The trip I had done 3 years before to Ukraine
had left a lot of blank spots, especially concerning the mountains and some old
towns. ChornoHora seemed a
mysterious place, a foggy land where nothing was clear, with peaks that bore
different names on different maps, no big cities in the immediate neighbourhood, still being so close to the Romanian border.
They splat from MaramuresMountains, another foggy land,
located on the former Romanian - Polish border, then on the Romanian - USSR
border and nowadays on the Romanian - Ukrainean
border. The decision to go there had already been taken while hiking with a
Polish friend in SuhardMountains, just miles from the Maramures. The initial plan was to do the Maramures, then cross into Ukraine
via Rachiv, do the ChornoHora, then cross into Poland
via L'viv / Przemysl and do
the Bieszczady, all in all being supposed to take not
more than 2 weeks, say 20 days. Well, plans never come true and that is the fun
of being alive I guess, otherwise it'd be a loooong and wideeeee
boredom. So, taking things at a time, ValeaViseului / Rachiv was not an
"international" borde3r crossing point on the Ukrainean
side, so I could cross the border there, as a Romanian, but my friend could
not. The only solution was going to Suceava / Chernivcy, some hundreds of kilometers to the east. Quite
upset about this situation, we started. According to the same plan, we were to
go by train to Viseu de Jos,
take the narrow gauge train along the VaserValley
to its end and start hiking from there. Wrong again. After a night's trains riding,
we reached Viseu de Jos on
a chilly and foggy morning. I could not even see the station because of the fog
and the steam coming from the ancient wagons heating system. We got on a chilly
and ancient bus soon filled by peasants, workers and one other backpacker.
Getting off the bus, we started walking towards the narrow gauge railway
station. It was the only narrow gauge still in use in Romania,
partly for tourist purposes, partly for exploiting wood. The train was supposed
to leave Viseu at 07.00, but of course it had left at
06.00 and there were even more pieces of bag news to come:
"Tomorrow it is not going to work, as it is a religious
holiday". The other backpacker from the bus, a German buy, was very happy:
"I have come all the way from Germany
for this train alone" he said and vanished in a cloud of fully explainable
anger.
Life is great and bad news always travel
in couples, one might say. So, we went back to the main road. Sometimes an
unexpected change of plans ends up well. Sometimes not.
But in both situations one gets up with an interesting experience and he/she
ends up drunk. After a brief coffee and after noticing that half of the Pipulation in Viseu was Italian
or had cars with Italian plates, we took a small van to BorsaVillage,
then we started hitch-hiking towards PrislopPass,
where MaramuresMountains started. It did not take
long and a typical 25 years old truck appeared and suddenly stopped. Three boys
were on board, probably none of them being over 16 or having a driving license.
The road went up in very tight and steep curves towards the pass, while they
were driving as if they were part of some rally. The air was filled with a loud
Gipsy music with very funny lyrics. At a certain moment the happy chariot
stopped to give a ride to some cyclists and, as there was no place inside, they
stood on to the back of the truck. To make their ride easier, the driver of the
moment took off one of the speakers and put it on top of the cabin, so that the
whole valley could now listen to the latest hit of John Doe. It is impossible
to describe the way small things like that make up a trip wonderful. Reaching
the pass, we got off the merry truck and started walking along the foothills of
the Maramures Ridge, which was filled with pastures,
sheep and cattle. When reaching FantanaStanchii Hut, opposite the map directions, the man there
showed us the direction we should have followed; we were to dramatically (for
us) find out later that they were both wrong. After following an old trail
(probably unused since the area became so close to the border), we got in the
middle of a delightful and welcoming (but nevertheless shaking and scratching)
sea of juniper bushes. Tall junipers.Dense junipers.Green junipers.Moving junipers. Junipers that made the wind cease and the
sun burn even stronger, making the resine melt and
stick to us. We would make a few steps and then fall, getting up again and, the
very moment we thought we are back to the vertical, we would stumble and fall
again, swallowed by that living mass of the shaking spirit. Eventually, after a
serious struggle to get on a view point, we reached a peak and, with one foot
on a stronger juniper and the other one twisted on a stick, I could see the
future: kilometers of junipers. So we decided to go straight down in the
direction of the Vaser hydrological basin. A couple
of hours later, after covering 100-150 meters, we reached a small stream, which
eased much the going down. We found the military designed trail in the forest.
Sunset was getting close, so we started to look for a camping place. Abandoning
the path, we reached a clearing and we noticed a dim light in the opposite
side. Thinking it was a tent, we went there, to find a truck with strange
plates: neither Romanian, nor Ukrainean, nothing
understandable. The truck full of wood had the lights on, the door was open but
there was nobody in the vicinity. We shouted and made noise, but nothing: it
belonged to wood smugglers. Only when we loudly decided to camp there, three
men appeared, asked us what we were looking for, chatted for a while and
eventually, realizing we were not after them but after a night's sleep, they
showed us to a small hut hidden in the forest and told us we could stay there
until morning and even use their food stock. Then they got on the truck and
left. Thanking them, I realized, not for the first time though, that everybody
in this pit called Earth is human after all and all there is need for is to
know how to talk to people and take people for what they are rather than judge them,
for nobody is perfect. The following day we started again, following the path.
Some hours later we reached an open area, where the ridge was followed by a
grassy stripe cut off across the forest and the junipers: the neutral stripe of
the Romanian - Ukrainean border. Every 200-300 m. or
so there was one pillar on each side of the stripe. On the Romanian side they
were painted in green and white, bearing at their upper end the Romanian flag
painted over the place where the communist coat of arms had once been. On the Ukrainean side the pillars that had once been red were now
painted in green and red, with the new coat of arms of Ukraine
on top, covering the former red star. Either countries
no longer were what they had once been, but we were to soon find out that the
new paint did not entirely cover all that red past in both cases. As the ridge
was covered in junipers, it was only possible (and even there, not a heaven) to
walk on that very neutral stripe and so we did. When we reached IhnitessaPeak,
we stopped for a sip of water and some pictures. Soon we noticed that two
people were coming after us in a quite high speed; they were both dressed in
blue camouflage uniforms: Romanian soldiers. They reached us and took a deep
breath:
"Romanian border police, your documents, please"
Then the story started with things I had already known. It
was forbidden by law that anyone but the border police patrols to walk on the
neutral stripe. We were supposed to keep at least 20 m. from the stripe inside
Romanian territory. Of course we should have, opening new paths through the
junipers and clearing the forest. The answer was simple:
"As walking in the area except for the stripe is not
possible, you shouldn't have come here. There are laws. We only make sure they
are respected. Now you have to join us and you risk a penalty of ROL 1, 000, 000
- 10, 000, 000 (USD 30-300)." They had their side of rightfulness, and we
had ours. Yet our side was not protected by any law, only by the desire to hike
those mountains. So there was a need to backup our case, in order to have one
and not surrender. Blaming it on the map which showed, to our salvation, a
non-existent path on the Romanian side (which we had not even looked for),
playing the innocent and expressing our full respect for the law, we eased the
situation and made them - nice people, after all - a little more comprehensive.
