The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

In Saratov, I wrote that the map already hinted at a very different kind of country beyond the Volga, through its lack of ink alone. Five days later, as we wait at the Kazakh border – our visas do not become valid until tomorrow – this hint has been borne out by reality.

The Volga forms a massive geographical barrier, more than ten kilometres wide in places. It may well be said that though three hundred kilometres have passed and we are still in Russia, the next part of our journey has already begun.

It is not only the fact that settlements have become even more sparsely spread than before, but also in the people: there are already plenty Kazakh faces amongst the Russian ones. This is very noticeable since while Russians are not so greatly different in appearance to western Europeans, Kazakh people are unmistakably oriental. It is remarkable that the physical boundary between Europe and Asia is also so obvious in the population.

Before reaching this new stretch of territory, it was of course first necessary to cross the Volga itself. This we did by means of the enormous bridge between Saratov and Engel’s, quite a scary experience especially given the fact that large chunks of pavement and railing were missing from the side of the bridge.

On the first full day east of the Volga, we stopped at a café for a few hours. Here we met quite a mix of people: the woman working there was Azerbaijani, her partner and/or colleague Armenian (strange since these two countries don’t seem to like each other very much), and the girl in the kitchen Kazakh. We also drank vodka and ate very salty, stringy cheese with some other customers, including one policeman from Tartarstan. He invited us to come to his bath house for more vodka and tea, an offer we politely but firmly refused. This especially since he was being a bit too affectionate with Astrid.

Among our troubles in Saratov, I did not mention that Astrid ended up with her front wheel stuck between the bars of a steel grating in the road, sending her over the handlebars. Russian cities are not very bicycle-friendly; this was like getting your wheels stuck in the tram rails in Amsterdam but much worse. Thankfully she was not badly hurt aside a graze on the chin, and the bike still worked okay, but unfortunately the front baggage carrier had become a bit mangled.

A few days ago we were able to get this fixed when we stopped by a garage next to the road. The owner phoned his son, who some time later turned up and proceeded to weld the thing back together. For his trouble neither he nor his father would accept any money, and so I asked him if I could at least by some fags or something. “American, not Russian!” he said in English. So I bought him twenty Marlboro.

There is a railway line running parallel with the road we have been following. There are not many trains on it, but there was one strange incident a few days ago during which, as numerous cars and buses waited longer and longer at a level crossing, it appeared that there was to be none at all. Eventually people started getting out of their cars and wandering about, and all of the passengers got out of a bus which subsequently turned round and drove off. We moved on before the situation was resolved, and so I have no idea how long they ended up waiting.

Yesterday, we had another road-related near-disaster. While trying to avoid the countless holes in the road where a team of workers were laying asphalt, Astrid managed to cycle through a patch of hot, sticky tar. Thankfully it was not hot enough to melt and burst her tyres, but it was of course very very difficult to get it off. The road worker guys found it very funny at first, but later came to help with all sorts of solutions, including the idea that we burn if off – which we didn’t try. A few of them could speak some German, and one in particular kept shouting “Berlin! Stalin! Hitler kaput!” – although they pronounce it “geet-lar”, since to Russians “g” and “h” are one and the same sound, strangely. They also gave us a bottle of some sort of petrol-like substance with which it was possible to clean the horrible sticky stuff off, eventually.

It could be of course that I am imagining it, but this border region feels like real frontier country. It is so deserted, there is a strange sort of tension, and the other day we met a real cowboy on a horse. He was a Kazakh herder who came to say hello as we ate lunch, and was very interested in our bikes. Later he came back with his young son, who was also on horseback, and gave Astrid a go at riding the horse.

I think that there must be something inherently special about such regions, since the border country between the Ukraine and Russia, and between Poland and the Ukraine before that, also had a very particular atmosphere. The road becomes quieter and quieter as the last towns and villages pass by, the stillness and silence becomes more and more noticeable, and the sense of being psychologically as well as physically on the perimeter intensifies. Enjoy this special feeling while it lasts, I tell myself, since the next border (with China) will not be for a very, very long time.

Much has been said and written about the idea of “culture shock”, the affliction which can leave otherwise normal and outgoing people afraid to leave their hotel rooms and face the reality of being in a foreign country. I am currently suffering what could probably better be described as “culture irritation”, a somewhat milder but nonetheless serious condition.

