland and Slovakia were hardly the most prosperous of places, but once we crossed the border things changed a lot. Since we were both eager to get to Ukraine, we rolled up to the border far too late one evening, failing to account for the beaurocracy that we would be involved in there. After 40 minutes of waiting, inquiries and much stamping and passport checking we were in. We camped nearby in a field . A border guard soon turned up to see that we were properly documented, then wished us well and left.
The next day was an experience, the first town we came to had horses grazing on the verges, poor old people selling their homegrown produce, and no working cash machine, so we had zero money. We continued on, naively assuming that there would soon be another town. However we were really out in the sticks and the road, which led us through the Carpathian mountains, only went through tiny villages. These seem to be mostly populated by elderly people who live a peasant existence. Old ladies all dressed in solid clothes, wellies and a scarf covering their hair and knotted under the chin. There were people working the land everywhere, backbreaking work, digging, weeding, building haystacks on every piece of land, chopping wood and tending to animals. Cycling isn't considered a pastime here, it's what you do when you want to get to a remote field, so we are regarded with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment. Kids find us hilarious and have been known to clap and cheer us along, or cycle with us and try out their broken English. We are getting used to being stared at intently...
As the mountains receded the towns have become more modern. Whereas at one point we had to get our water for camping from a well (and we're talking about a well with a leaky metal bucket, which you had to wind up with a handle) we are now able to find safer sources. We've even spent a night in a very cheap hotel where we ate borsch soup in the bar downstairs and chatted to a drunk local estate agent in German. At least, probably an estate agent, the clearest he could say was that he sells earth. But mostly we have camped in some stunning locations we have come across. The only problem is, it is now getting dark fairly early, and although the days are sunny the nights are almost freezing. So we end up going to bed really early as it's the only place that we can get warm.
We've only been in Lviv an afternoon so will write more about it another time. Experiences so far suggest that levels of service have reached a new low (the tourist information office is in a gloomy corner of a residential building, and today it was closed), but there's plently to see in this interesting city so we will have a busy few days here. It's not yet an Easyjet destination, but a lot prettier than some places we've been to so far that are, so maybe it will be 'discovered' and colonised by stag parties at some point in the future. As it is we will make the most of the lack of other tourists and do our best to order food without ending up with 'fried brain', which was on offer earlier... Farewell for now.
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Yer Feyther
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Fried brains? Mmmmm...
This sounds really interesting - have a lovely time! Lou's Papa