After all, they were the ones carrying guns and not us. The orders they
received from down were clear though: we had to join them to their commander and
later on an inspector would come to see what and how will happen. Oh dear me...
But they were nice enough (thank you, men!) to give us a tour of the ridge
further before going down, also telling us military stories and alot of things about the wild herbs that grow in that area.
In the evening we reached Coman, their headquarters
and also the end of the narrow gauge train we were supposed to have taken the
day before...isn't life strange? Thank God we had not taken that train, for, if
we had taken it, they would have turned us back without having the opportunity
of walking on the ridge and...fighting that sea of
junipers. We camped in front of their building and a middle aged, very smiley
inspector indeed came in the morning and decided in 5 seconds that a warning
was enough. So we could pack and got on the...train that was to make 6 hours
over 50 km., with a steam engine, stopping every now and then from its impressive
10 km./h. speed to take wood or workers, to drop something or to be refilled
with coal. The railway was the only way to those places, with no road along and
therefore it was also used by families that had off-road cars or vans and
modified their wheel system to fit the rails (changing the tires with train
wheels). As there was only one railway, these vehicles had to move one at a
time, so the train had to stop for a few times and wait. It is good to know in
a standardized and globalizing world that some things happen when they can,
without a precise schedule. We finally reached Viseu
and found a guesthouse, as we wanted to depart the following day for Poienile de sub Munte, a village
next to the border in the northern side of the same mountains and a base for
hiking towards Peak Farcau, lying fully in Romania
this time. We spent the evening walking across the town and enjoying a lazy ale in a local pub: the Inn
between Two Rivers, a traditional Romanian controversy: a traditional wooden
building with lots of carvings, bearing local symbols, but raved by a noisy and
totally unsuitable dance music. The following morning we started for the early
and only bus to Poienile, where we first encountered
Mother Russia, as the village had a quite big Russian community, so its name
was also spelled in Russian on the plate by the entrance. The first necessary
step was the "Sector", a mysterious term taken from a James Bond
movie and meaning nothing else but the Headquarters of the Border Police for Poienile de sub Munte Sector.
Taking law much more comprehensively, the people there said that, as far as
they are concerned, we can walk on the border; but they emphasized that this
does not cover the situation where we meet Ukrainean
guards. So we could, unexpectedly, walk from FarcauPeak
to Pip Ivan and further to BistraVillage. They registered our IDs
and we could go. We were given a ride by a sand filled truck and, as there was
no place in the cabin, we had to sit in the sand, with a lot of dust covering
us every time the truck would pass over a bump in the dust road. And then the
lazy hike started on a steep trail through the forest, until we reached a
sheepfold and entered the pasture. An hours later we
reached VarghirisLake, just under FarcauPeak,
where we met a large group of hippy-like, happy Czechs that were bathing. They
were coming from the Pip Ivan alongside the border.
"The only problem was that at a certain moment we saw a
car and we jumped into the forest." We weren't to be that lucky, but we
were to be lucky anyway.
We hiked the peak, which provided impressive views towards
the Maramures and the area
we were coming from, as well as Southern Ukraine; we
could also see HoverlaPeak in Ukraine,
with a black cloud on top. On the very peak there was a cross, just like on
many other peaks. The Czechs had inlayed their names on it and hung a can of Gambrinus beer on it. I do not know why, but it feels much
worse to find something like that, spoiling the place and the local people's
simple, but true belief, than finding a mountain of garbage next to a
frequently used camping place. We came down and went on towards the main ridge
and the border again, reaching it 2 hours later. After a short hike on the
border, we could see the reason for which many people get in trouble up there:
on the Romanian side there was a hardly noticeable path among bushes, high
grass and junipers, while on the Ukrainean side there
was a dust road. While Romanians were probably patrooling
by walking for miles through that forest and among bushes, the Ukraineans were traveling in cars, thanks to good old USSR.
The Ukrainean road was bordered by an electric fence,
no longer in use. Not much later on, we noticed a car on the dust road near MicaMarePeak.
We went a little down on the Romanian side and camped between the bushes as it
was almost dark anyway. The following morning we started along the tricky
Romanian path until it vanished. The border entered the forest now and the
neutral stripe even was hard to be followed because if the muddy and grassy
area filled of nettles and fallen trees. At a certain moment we gave up and
went on the Ukrainean dust road. It felt like heaven,
but not a very lasting one. After having done 2 km. or so, we heard a car and
saw it rapidly coming towards us. We jumped in the forest, ran across the
neutral stripe and immediately hid under a fir tree. A car passed on the road
and stopped a little further up: they were obviously after us and I can hardly
think they were to invite us for lunch, even if it was about 1 PM. A second car soon passed by too. Then we could hear
voices and steps on the stripe. They stopped just meters from the fir tree we
lay behind:
"Can you see anything?"
"No"
The two meters that separated us from the Romanian pillar,
the few moments that separated us from their arrival and that God-given fir tree
sheltering us, as well as the fact that the soldiers respected the law and did
not make even one step in Romania, saved us from a certain fine and a long
deportation via ValeaViseului,
the closest legal border crossing. After their departure, we continued by going
down into Romania and then trying to keep the same altitude, jumping over
fallen trees, falling in mud and cursing bushes or nettles. Eventually we found
a very narrow and not always clear path probably used by sheep following
shepherds, by wolves following sheep and by sheepfold dogs following wolves,
respectively by bears chasing all of the above. The path stubbornly followed
the ridge and the border at 50-100 m. After a slow and painful hike through the
forest, we reached the border again and the - hooray, hooray - pasture: we were
at the bottoms of the PipIvanPeak. To the SW there were some
sheepfolds on the Romanian side and about 200 m. in front of us, also in Romania,
there was a poor and small wooden hut, probably built long ago by the border
guards. As clouds gathered and a storm soon started, washing off our wounds
created by mankind and their useless borders, we chose to stop for the night
there. Soon after the rain started, three young people came speaking Ukrainean. They were backpackers just like us and, when
hearing that they were no longer in Ukraine, they wanted to run away, but
eventually we managed to make them stop, telling them that Romanians will not
bother coming all that way, as their headquarters were far, and anyway not
through that rain. We all settled around a makeshift table and they put on some
food: half a kilo of rice which they boiled and added one tin of beef, mixing
everything with about half a kilo of smashed garlic. I thought I was not able
to eat that, but, after a few sips (or rather gulps) of their vodka, I could
see the whole world from a different perspective. First, one never refuses a
drink from these people, for otherwise they get offended; well, this also
happens in Romania,
what can we do, we are all savage and still live in the Middle
Ages... Then, whether they give you a cup full, half or they only put a few
drops of whatever, you have to drink it all of a sudden, for otherwise they
think you do not like it. And then, when you think "I'm doing well,
keeping my national honour high", they put you
another one. After two rounds or so, we decided to go down to the sheepfold and
get some cheese, which we did and when we returned, the Ukraineans
were standing around a fire.