The cause of this malady is the great difficulty in doing anything practical here in Russia. You quickly become aware that something, whatever it may be, is not done the way you are used to, but it can take a lot longer to find out how it is done. Or, you are unexpectedly confronted by some sort of rule or regulation for which you are totally unprepared, and which stops you in your tracks. All the while you try your best to maintain patience with the situation, with this otherness, but in the end it just becomes too much and it becomes impossible not to curse the whole place and everyone in it.

Perhaps it is necessary to step back a bit and explain the sequence of events which has lead me to dwell on this topic. As I have explained in an earlier post, it is necessary as a foreigner to register your presence within three days of arriving in the Russian Federation. We did this back in Kursk, by staying one night in a hotel, and have since then stayed the rest of the time in our lovely tent.

This ended up being a huge problem when we arrived in Saratov the other day, in search of a hotel for a few badly-needed days of comfort. It was difficult enough finding one which was affordable, but when we finally did, we were told we could not stay there because we had not registered our whereabouts since leaving Kursk. Of course we hadn’t – how do you register your address when camping in the forest? We were told that we would likely also be fined. And still no hotel room.

After about half a day of this kind of nonsense, we ended up with a solution to our accommodation needs at least – we have been able to rent a little apartment for less than the cost of the hotel, and without needing to register ourselves. We may yet have problems next week when we try to leave Russia, but we will deal with these when the time comes.

Aside from the possibility of being fined, such a run-in with the authorities will apparently “significantly lower your chance of getting a Russian visa for the next five years”. If this is sort of welcome that we would receive any time in, say, the next five years, that would be no great loss to me.

I must immediately make up for being so negative. For all this, most of the individual people we have had contact with have been tremendously helpful and understanding. We would never have found the apartment without the receptionist at one of the various expensive hotels we passed by. She took pity on us and rang up some numbers in the back of the newspaper, thereby putting us in contact with one Igor, who had an apartment. All of this without any sort of common language. We must have looked quite pitiful.

Yesterday, I needed to make a few calls home. Of course, this was not achieved without a lot of searching around town, once again assisted by various receptionists, assistants, and passers-by. When I did arrive at the correct location, there was yet more bureaucratic absurdity – instead of being able to dial the number myself, I needed to write it down on a form and hand it to the woman behind the counter. She spent some time typing things into her computer, before calling up a colleague at some unknown location and reading him or her the number I wished to call. I needed to specify how long the call would be – how on earth was I supposed to know beforehand? – and pay in advance. Finally, after some waiting, the unseen colleague called back, and I was told to go to one of the various little numbered booths and pick up the phone. Finally I could actually talk. Needless to say, to make another call the same procedure needed to be repeated from the beginning.

I have read somewhere that at one point the Soviet Union was becoming so increasingly bureaucratic that, given another fifty years, almost the entire working population would be occupied in administrating the state apparatus. I have absolutely no difficulty in believing this.

Among the highlights of Saratov are the view over the Volga, an enormous and intricate model behind glass of the development of the city during the last four hundred years, and the obligatory vast statue of Lenin overlooking an even more vast central square. But my favourite site has been, naturally, the second-hand market on the road into the city. Here, spread out neatly on countless old bed sheets, is every sort of car part imaginable; with the right know-how, you could quite easily assemble enough parts to build your very own Lada from scratch. One day, I would love to come back and do just that.

One thing which causes me to become quite angry here is that while there is quite visible poverty and terrible infrastructure, there is also plenty of money around: there are countless expensive clothes shops and gleaming western cars. If I have been informed correctly, tax evasion is a big problem here; in other words, people with money would rather keep their cash to spend on new four-wheel-drive cars than have the roads fixed. I am of course exposing my own political views in saying that I find this very selfish. It is quite ironic that a country which was once synonymous (at least in theory) with socialist solidarity has become such a blatant example of the everyone-for-himself mentality.

