Across valleys and along the coast

I am now in Elista in Russia, on my way to Astrakhan and then Kazakhstan. This blog is really lagging behind so I will try to make it more up to date. But there is a lot to tell and I don´t have a quality internet connection very often. Anyway, here is the story about the Ukrainian river valleys and the coast.

 

As I got tired of the rain and fishless fishing me and my bike headed eastwards through the small town of Verkhovnya and towards the lowlands. Now it was mostly downhill on narrow asphalt roads which were in very poor conditions. The plan was to get out of the mountains in hope of escaping the fog which had engulfed the Carpathians. I had originally planned to go through Romania and Moldova but decided to go around Moldova instead so that I would stay in Ukraine. Why stay in Ukraine? Because I wanted to practice my skills in the Russian language. I could clearly feel an improvement had taken place during the last weeks of cycling in post-soviet countries but I was aware that the Russian language would be much more used in southern Ukraine than in Moldova. 

As I started the descent I could see some fishermen along the river. They were fishing for trout with worms in the muddy water. I asked one of them if he had caught any fish. He replied that he had, but not today. It was always like that in the carpathians, everyone said they had caught fish but this day happened to be an especially bad fishing day. I tried not to think too much about fishing, I wanted to focus on cycling instead. The mountains got smaller and it was downhill most of the way. I passed a small village and asked some  locals for the way. They wondered if I had been to the european championships in football which I had not. It got dark and I had to find a place to set up the tent. Most of the time it is really easy to find a camping spot, you just find some place where there is no buildings and where the tent can´t be seen from the road. This time it was harder, because there was practically no flat ground outside of the road. Only a few meters from the road the terrain was too steep for sleeping.  I biked into a small dirt road which went parallel with the main road and the river. After a few hundred meters and a small hill I found a flat spot. The only thing that made this place less than perfect was that there was a small hut where people probably used to park their cars and drink coffee and have som barbecue. A less than desirable place but it was late and dark and I didn´t feel like dragging the bike a few hundred meters uphill to maybe find a good spot. So I put the tent up on the small path of grass near the hut and went to sleep. I thought that no one would come to this insignificant place in the middle of the night an I fell asleep. But I had mistaken myself. Of course there is no such thing as a path where people don´t walk in the middle of the night. Around 02:45 I heard two voices, a young man and woman were approaching. They probably didn´t have any hostile intentions but were most certainly only the western Ukrainian equivalent of “Lady och Lufsen” taking a little midnight stroll, but without the moonshine. Despite this my system went from rest to full “fight or flight” mode. I heard how the intruders approached and went into the hut where my bike stood. I didn´t know if they had seen the tent yet but I was sure that they had seen the bicycle. I had to act. I threw some attempt at conversation out in the darkness. “Dobryj vecher.” (Good evening)

“Dobryj” the young man replied.

“Ne trogaj velotsiped!” (Don´t touch the bike) I said trying to sound harsh. It worked. I could hear the couple walk away.

The rest of the night I didn´t sleep very much, I was mostly listening for sounds in the dark and painting dreadful scenarios in my head. It had only been one guy and a girl, but what if they would bring ten male friends to hunt down the foreigner? Of course it is a quite unrealistic scenario, but what if? The next day I decided never to set up camp near a path but to instead follow my stealth routines. People always ask me how I can sleep in the forest alone at night. Isn´t it scary? (Strashno) The secret is to put up the tent in a place where it is extremely unlikely anyone would walk or drive. In places where people frequently move you can also very often see that they have littered a lot and of course such paths are also well trodden. So when I follow these guidelines I always feel safe at night. The only time I was compromised during camping was when I broke this simple rule. An other time near Lutsk in western Ukraine I camped in a small forest and had kids and vehicles driving at a path some 30 meters from my camp. They didn´t see me, only a dog approached during the night and I scared him off standing upright in the sleeping bag making some intimidating sounds. So “find a place where people don´t go” is my advice to all those camping alone. Of course another option could be to put up the tent near a house where you have asked the owner. But this makes me feel a lot more unsafe. As long as you are seen you are vulnerable. No one will harm something they can not see. Anyhow, generally the fear among people for camping alone is extremely exaggerated. How often do crazy axe murderers roam the forest looking for innocent campers to kill? And even if they did, they would have a hard time finding me.