"How could you set a fire out of those wet pieces of
wood?"
"Only idiots make a fire out of dry wood."
The evening faded out with Ukrainean
songs, vodka and, more than anything else, with a big and mutual cheer meant to
wash off taboo stories and preconceived ideas, as well as the language barrier.
The following day, after breakfast, we splat, as they were
going the way we came (hmmm, lucky people, they could follow the dust road),
while we had a peak to hike. It was very sunny and hot while we hiked along the
path (pretty clear now, as there seemed to have been more hikers interested in
this peak) that cross-crossed the border again. Fortunately, the dust road was
down at 1600 m. and we were in the open, so we could see the "enemy".
An hour and a half later, we got on Pip Ivan, with great views to the area.
Once again, the Hoverla was covered in clouds. We
continued on the border for about 2 hours, on a ridge that was rocky at times
and bushy at other times, looking very deserted and far away from everything.
Just when leaving the border, we met a signpost saying "Attention: state
border". Well, it was a bit late, indeed, but it was still nice they told
us in the end we had hiked on a border. We got off the ridge to the south and,
as I probably chose the wrong valley to go down, what seemed to be a narrow
path in the beginning, soon faded out and we had to fight through fir trees,
going down on a steep slope covered with a slippery dead leaves layer. After
about 2 hours, we reached an abandoned forest workers' hut and a poor dust road
that had not been used for many years. The heat, the vegetation that had grown
on the dust road and the few things reminding that this place was once probably
frequently crossed by people, made Dracula's crappy castle and legend look
silly in comparison to a real and unexpected life experience. One more hour and
we reached "civilization": the border police hut, where we had to be
registered and then we could go. It was getting hotter and hotter as we were
going down. We reached BistraVillage and, after eating or rather
gulping a few apples picked from a tree by the road, we found the railway halt.
The first train that arrive had us on board and we
took it to a bigger station where "fast" trains would stop. We were
lucky that the train to Bucharest was late, so we could get on that, bribe the
conductor, as there was no time to buy tickets and there was no need to make
him go through the painful (and expensive, for us) activity of issuing tickets
on board. We got off the train in Salva at about 10 PM of so and we were supposed to wait there
for 2-3 hours. We soon noticed that we had run short of Romanian money and - of
course - big banks, ATMs and non stop exchange offices (if ever) had not
conquered that remote little village. But people are people and we are all humans,
the railways clerk doing for us what not even the World Bank or the IMF could
not do there and then: changing 10 dollars into lei and allowing us to buy
tickets, get food and beer, nevertheless remaining rich. There is a God after
all. The otherwise small train station - a railway knot - was full of an
international bunch: a French couple going to the painted monasteries in Northern
Moldavia, a Polish guy and a lot of Romanians, probably traveling
to some village nearby or going for the early shift in some nearby factory.
Eventually our train arrived with bad news for the tired hikers, respectively
good news for the sociology fan: it was full of a huge group belonging to a
Catholic organization that was going to Iasi, in North-Eastern Romania.
So, for the first time in a long while, I traveled in a first class wagon,
where we could find spare seats and also settle a small bribe with the
conductor, for we had second class tickets and the official difference to pay
was big enough to require him playing the exchange office. We fell asleep and
only woke up a few minutes before the train stopped in GuraHumorului. We got off and, as it was
about 5 AM or so, we went to sleep on
the benches of the railway station. There was this bodyguard in the station
asking everybody whether they needed advice or directions for their trips, as GuraHumorului is a starting
point for the painted monasteries. It is nice to find out at times there are
people that heartfully care about something,
disregarding of what that something is and disregarding of a material interest
we all seem to be obsessed by these days... When the time got more decent, at
7.30 or so, we moved towards the centre of the town that was slowly moving
towards a new working day. Ignoring official and too expensive guesthouses,
after asking in a few small shops, I found out that there was an old lady in
the area usually renting rooms for the peasants that used to come to the market
place. Getting there, we found the charming lady of the house, which lived together
with her mother, son, daughter-in-law and nephews. She immediately stopped from
whatever she was doing and offered us a coffee with a motto: "life is
bitter anyway, so the least we can have is sweet coffee". Also mentioning
that she asked for EUR 3 for a room, she beat by far any fancy hotel with fake
professional smiles and standard stays. After wandering for a few hours in the
town, after spending the night in that lovely house, we woke up early in the
morning and got a bus to Suceava. Reaching the bus
station in Suceava, we noticed that the bus to Chernivcy was due in a couple of hours, and the
"international ticket office" was closed until 9 AM, so, looking for
a place to eat something looking like breakfast and preferably not still alive,
we incidentally crossed the parking lot next to the market place. Seeing our
backpacks probably, a guy asked whether we were going to Chernivcy.
So we had a small unofficial (and therefore appealing, just like all unofficial
things) van going to Ukraine
in half an hour, at the same price with the bus. So we left the luggage with
him and went to search for food. Eventually, after checking many places which
were all going to open at 10, we found an underground heaven, smelling like
roast chicken served by a fat and cheering old woman. A few minutes later we
were on board of the green van to Ukraine.
A couple of lady smugglers came with two large and kitschy paintings and some
other large packages. This was a good thing to know: there was no kitsch in Ukraine,
so they had to import it from Romania.
And then I wonder, why are all smugglers going on
night trains in winter and on small vans with large packages, women? It is
below men's pride and honour to stand the chilly
weather and the demanding, greedy customs officers, bribing train conductors,
carrying large parcels of God knows what and nevertheless bearing on their
tired faces a shy, nevertheless sad smile telling their full story? I guess so,
but I would rather call it not honour, but cowardness. Apart from the smugglers, there was an old and
elegant lady going to visit some relatives in Chernivcy.