Of course when times are hard, people make do as best they can. There is not really public transport of the sort found at home, but what there are instead is a great many small yellow minibuses which serve as the principal means of transport for people without cars. What is remarkable about them is quite how many people they manage to pack inside. When one screeches to a halt to let someone out, the door is suddenly flung open and the person who wishes to get off ejects themselves as if forced by a great build-up of pressure from inside. More often than not the passenger is a young lassie in very tight trousers and high heels, who despite the awkward way of getting out of the bus, still manages to land cat-like on her feet and elegantly walk away as if nothing had happened. Very impressive.

Amongst the strangeness of what is available in the shops, I came across one familiar and welcome sight – Irn-Bru. I remember reading somewhere that it was quite popular in Russia, perhaps for the same principal reason (hangover cure) as it is in Scotland. Although probably not after drinking our whisky, since it is ludicrously expensive – about twenty times as much as a bottle of vodka of the same size.

Much more quickly than I would have hoped, our four nights of being under a roof are now up. In a few hours we will leave Saratov, cross the enormous bridge over the Volga to the town of Engel’s, and head off for our last few days in Russia. Looking at the map, I am already quite apprehensive about what is coming – because what is coming is not very much at all. After Engel’s, there is hardly a village for about two hundred kilometres, and even then we will be lucky if there is so much as a shop. And beyond that of course, Kazakhstan, the great empty wilderness about which I am so excited. There, we will really be on our own.

When I last wrote, the sun was shining and we were making our way leisurely through the empty Russian countryside. Since then, a few misfortunes have come our way, and the rain pours down outside the roadside café where we have just eaten. Inside it is warm though, and the fried eggs, mashed potato, borscht, and coffee are good.

But first I will return to the journey from Kursk to Voronezh, the latest city on our route. On the last day of this stretch, just as we passed the police checkpoint at the boundary between the Kursk and Voronezh oblasts (provinces), I heard a voice call “hey!” from behind. Thankfully this was not the cops, but another cyclist – the first (besides locals) that we have met on the journey. His name was Jeff, he is from Canada, and he is coincidentally also travelling via Kazakhstan to China, although via a different route.

We got chatting about our experiences, and also camped next to each other that night. And, since we were going the same way anyway, we also cycled together as far as Voronezh. Perhaps we come across one another again in the middle of Kazakhstan.

Our plan upon arrival in Voronezh was to make our way to the shores of the lake which runs from north to south through the city, find a peaceful spot, and stay there for a few days. This all went quite well in the beginning, but things unfortunately did not stay that way.

Firstly, I began feeling not too well just before dinner. This only got worse, so that by the middle of the night I was getting up every hour or so to vomit. By morning there was nothing more to come out and I still felt terrible.

This was not our only problem, though. Astrid’s Therm-a-rest (self-inflating mattress) was flat, and the cause was very quickly found; a broken bottle under the tent which had ripped through this and made no less than seven holes in the mattress. It must be said that with the amount of glass, metal, and other litter lying around in Eastern Europe, it is perhaps more remarkable that this has not happened before now.

On what was supposed to be a relaxing day by the lake, I lay in the tent recovering while Astrid headed back into Voronezh on a quest for a repair kit or at least some duct tape. This came to nothing, and while I was feeling quite a lot better by mid-afternoon, the next night turned into a repeat of the one before. I was beginning to think I would need to find a doctor, not an appealing prospect after my experiences in Poland. Of course as I lay shivering and writhing in agony in the middle of the night, I began to think all sorts of absurd thoughts – maybe I have something serious! Is it cancer?

But of course it wasn’t (this time) and after another day of rest and carefully beginning to eat again, I was on the road to recovery.

The day after this, we headed once again into Voronezh, among other things on a second attempt to find something to fix Astrid’s mattress. This turned of course into a long, tedious, and frustrating affair. Eventually, a girl working in a camping shop close to the café where we had based ourselves lead me on a tour of various shops in the neighbourhood. After various misunderstandings, we reached one where I could buy some waterproof (and luckily also airtight) fabric for fixing tents. This, along with various sorts of glue, seems to have fixed the problem. Naturally I am very grateful to the camping shop girl for her help, but I really wish we had bothered to spend 10 Euros on a repair kit before leaving home. One more lesson learned.

Another task in Voronezh was to find somewhere to make telephone calls. This ended up being an office with little cubicles as might be expected, but what was surprising was the other facility being offered there – for it appears that the telegram is alive and well in Russia. Handy for the relatives in deepest Siberia without a phone, I guess.