The day after I followed the stream on a decent asphalt road and after a few hours the valley plained out. I could see autumn was already getting a hold on the Carpathians. The trees still carried their leaves but they where slightly turning yellow. The air had a smell of autumn. I felt some kind of pity over this. I had left home late in the summer and the consequence of this would be cycling through  autumn ad perhaps even winter. But as I got down to lower terrain autumn didn´t seem to have advanced that far. I met a black stray puppy on the road. He followed me for a while but then went after a cargo truck instead. I kept on trucking down the road and after a few hours  I entered the town Vyzhnytsa. I had an ordinary Ukrainian mealtime at a local restaurant. Some borstjtj and chicken with potatoes I think. After cycling a bit further I was out of the mountains. The terrain was plainer now. Behind me there were already fields and behind them I could see the round foothills of the Carpathians a few kilometers away. The clouds vanished and the sun shone on the road. I passed a monument from “the great patriotic war”. These monuments are everywhere in the post soviet states and usually they are not that interesting but this time I made an exception and took a picture. 

Monument for the Great Patriotic War, Carpathians in the background

 

I went through a small town on a very straight road. Outside the town I took a short break on the side of the road when a man on a horse carriage passed me. “Where are you going?” he asked. “I´m going to Chernivtsy.” I answered. The man insisted on carrying me and my bike on his wagon for a while. I thought that it seemed like fun so why not? So we loaded the bike on the carriage and then went towards Chernivtsy. 

The man told me his name was Ruslan, he was a farmer. He spoke some kind of mix between Ukrainian and Russian and used a lot of the Russian profane slang, “mat”. Ruslan asked me where I was going to sleep. When I told him I planned to sleep in a tent he invited me to stay in his home over night. Ruslan stopped at a local shop and bought us some beer. Then he sat behind the horse, opened the beer and we drove off onto a dirt road. At the dirt road we met his friend Vova who had some problem with his motorcycle. Ruslan wanted to take both the motorbike and my bike on the carriage. I didn´t think it would be possible and I was starting to think this might be bad for the bike. Maybe it was better that I went by bike behind the wagon? Ruslan didn´t approve of that and I was convinced to try it. We got both bikes on the wagon and then all three continued the trip together. Ruslan beat the horse because he thought it was slow and lazy and the horse went faster. We came into a really narrow dirt track which went through a forest. It was a bumpy ride and it was hard to hold onto the wagon. On some occasions the sitting pad broke and once I even fell off the wagon into the mud. It was great fun. We passed the edge of a steep hill and could see a beautiful landscape on our side. Vova told me that there sometimes were landslides here. In spring 2010 several houses were buried in a landslide and some people were severly injured or killed. Vova told me he had rescued some people from underneath the earth. We finally arrived in the village. 

Now it was time for some more beer at the village shop. Then we went to a neighbor of Ruslan and Vova and had some dinner and of course vodka. Later the same night we continued to Ruslans home. His wife was very upset, probably because Ruslan was drunk. She also didn´t like that he had brought a complete stranger to stay in her house. I wasn´t allowed into the house but I got to sleep on the haystack in their barn. The day after Ruslans wife had calmed down and I got some breakfast and coffee. Then Ruslan drove me and my bike with the horse carriage to the asphalt road. Overall this was a good experience, but maybe not so good for the bicycle. I might have to do some painting work on it.

Tank in the centre of Chernivtsy

I went the 25 kilometers to Chernivtsy were I found a hotel. I had to make some contact with Sweden and I stayed there for two nights. The back wheel wasn´t straight so I had to adjust the spokes to straighten it which wasn´t very easy until I figured out how to do it. There wasn´t very much to say about Chernivtsy. People there still mostly spoke Ukrainian which I found somewhat frustrating at times since their English usually was extremely bad.