Eventually we departed, making a detour, as one of the smugglers had more
luggage to take from her host. Half an hour later, we reached Siret town, the last Romanian community, where one more
stop meant buying two large bags of concrete. Then we stopped and passed pretty
easily and events free through customs, with no big line or anything. Neither
the Romanian, nor the Ukrainean border police
officers understood where the hell we were going and especially why, but they
both let us be; it is better not to argue with crazy people than to start a
world war because of them; it has happened before and many have died.
Then we entered Ukraine
and headed towards Chernivcy. The Romanian fairly
tale said there are gangs of gangsters and robbers waiting for people to enter Ukraine
so that they can rob them, ask for "entrance" fees and so on. The
international fairy tale said more or less the same about Romania.
Well, I don't know about the Romanian one and am not the right person to
confirm or deny it, but the Romanian one was not true, being probably issued by
people that only travel in their bed, in front of the TV set. We reached Chernivcy in one piece, got some advice referring to how to
get to the mountains from the van driver, dropped our luggage in the bus
station and found out that there was a van going to Kamyanetz-Podilsky
immediately, but there was no seat left. Well, we traveled for 1 and a half
hours snatched between an old lady and a young girl, in a hot and static
atmosphere, as nobody wanted to open a window. Even though the city was pretty
large and there were many inhabitants, the guy from Let's Go Eastern Europe was
true: one could have easily concluded that the German troops had just left the
city. The old quarters were deserted and only a few of the buildings looked
cared about or restored. Most streets looked like after the war, with heaps of
dust, scaffoldings, abandoned working sites and impressive monuments one had to
look for carefully in order to notice them, simply because they were hidden
behind some scaffoldings or demolished / ruined house. The local fortress was
the only place where some restoration works were underdone, even though there
was a funny plate saying "life danger" at the entrance to a wing of
it. The only really refreshed site, also bearing that commercial look old
buildings bear in all tourist places in this world, was the city hall tower.
After enjoying a good beer in the very city hall building (which would have
cost a lot in any other place, but was as cheap as plain water there), we fastly moved towards the bus station, where we had to wait
for half an hour because the bus to Chernivcy was
late. Eventually we got to the city, picked the backpacks and started to walk
towards the centre. We found a travel agency and a half drunk man there gave us
some directions referring to how to get to one of the only two hotels in the
city. yet we were to soon find out there were far more
than two hotels there, i.e. three. We found the hotel, which was a concrete
square and 70s typical building where the good and old double tier price system
was still in use with loud glamours: we paid about
USD 24 for a room which cost Ukraineans USD 15. Chernivcy itself had a quite large old centre with a big
number of good-looking classical buildings, many of which had been restored or
at least repainted. A few late 19th century churches, as well as some
picturesque corners and ancient pavement streets completed the image of a
typical city postcard from the 20s. The city successfully fit southern Ukraine
in the same way L'viv fit south-western Ukraine.
The only problem there was to explain the railway clerk that our passports had
no page with Cyrillic translation, but eventually, with the help of a very nice
man behind us in the line, we succeeded and beat the system. One more stroll
through the city the following evening, on the way to the station, made the
image complete: with an incredibly chaotic traffic (worse than Bucharest, and
that means something), a great background for tourism and a good location (next
to a major road and railway), Chernivcy was just a
step away from prosperity: will and promotion, yet it was waiting for someone
else to make the step and that was wrong. We reached IvanoFrankivsk at the break of dawn. The guidebook said
nothing much, only that the city was a business centre. It might have been, but
it was more than that. With an old centre fully restored a few years ago, neat
terraces and great facades, Frankivsk was simply
lying and waiting for tourists. It was the city that shocked me the most in Ukraine.
Large hotels, well refurbished, fancy restaurants where one could eat a full
meal for less than USD 5-6, cheap beer and good value tourist sights,
everything seemed like prepared for a movie set or getting ready for an
invasion of the Japanese. Yet nothing happened there except for the old
babushkas trying to make a dime by selling vegetables and milk in the market
place, respectively the young drinking to forget or forgetting to drink...
A few hours, we got on the morning train towards Rachiv. Isn't life funny? Just three days ago we were in BistraVillage,
not even 20 km. from Rachiv and we had to go round
for hundreds of kilometers just because of a simple word:
"international" from "international border crossing"...
Well, not that I regret going round. At first I thought it was a mistake that
the train was supposed to make 6 hours over 100 km. or so, yet there was no mistake.
The train never got over 20 km. / hours (if ever reaching that speed), stopping
in any place that seemed to have been once inhabited by sheep or cattle. The train
had open wagons with wooden benches. Fellow passengers included a whole social
bunch, with very different types, from mountaineers to rightfully dressed old
people, fashionable-meant-to-be middle aged provincial ladies or tired people
probably returning home after the night shift. Their faces were telling stories
that kept me reading for hours in that heat that was gluing down my skin to the
wooden bench. Old women, the always surviving type, would come and go at
regular times, offering passengers beer, snacks,
delicious home made honey waffles, apples, donuts or sunflower seeds. A middle
aged man came selling necklaces and bracelets. Then a
couple of young Gypsies with two babies came along. The guy was playing the
harmonica, with all of them singing something in Ukrainean
that made some of the passengers start laughing. The heat got even worse, but I
admit it kind of fit that train and that place, as we were crossing some
desolate plains, where time seemed to have stuck centuries ago, behind the
different rules the land had been subject to (Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian,
German, Sovietic), behind the obvious poverty that
existed there and behind life itself. Somewhere to the back of the wagon a
group of mountaineers were singing while one was playing the guitar. Despite
the discomfort, the heat, the poor train and the slow speed it was moving at, I
would say that the very same reasons made me enjoy the ride. Eventually we
reached Vorochta and noticed that, just like in Romania,
Bulgaria or
other former communist poor countries where things are developing at a very
slow pace, the tourism industry was organized - if ever - very chaotically or
rather it was not working at all. Vorochta was a very
convenient place to start to the highest peak in the ChornoHora. Just off the railway station, apart from the
people trying to make a living out of selling everything and nothing, there
were makeshift taxi drivers offering rides to the base of the hiking paths but,
of course, there seemed to be no regular vans or buses or oxen pulled
carriages. In a quite poor area where infrastructure - if one could have called
it like that - was old and hardly providing a way to go and where tourism was
probably one of the few sources of income, this was an unpleasant impression
for the first timer in Ukraine
aiming at the country's highest peak. Thank God I was coming from a country
where things were the same and even worse in some cases. Not agreeing to pay
about USD 10 for a ride, we started hiking but were soon given a ride by a
small van which dropped us by the entrance to the National Park. Rules to obey:
camping was supposedly forbidden in the National Park, we could not overstay
the 4 days we had paid for and on the ridge there was no hut. Fair enough, the ChornoHoras seemed just as
restricted like the Alps, but - as always - what is
written is not always what happens in the real world. Besides, we entered the
park through the only place where one would pay such a fee for entering. The
lady told us however that just after passing by the highest peak there would be
a meteorological hut where we could fiund
accommodation. As there were some grey clouds moving fast towards us, we
decided to camp at the entrance to the park. When settling down, some young Ukraineans from a nearby tent came and very happily invited
us for a drink. They were a very hospitable people and that made traveling much
more pleasant. The evening ended with a camp fire, a lot of beer and ad-hoc
burnt pork fat.