Several days later, and we are back in the open countryside. In about five days we will reach Saratov on the mighty Volga river, the last big city for a very long time and the last town of any kind before Kazakhstan. In the meantime, there is not much to comment upon except plenty pedalling, here and there a village, solitary cows tied next to the road, huge empty fields, and today another holy well. This time electrically-operated, for the convenience of pilgrims and truck drivers alike.

I must say that I preferred the cakes and biscuits in the Ukraine, although they’re okay here too. One odd sort that I came across yesterday was literally a “cup-cake” – a small cake jammed into the sort of plastic cup that you get at office water coolers. To my surprise, I discovered that the purpose of this cup is to keep the bottom of the cake moist with a small quantity of rum. It was delicious.

As can be seen from the map at the top of this page, we are now in Russia. If I am still counting all right, that is country number five. We are also now on our third time zone, two hours ahead of CET. This is quite confusing since we are not really much further east, but then all things to do with borders and the like leave me quite perplexed. For example, we are apparently still in Europe. Kazakhstan is definitely in Asia, so where on earth, quite literally, do we cross from one to the other? Well, I looked it up the other day, and it will in fact be at the Kazakh border. This follows no particular geographical feature, meaning where one continent ends and the next begins has just been made up. Why is it even necessary to give names to such things?

Back first though over the border to Ukraine, or “the” Ukraine, I’m never sure which it should be. Our rest day in Sumy went by much too quickly as usual, but all the same very enjoyably. We ate ice cream in the park while all around us old people in tight swimming costumes sunbathed. One by one they would take it in turn to go paddling in the river, with one or two brave souls daring to swim the murky waters. Later I bought a thermos flask (for milk) in a little shop selling every kind of sporting good imaginable from hunting knives to inflatable boats to billiard balls to novelty billiard ball clocks. Like pretty much everything I have bought for this trip, it was of course Made In China. So I will be taking it all home.

Alexander, the concierge at the “Hotel Ukraine”, where we stayed, was luckily able to speak English. This made him of course the target of constant questions from us, which he was all too eager to assist with. He even insisted in leading me round town to show the location of various things that I was looking for. I get a bit embarrassed when people are so helpful.

Among the things we discovered from him was that Sumy had recently suffered the loss of its most important icon from the main Russian Orthodox church. The churches here are full of beautiful, priceless art works, and so it is unfortunately not so surprising that things get stolen. This has apparently been viewed as a terrible disaster for the town.

On the way out of town towards the border, we stopped as we have done many times to buy some petrol for the stove. The guy at the pump was not able to fill our little bottle, as far as I can tell because it was not possible to sell less than a litre of fuel. The solution to this as quite surprising – he went round to a little cupboard behind the petrol station, which was filled with old champagne bottles full of petrol. We could have some from one of those. I’m not sure if this was normal or even legal, but it burns very nicely.

The road to the border passed through some lovely countryside, including a lake with a soft sandy bottom which was perfect for soaking tired feet. On our last night in the Ukraine, that is to say the night before our Russian visa become valid, we camped in a forest just before the border. The road was so quiet, and the countryside so empty, that when it got dark and the birds stopped singing the was really not a sound to be heard. Quite eerie.

Tuesday morning came, we packed everything in, and headed slightly nervously towards the border crossing. The last one was a pain in the arse, and so I had been fully expecting even worse from this one. As it turned out it went fine, although of course a lot of patience was necessary; the Ukrainians wanted to see our passports twice and the Russians no less than three times, in addition to which they made a half-hearted go at looking in our bags. Good luck to them, there’s not much there besides my old socks.

In the reverse of the situation in the former DDR, I was of course interested in the differences between these two former components of the USSR. Would seventy years of comradeship have been swept aside by less than twenty years of separation?

To an outsider the differences are not immediately apparent. Things are all in Russian now of course rather than in Ukrainian, although I need to look hard to see the difference (one noticeable one – Russian does not use the letter “I”). One thing which did strike m quite quickly is that there is perhaps more of an attachment here to the good old days – Lenin is still proudly standing in front of town halls, and there is much publicity in advance of today’s Victory Day (9th May) celebrations.