 

I then went on heading for Odessa. Soon there were more hills. I passed a few villages on a road with many small hills and downhills. In the evening I was invited by a drunk truck driver to stay at his home. I went to his house. It was one of the newer and better built houses I had seen in the villages. The truck driver told me that he hadn´t finished building yet because at the moment he was short on money. His family lived off his truck driving and their apple plantation. The interior of the house was pretty fancy. They even had some fake Greek marble columns. But their toilet was in a small wooden hut on the yard. We had some food and drinks together and the truck driver complained: “we live poorly, not like you in Sweden”. I slept well and the next day after having some breakfast I started cycling further. The roads were pretty tough now. Lots of small hills. This was because all the rivers and streams in the area went from north to south, towards the black sea and I was going towards the east. I passed the river Bug at Novodnistrovsk and had a nice view over their electrical dam station.

The roads into and out of the river basin were steep. I went through the villages Mogilev Podolskiy, Jampil, Vilshanka and Studena. In one of the villages, I think it was in Mogilev Podolskiy, I met another drunk ukrainan guy. He invited me to drink with him. We bought vodka in a local shop but had to hide from the police so they wouldn´t see us drinking on the street. That´s forbidden. He was very suspicious against the police and was convinced that we were followed by KGB. “You see those guys in the car over there, they´re KGB!” Then we went to his friends paint shop were we got some food and some more vodka. But my new found friend was a little bit suspicious towards me. “Are you sure you´re not a Russian spy?” He told me about his service in Afghanistan. “Many of our guys got killed, it was terrible”.

 Between all of these villages there were one or more valleys I had to pass. It was probably the most physically demanding part of the trip so far, but I felt like I could take anything. My body had started to adapt to the workload. And the downhills were pure fun. Between Vilshanka and Studena I cycled on some nice dirt roads and small tracks because there were no real roads. So this was a pleasant part of the trip. I had a nice camping experience in the same area. I put up my tent on a small hill and could at the same time see the sunset, a rainbow and an old airplane flying over the fields. I didn´t catch the airplane on picture, but it was beautiful.

Hiding in the corn fields

"Miru - Mir" Peace to the World, common soviet slogan.

The next days the riding became easier, the roads were almost plain all the way down to Odessa and the last part I had a slight downhill for about 70 kilometers.  I had some interesting encounters with locals here as well. I met some Moldovan Ukrainians who also went by horse carriage on the road. They had just bought some local wine and offered me to taste some.

I passed by at a place where they were bringing in the barley. Here I was invited for some food and coffee by a retired pilot of the soviet air force. I got to meet his young wife and his two sons and we had a look at his pigeons. Some of them he had brought home from Chechnya. I asked him if it wasn´t dangerous to go to Checnya. He said that it was not dangerous there anymore. I wasn´t convinced. There is not so much more to say about the last days before I came to Odessa. In a small village I met some kids in the age around 15-17 years. This was what I had been warned about by a Russian American master chef in the hostel in Vilnius. He had told me that there were lots of teenage gangs roaming the streets of Ukraine and beating up foreigners. The kids didn´t beat me up, instead they

showed me the way towards Odessa.