The following morning we started towards the peak and were
lucky enough to be given a ride inside the park by a couple from Kiev.
They were also going to the peak. The path was well beaten and there were many
people going to this Ukrainean Mecca, groups of
children, youngsters, old people, many of which wore tennis shoes, slippers,
regular street shoes... The peak was a wide flat area with a stone pillar
covered in graffittis and a monument in memory of the
Ukrainean state independence from the former USSR.
A few minutes later we had to start further, as the wind got pretty strong and
a heavy rain started too. Even worse, a thick layer of fog covered the ridge so
that one could not see more than 10-15 meters in front. Thinking of the
"meteorological hut on the second peak after the Hoverla",
we went on and made some Poles.
"We made 3 days from the Pop Ivan here"
That sounded a bit too long, but the weather conditions were
reason enough. After 3 hours of hiking (or rather surfing) through the weather
and - of course - no trace of any hut, we heard some voices to the left and
found a small lake and a tent. We camped there, cooked something and soon
another group of 3 arrived and settled next to us. They were coming from PopIvanPeak
and they had started that very day. In exchange for the food we had cooked,
they offered some vodka and we chatted until night fell. I enjoyed very much
this sharing of things and their generosity. The next day the weather was
beautiful and we could see the landscape around us. The ridge was pleasant,
being covered in grass and a few rocks at times, while the area, surrounded by
lower wooden mountains, was quite picturesque. After noticing that we were
among the few going to Pop Ivan instead of coming from there, we reached the
peak about 4 hours later. Before being overtaken - together with the whole area
- by the USSR,
the peak and the whole ridge had been on the Czechoslovakian - Polish border
and the Poles had built an astronomical observer on the very peak in 1936-1938.
Just a few years later, the Red Army came and destroyed the huge building, as
well as all of its equipment. Nowadays the stone walls remained like the ruins
of a medieval castle, fitting a Dracula story much better than the crap people
go to visit in Bran, Transylvania (and which has to do
with the Dracula story as much as that building on the Pop Ivan has). There
were a lot of people, Ukraineans, Russians and Poles
on the peak. We had to start going down and so we did, passing by the ruins of
a former Polish hut. After meeting a lot of tents in the area, it was obvious
that most of the people were going up from this side because there was no
entrance fee to be paid. About 2-3 hours later we reached Dzhembronia,
a small village with most houses spread on the hills in the neighbourhood
and a lovely and remote atmosphere. There was only one bus to the outside world
a day that that was going at 7 AM in the morning. There was one shop with cheap
beer, one church and that was about it. The following morning we got on the bus
together with a large Polish group and some local people that could hardly get
on the bus because of the backpacks. The way out of the village was lovely,
with small communities of 1-2 hours gathered in narrow clearings along the
valley and people dressed up in traditional outfits. Finally we reached Vichodnia and got on another bus to IvanoFrankivsk again. Ukraine
had been very welcoming so far and better was to come. On that bus, being quite
close to L'viv and further to Poland,
the idea called Crimea emerged. So, just hazardously we
asked whether there were tickets for Simferopol
and, strangely, there still were, via L'viv. So we
went. The ride took 7 hours to L'viv, one hour wait
there and then 25 hours to Simferopol,
all in platzkartni wagons, and all costing about USD
12 per person. On the way from L'viv to Simferopol we got our beds next to
an Ukrainean old lady and her daughter. They were
both coming from a village just north of the Romanian border and were heading
to Crimea as well. They were basket manufacturers and
they were going to Crimea to sell their products. The
very nice old lady offerred us some delicious hen
roast, filled with polenta mixed with vegetables, as well as home made brandy
and the ride seemed much shorter. Not everything was pink for her family
though, as she did not have enough money and therefore her daughter could not
go to university. Trying to kill the rage stirred by this situation, we reached
Simferopol,
the most busy railway station I had been to with thousands of people and their
luggage waiting for trains which were coming and going every minute to many
destinations in the former USSR
and some East European countries. As warned by the old lady on the train, the
first thing to do was to get return tickets.
"No tickets to L'viv until
the end of the month" (which meant more than 2 weeks ahead)
"Kyiv?"
"No"
"Ternopil?"
"No"
"Chernivcy
maybe?"
"No way either, all trains are
sold out"
Well, that called for an emergency pull, so we went to the
"Service Centre" I had previously used in Moscow
and 20 minutes later, when we got in front of the tired lady there, we
approached her differently:
"To what destination do you have tickets this week?"
"Well, there are still a couple of tickets to Riga"
"Good, and what route does it follow?"
"Kyiv"
"OK, two tickets to Kyiv then"
The tickets were more expensive (USD 16 per person), as the
train was a charter of the Estonian railways. After a victory scream that made
some people (probably not as lucky as we were) angrily look at us, we dropped
the heavy backpacks in the station and got on a train to Balchihsaray:
we had 4 days to spend in Crimea.
Four days which would be some memorable
ones. We started by an electrichna train to Balchihsaray, where a Tatar palace was located. Crossing
the dry and desert - like hills of south-western Crimea,
the picture was not very appealing to me, especially when we got to this town.
A small station, a few kiosks and cafes that had a lovely interbellum
look, a few old vans going to Simferopol, Sevastopol
or to some village in the neighbourhood and nothing
much else. We took a bus to the local monastery, which once was the harbinger
of Orthodox religion in the whole area. The monastery had been founded in some
caves located in the dry limestone rocks, beautifully being surrounded by pine
covered hills. It was not too big or overwhelming, but it had a special appeal
of its own. Further up the valley there was the "Fortress of the
Jews", a partly natural fortress consisting of a wide limestone plateau
pierced of caves, having absolutely no water and a torrid summer sun dying
one's blood out. Back to the town, we visited Khan's Palace. Its simple lines,
pleasant interiors and beautiful garden were a nice
refreshment after the Fortress of Draught. Going back to the station, I saw the
places from a different perspective and I could not ignore the town, which
attracted me even more than the sightseeing places it hosted. There were so
many old and nevertheless small buildings, a few God forgotten terraces with
old people watching draught fading the day away, the smell of the shashlik in the air and a few tourists, generally Polish or
Russian, every now and then.
Eventually we started towards Sevastopol
by a small van. On the way, while talking about the differences between the
language areas in Ukraine, we almost started WW4 (because WW3 was already on
the way), as an old man which obviously did not understand Romanian, told us
very sharply that we should not mock at Russian, because it is the most
beautiful language in the world. Well, those building up monopolistic groups of
multiethnic and multicultural groups, on the "we are the best, fuck the
rest" principle had had no idea of the great damage their theories would
have over people's minds. We reached Sevastopol
ironically being called "strantzi" by the
old man and some other fellow-travelers. We got off the van and were approached
by an old man holding a piece of cardboard on which there was written "komnata u mor";
he asked whether we needed accommodation and we did. He said that his place was 10 minutes from
that place by bus, while the price was USD 8 for a double room. However the
location was about 30 minutes from there by bus, on the 9th floor of a concrete
block. We regretted in the first place, but eventually accepted and even
enjoyed the experience afterwards. When one says Sevastopol, he / she thinks of
the military harbour, of the history book, of Crimea,
but not about the way people live or about the fact that Crimea could be just
as block filled as Bucharest or Moscow. Our host, that old man and his family
(5-6 persons) lived in a 3 rooms apartment just as
badly conceived and maintained as the ones back home, in Bucharest,
but they played very nice hosts. Later that evening, sitting on a terrace close
to the "komnata" and trying to figure out
the menu, two young people approached us in Romanian: they were from Chisinau, Republic
of Moldova and they were here on
holidays. They gave us some useful advice on the things to see in Sevastopol,
as well as a warning: "Yalta
is going to cost you a lot of money". We chatted for a while and went home
late at night. The following day, after a half an hour search, we finally got
an old lady to give us directions towards Hersones,
the ruins of the old Greek colony. On the way there, a couple of middle aged Ukraineans showed us a hole in the wall surrounding the old
city and we followed them, saving the 6 hryvnas for
the entrance tickets. Only foreigners used the main gate, while a line of
locals did the same with us. The ruins of the Greek city were not either very
well preserved or very well commercialized, but that was the very image of the Ukrainean tourism industry, with a very few exceptions we
were to witness the days to come. However the city had its nice buildings and
fine terraces along the quay. The time to leave arrived and we moved on towards
Yalta.
Things took a dramatic change soon: the coast was very picturesque
and the resorts, as well as the road, had nothing to do with my previous
experience in Ukraine.
Crimea fully deserved its self-promoted
"autonomous" feature. The only disappointment in Yalta were the
concrete blocks which spoiled the nice scenery, but everything else was simply
impressive, starting with the fine hotels and restaurants on the sea quay and
ending with the long and so pleasant palm trees-lined promenade along the
beach. However people were still poor and the resort and therefore the resort
provided places and offers for all pockets, as we found a room at an old lady's
place, for the same UAH 40 rate. Yalta
was not a place for the average holiday-maker, it was meant for either the very
rich or for the very poor and not caring (like us), ready to sleep on a rug and
live only on smoked fish and biscuits sold by babushkas forever. From all
official Ukraine, Crimea seemed to me like the place where real money were made
day and night and where there existed the will and the know-how to create
business, even if I personally prefer quieter and more natural, regular places
where one can easier penetrate local people's lines. Our host - a woman in her
60s - lived together with her husband in a flat (again), being surrounded by
cats. In the evening we discovered close to her flat, by mistake almost, an
Armenian church. A middle aged woman invited us in and we went. It was not
grand, but the building was well preserved, while its architecture had a lot of
sense, fluidity and balance. The lady seemed to be a priest as well, as she put
on the mass outfit and showed us all the church, said a prayer and told us the
story of GriogorNarikatzi,
an Armenian saint that had lived on Ararat Mountain in the times when it was
located in Armenia. After spending more than a pleasant hour in the church, we
surfed through the city until tired. The following day was to be dedicated to
palaces, including Alupka, Livadia
and Massandra. The first one seemed kitschy to me and
the (real) chords of tourists that would stand everywhere to get photographed
at all times were not to my please. Mixing the Arabian style
with the Tudor, hosting inside all those different pieces of furniture and
planting palm trees on the porch stroke the eye in a spicy and bitter way.
From all the visit, the only thing that got my
attention was that, at a certain moment, a quite big part of the ceiling
collapsed in one of the rooms. While the attending staff froze, a bunch of
tourists immediately rushed there to shoot pictures. LivadiaPalace
was simpler in structure and more pleasant in looks. The main attraction was
the round table which had once hosted the three people considering themselves important and smart while doing nothing but
playing a dirty and unfair game with God's dice. I have never been to either Siberia
or inside the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest,
and I think I shall never go there, but the pictures with Churchill, Roosevelt
and Stalin made me think of what their luncheon ended with. Up the hill from Yalta
there was MasandraPalace, the most real one, might I
say so. It lacked the awkwardness of the palace in Alupka
and the "I am famous, aren't I?" feature of the one in Livadia. Instead it was normal, smaller and much more
tasteful, a bit remote from the town and preserving that image of a countryside
manor.
As the following day we were to leave and I stubbornly
wanted to visit Aivazovski's museum in Feodosia, we went to the bus station in Yalta.
A Russian habit, very civilized otherwise, but very inconvenient for those on
the run like us, they did not sell tickets for a train or bus unless there are
spare seats. So all we could do was to go to Alushta,
from where we hoped to find something further to Feodosia
or Sudak. All tickets were sold out, even for Simferopol. All we could get was
sharing a taxi with 3 other Ukraineans. Because one
of the fellow travelers was rushing to a train, the guy drove like crazy and in
25 minutes we got there, mainly sticking to a police led and guarded Hummer
limo. Getting to the bus station, we saw a bus was leaving to Sudak in 5 minutes, so we went. The scenery was totally
different. While on the coast the communities were much richer and there was
tourism, inland there were only poor villages with old and small houses; roads
were not as good either. The bus was to get in Sudak
at about 9 PM, but we got there at
almost 11 PM on another bus, because
it broke down on the way. When getting off, we were approached by two ladies
offering accommodation: they were Tatars.