After a few days of easy cycling I reached Odessa on a sunny day. I was content with achieving my own personal minimum goal of this trip, to reach the black sea. In Odessa I got my Russian visa. I stayed at Lafa hostel with some very friendly and interesting people, Russians as well as Americans, Belgians, Poles and British. I will not delve into detail about Odessa but it is a quite pleasant town, close to the sea and lots of old architecture. The only problem was the weather, almost constant rain. I spent most of the time waiting at the embassy for handing in visa documents and for collecting the visa. The rest of the time was spent on drinking beer, visiting a night club, meeting some street workout people (very impressive boys and girls, I saw one of them doing three sets of 12 muscle ups at a steel bar in the street) trying to find a better GPS device, buying a new sleeping bag and planning the further trip. The most dramatic episode was when me, a French guy and two polacks went to the beach.  It was cold, the season was almost over. Me and the frenchie, Xavier went for a swim. We tried to befriend some beautiful girls from Transnistria. We had a little chat, then they said they had to go study. Then Xavier started dancing to the music that were playing on the beach and injured his foot on some sharp object in the sand. We got some help from medical personell on the beach. Xavier had to go to the hospital. I went with him in an ambulance and we came to Odessa´s soviet looking hospital. The process was quick. The doctors stitched him up. He didn´t have to pay as much as we had feared either.

A frenchie

and a swede. The water was 14 degrees celsius

The polacks didn´t swim

 

After getting my visa for Russia I left Odessa, heading for Crimea. I went along the coast which had some very beautiful views over sandy and muddy bays.

Posing with the great poet Pushkin

 

 After one day of cycling along the rainy coastline I came to Nikolaev where I spent one night in a hotel, then I got in touch with a local guy whose phone number I got from his sister whom I had met in Ivano Frankivsk. His name is Vova and he is an illusionist, working a lot with fire. I slept two nights in his apartment and he and his Estonian room mate, also an illusionist showed me some “magic”. I also got help with finding a new handlebar for the bike. Vova knew a bike shop were they had “butterfly” handle bars and I got one for my bike. I also visited the local zoo. We had some beer at a restaurant overlooking the river. And of course we visited the local pub where we met a local MÖP (Military Overinterested Person). His friend made fun of the fact that Sweden had a tank without a tower (Stridsvagn S). But in general they were nice people. I also got to watch some soviet cartoons “The hedgehog in the fog” and a very beautiful version of “The old man and the sea”. We also visited his mother who treated us with lots of food. The last day Vova followed me for a while with his bike and we went to a “medieval” restaurant some 15 kilometers from Nikolaev.

The bike shop

In soviet Ukraine vacuum cleaner pumps matresses!

Yeah, I know, these are not ukrainian animals but still pretty cool.

At the medieval restaurant they had Another illusionist!

And a very sccary dragon

A truck at a police station

Then I went further and in the evening I reached Kherson. I found a hotel Vova had told me about. The old lady in the reception there still had a lot of soviet mentality. She wouldn´t let me take the bike with me into the hotel. “If my boss sees that I let a bike in I will be punished”. I had to find some other place. I got help from a local bike enthusiast who invited me to his place. He shared his apartment with another guy and we had a really good time even though their living standard was “Spartan” by Swedish measures. What they did have that most Swedish people don´t have was lots of Grape Vine in their yard. The next day I got to see Kherson. The city had some good views over the river and some interesting monuments.

This one goes out to all the "green" truckers out there!

I was convinced to take a night train to Simferopol. My host thought it would be better to save some time because there was nothing interesting on the road. The next night I took the night train to Simferopol which wasn´t too complicated with the bike. You just had to take the front wheel off and wrap the bike in a plastic bag and it was good to go. I arrived in Simferopol the next morning and spent the day trying to hunt down a good GPS device. The problem was that I had bought a Garmin Etrex10, which can´t store maps. I wanted to be able to use Open Street Map so I had to find a better GPS device. After driving around to different shops who only sold GPS devices for cars I got help from a man in a shop who sent me to a guy who traded with handheld GPS units. He didn´t have the model Etrex 20 which I was looking for but he had Dakota 20 which had touch screen but was more expensive. I bought it and the GPS problem was finally sold. With a GPS device it is so much easier to find your way when you enter a city by bike. The next day I met a Ukrainian cyclist who had already spent a week in Crimea and was preparing to leave with train. He accompanied me for a while on my way to Bachchissaray. Now began the most interesting part of the trip so far.
 

When I get to Astrakhan I will give you the story about Crimea and my journey through southern Russia.