"We even have a shower"
That sounded promising. Actually all they had was a not
finished yet house made of two rooms. The wider one, bearing a garage-like huge
metallic door, was made of a lower area which hosted a makeshift kitchen and an
upper area made of a wooden podium on which there were pillows and 3
mattresses, that being the sleeping area. The smaller room was
"normal", with two beds and some old pictures on the walls. The
"shower" meant an outside cabin made of wood, on top of which there
was a water tank which would be warmed up by the sun rays. Another wooden cabin
was meant for the toilet, just like in rural Romania.
The very welcoming lady of the house cooked some omelet and made a salad for
us, as she said that at that hour the shop was closed. They were very nice
people and their hospitality would have touched anybody. Unfortunately Feodosia remained out of the question the following day, as
there were no buses running there soon enough for us to return at the right
time. So all we could do was walking in the streets of Sudak
(much poorer than the resorts to the west, even though preserving a draughty
and otherwise desolate Turkish fortress) and enjoying some of the local cuisine
in a bar next to the bus station.
Then we headed for Simferopol,
where we had three hours to enjoy the 200 m. of pedestrian
street in the old centre and its monuments. However the most striking
thing about the city was the station, a large building with thousands and
thousands of people hanging around and waiting for trains going all over Ukraine,
Russia and some
East European cities at every few minutes. The SimferopolVokzal show was a must-see in Crimea
for sure. But the time to leave arrived, with a platzkartni
wagon to Kiev. Opposite to us there
was a couple of very nice young people with which we had a nice time and plenty
of beer. The following day we reached Kiev.
I was very curious from the last time I had been there, to see the way the
refurbishing works of the station were accomplished. Wow, the station looked
more like a bank on the inside, with marble and huge chandeliers, lots of
flowers and a very well organized space, with wide halls and very well balanced
areas. We had the ticket to L'viv done in a few
minutes and we went for the city, to soon discover that it was actually August 23rd
(Saturday), while Ukraine's
Independence Day was to happen on August 24th. The city was filled with people,
parties were on the way, there were going to be concerts all night and the main
avenues were closed to traffic, being filled with beer terraces and junk
sellers. Even the stalinist
architecture in the centre looked between in this celebration wrapping. Prices
were higher, much higher than in Chernivcy or IvanoFrankivsk and the city,
even in the middle of that party thing, looked proper and much cleaner than
other East European capitals. Still there were few foreign tourists, even if
the place looked vivid because of the holiday. Another night, another train and
this time an almost suffocating ride, as we were next to these middle aged
women that closed the window every time I tried to open it. Our Ukrainean leg was coming to an end, even if it wasn't to be
the most pleasant of them all...
We reached L'viv in the morning,
the morning of the National Day. The city looked almost the same as the first
time I had been there and also as the very day Sovietics
took it from Poles., with old cobblestone streets,
aging tramways making everything shake, but also with those small shops that
looked so picturesquely. The centre was full of people even if it was pretty
early, and there was some typical communist propaganda music, very loud, in
some speakers all over the place. It was strange to see that type of
manifestation in a Gothic city and the worse was even to come. This time I
noticed a thing that I had previously ignored when visiting the city in 2000.
Of the once many Roman Catholic churches in the city, only one still bore the
same religion, while others had been turned into Orthodox or Greek Catholic
churches. Being a person that does not believe in religion, but rather in the
only God there is, this situation did not bother me, but the discordance
between the Gothic architecture and frescoes, respectively the Orthodox altars
was striking. At a certain moment an old and quite poor lady stopped us in the
street. She was Polish and all her relatives had been sent to Siberia;
ever since she has not heard anything of them and now she had to beg for a loaf
of bread. This element, together with many others, made Ukraine
a very complex experience, a country which one cannot just cross and come to a
conclusion. It was getting late and there was another place to visit, the
former Polish cemetery. Behind the well preserved gate, we saw some nice and
also well maintained graves. But before going further, entrance was paid for.
UAH 3 for adults, UAH 0.5 for students. Noticing we were foreigners, the guy
there said that the discount was only for Ukrainean
students, because we were in Ukraine
and Ukraineans deserve everything there was. Well,
thank you, merciful God for bread and the air was not also meant for Ukraineans alone, for we might have got a problem...
Probably considering that he had not showed enough of his intelligent ideas, he
went on very sharply, noticing that one of us was Polish, saying that L'viv was an Ukrainean city, all
major buildings and attractions there had been built by Ukraineans.
Not feeling like taking too much of his Ukrainean
time, we went to the Ukrainean cemetery for an Ukrainean experience. And what a unique experience we
had... The first graves looked well indeed, as hell is always wrapped up in
pink paper. Many Polish graves had been destroyed, with broken funeral plaques;
funeral monuments and crypts had been vandalized, while most of the kind of
preserved ones lay under a mountain of especially brought garbage. Alleys
looked like war ditches, while headless statues of angels accomplished a
perfect apocalyptical image. If I had been for a second that man telling his
crap, I would have stopped saying that everything in L'viv
was Ukrainean, for he blamed himself in a mostly
direct and straight way. The cemetery was the last thing we could visit in Ukraine,
in the end of a 2 weeks travel in this country and it proved to be one of the
saddest things I have ever encountered. If I had lead the Sovietic
occupation army, instead of vandalizing and messing up the cemetery, plundering
history and indirectly throwing dirt on my own soul, I would have simply razed
off the place, building concrete boxes instead. For this issue I give Ceausescu
(yet another moron) more credit than that man at the entrance to the cemetery.
We rushed to the station and got on the bus to Przemysl on the last minute. Except for us and a guy
probably going to work in nearby Poland,
there were only smugglers on the bus. After easily going through the Ukrainean customs, we reached the Polish side, not such an
easy place to penetrate. Half of the people on the bus were turned back to Ukraine
for they had much more cigarettes than accepted by law. The funny (now) thing
was that the punished ones were not those breaking the law, but rather those
obeying to it, as the bus was turned back together with the smugglers, while we
had to wait out in the cold for a next one with more conscious smugglers, traveling
to Przemysl in one leg and with this old lady
shouting for we were bothering her with our backpacks. We reached the Polish
city at around 3 AM and our bus to the
mountains was due at 8 AM, so we tried
to go to the railway station, but (welcome, civilization!) it was closed from 10 PMtil4 AM. We waited in a small bar across the street
from the station, to discover that (welcome, civilization!) beer or any alcohol
drinks were forbidden from being sold near railway stations. The following
three days were about an eventless hiking trip to the Bieszczady,
over restricted mountains where one had to wait in line in order to follow the
path at times, where buses come on time and tourism is rather making money and
not necessarily people happy about doing it. Strangely, it seemed to me that
the simpler things get when traveling, the worse, for one misses the real
experience. When people speak English, when maps are easy to be found, when
roads are fully asphalted to the last cottage and when there are no shepherds
with which one can trade a chat for a piece of fresh cheese around a sparkling
fire in the evening, when - going back home - one's clothes do not smell like
smoke, mountaineering is no longer my thing.
After spending a few days in Krakow,
as I had got back in the civilized world and paid about EUR 80 for a 2nd class
ticket and I left Poland
to Belgrade, where I was to meet
some friends and go to the mountains in Montenegro.
After wandering through Budapest
for a few hours, I was waiting for the intercity from Vienna
to Belgrade and, seeing its OBB
wagons, I was thinking that maybe civilization also meant air conditioning on
inter cities. It did not and a ride very similar to the one from IvanoFrankivsk to Vorochta in Ukraine
followed. But the fancy OBB train was missing the old people selling
everything, the cheering mountaineers playing the guitar, the gipsy family
singing for a living, in a word it was missing being
alive. After a dry and ever getting dryer ride, I eventually reached Belgrade,
back to the normality I was already missing. After throwing the backpack in Nenad's place, we went for a long-lasted-for JelenPivo, and a jelen always calls for a second jelen
to come, so I woke up after the long nap I had taken after leaving L'viv. A few days in Belgrade were mostly welcome, crossing
the city on the bicycle, watching people enjoying being alive in KneazMihaila and on the beaches
on AdaCiganlija, enjoying pljeskavica after pljeskavica and
burek after burek.
Eventually we left for the mountains, with a night bus to Berane. Then I entered an area with a very interesting
people. Next to the Albanian border and also not very far from Kosovo, we were
traveling between Berane and Gusinje.
Gusinje was a town inhabited mostly by Albanians,
where everything was settled around a living axis, a wide street bearing a
mosque at one end many terraces along it, separated by groceries. People would
just walk by or sit at some terrace, meeting up friends and relatives, talking
for hours as if nothing was going on anywhere, as if they were in the middle of
a desert, with nothing around them and with no restrictions, laws, rules, work,
worry or event to bother them. Life had stopped in Gusinje.
After registering with the local police, as we were going to hike in the border
area, we took a taxi and went to a mountain hut, where we dropped the backpacks
and headed up in very foggy and wet weather. At about 2000 m.alt.we got out of the
fog and could see the impressive scenery ProkletijeMountains
were offering us. A huge limestone mountain with glacial valleys and wild
ridges, with huge rocks and lacking pastures, the Prokletije
were simply impressive. We reached the highest peak and looked around us: score
kilometers of mountains and nothing else, with very picturesque sights towards Albania,
and with everything topped by the highest peak in the area, the MajaJezerces, lying in Albania.
We got down to the hut and, after discovering there were scorpions in the hut,
our sleep was not very smooth. The following day we went hiking in the rain, rain
that only stopped when we got very close to the sharp, steep and rocky OchnijakPeak,
the most impressive of the whole trip. In the evening we got down and sent ansms to the taxi driver which
came the following morning to pick us up. The whole area was arranged by taxi
drivers. They were going anywhere there was a road or trail,
they would come if asked by sms... This unorganized,
ad-hoc system worked much better than buses with precise schedules as they had
in Poland or Slovakia,
for instance. After crossing Gusinje once again and
enjoying a great baklava in the local Mecca
(nothing else than a confectionery, but a very lively and always full one), we
checked out with police and left the town, going to VisitorMountains. Getting off the taxi at
the bottom of the mountains, I dropped my backpack on the asphalt to drink some
water. A man which had some problems with his car
stopped and, seeing the label depicting coat of arms of the RepublikaSrpska I had long ago stuck to my backpack and had
also forgotten about, he shouted:
"RepublikaSrpska! DalisitiSrpsku?!"
Both I and Nenad froze, realizing we were in a mostly
Albanian area, just 35 km. away from Kosovo. However that man proved to be Serb
and he was actually happy he saw that badge. We started hiking and reached a
poor wooden cottage close to the main peak in a pouring rain. After doing some
more hiking in the Visitor through fog and rains, and after not succeeding to
buy some cheese from some Albanian shepherds, we returned to the hut and went to
sleep, hoping it would not start raining seriously, for there were many holes
in the roof. The following day, in a perfect weather, we hiked up the highest
peak, which was partly grassy, partly rocky, and then we went down, took yet
another taxi and reached the bottoms of KomoviMountains,
meaning that taxi drove over a poor trail up to 1800 m.alt.
The mountain was going down along two foothills and each of them was host for a
small village made of wooden huts belonging to two different (and enemy)
families said to be Serbia's
oldest. The same day we went on a 2461 m. high peak. The Komovi
were very scenic, with very sharp ridges and huge, but few rocky glacial
valleys. The following day we went up the highest peak in these mountains, Dom Kucki, after a short exposed passage, and we also went on
the third peak in the area. We went down, washed a little and waited for the
taxi that promptly arrived, taking us down to Kolasin,
from where, after a great traditional meal in a fancy - we though at first -
restaurant (we had to first go in without backpacks and ask whether they
accepted us like that), we took a train to Belgrade. A few more days in Belgrade
accomplished the trip before entering Romania,
with those people hanging around Ruski Car terrace
and talking forever, with old people reading newspapers over a cup of endless
"Turkish" coffee, with the great smell of the pekara,
with a ride to Rakovica Monastery. I left Belgrade
towards Romania
by car with a Polish friend. We had a long lasted for "Romanian traditional"
meal in Timisoara.
We visited Brancusi's park in TarguJiu at midnight.
We entered a one way street in Pitesti in full speed just passing
by the police officer, because we did not see the signpost forbidding access
there. We reached Bucharest in a massive
rain at 4 AM. A few days later, we
were denied entrance into Bulgaria
because the Bulgarian customs officer would not understand that a car can have
three owners, only one of them driving it at a time and we would not understand
that he was expecting a bribe. We crisscrossed Romania,
visiting God-forgotten villages in Transylvania and
being almost killed on a mountain road by a truck, as its driver discovered
that it no longer had brakes that worked. And life went on, re-discovering the
place where I had once had the greatest meal in my life, in Oradea. And, while enjoying a shumyogalushka, I was thinking:
"where next?". Well, life will tell...