In addition to paying and waiting for a visa, and all the buggering around at the border, there is something else which is necessary when staying in Russia. You must register where you are staying within three days of arrival, which is not so easy of course without a fixed address besides “green tent, middle of nowhere, Russia”. Not doing so can apparently lead to all sorts of trouble when leaving the country, as well as the possibility of of being stopped by the police and being asked to pay a “fine” (straight in the back pocket). So a solution needed to be found.

What we have done, which may or may not do the trick, is to stay just one night in a hotel. What we of course hope is that they will not ask what we were doing the rest of the time. In any case we can stay now and again in a hotel and get a few more stamps for good luck.

Actually finding a hotel was unfortunately not so straightforward. Firstly, there are not so many of them in the city of Kursk, the first large town over the border. Secondly, the word for “hotel” is a different in Russian from Ukrainian – гостиница instead of готель, which we had failed to check beforehand. And when we finally found a “гостиница”, the woman behind the reception desk had no interest in helping us, leaving us quite despondent.

Then, as has so often happened, our luck suddenly changed. We came upon a hotel where the receptionist could speak excellent English, where a room was available, and where we could have our visas registered. The only problem was that the room would cost over 3000 Roubles (about €65), more than twice what we could afford. We said so, and the receptionist then phoned her manager. “It’s okay”, was the answer, and we got the room for 1500 Roubles. So, that’s one to remember – prices in Russia are negotiable!

Best of all was the room – or to be more specific, the bathroom. It had a bath big enough for two, with little jets to make bubbles! Unbelievable luxury after a few nights in the forest.

One more pleasant surprise was that we did not need to check out until 3pm the next day, meaning a very relaxed day ahead.

Before leaving Kursk the next day, we went for something to eat from the Japanese restaurant next door. Here a gong was struck every time someone entered the door, which got a bit annoying after a while, and free tea was served to all customers from a tea-can with an enormously long spout. Having spent far too much money, we prepared to head out of town in search of a forest for our tent and some cheaper living.

Just at this point, two guys on bikes stopped to say “hi”. We ended up accepting their offer to show us the correct road out of town, although we didn’t actually get this far. This was because Sasha, one of the pair, invited us to come and stay at his house for the night (after he had phoned his wife to okay it, of course). We accepted his offer.

At his house we met his wife and two small children, and spent an unexpected second night under a blanket instead of in the sleeping bags. The next morning Sasha and Alexander, the other guy, cycled with us for 10km or so in the direction of Voronezh, the next city on our route. It makes you feel very grateful to meet such friendly and welcoming people.

As nice as all this was, I have an admission to make: I am so very at ease in this sort of situation. I am caught between the fact that it is of course very interesting and a great experience to meet people when travelling, and the rather uncomfortable truth that I don’t like it very much. I feel very stupid saying it, but I am much rather alone amongst the trees in the forest than in the front room of a stranger, however much I wish it were not so. For me, one of the main motivations for making this journey was the idea of being able to live totally independently, fully equipped to be able to find a quiet place every night where no-one will bother us and we will bother no-one, fall asleep, and disappear without leaving a trace the next morning. As soon as you start interacting with people on more than a superficial level, this independence disappears.

But of course, being alone all the time would take away something very valuable from the experience. And so I will have to try and enjoy these kinds of situations, at least for Astrid’s sake; she is a lot more enthusiastic about such encounters than I am.

Today is Victory Day – sixty-four years since the end of WWII. People here maintain a justified pride in their country’s hard-fought victory over fascism, a conflict of unimaginable ferocity and barbarity unmatched by anything on the Western Front. I was keen to see how this is celebrated.

The only settlement of any size which we passed through today was the town of Tim, where the commemorations were unfortunately finished by the time we arrived. However, as we were sitting eating lunch on a bench on the town’s main square opposite a statue of Lenin, we were approached by a middle-aged woman on a bicycle. It turned out that she was the teacher of English from the local school, and was very keen to speak to us – in any case for the practice.

Of course it was also a great chance for us to ask questions about the celebrations, and about various other things related to our experience in Russia so far. Two young men in police uniforms approached, and she explained that they were “my boys” (former pupils) who would like a photo with us. Of course we were happy to oblige.

This is of course the sort of contact with the police that I don’t mind, rather than any other kind. It kind of sums up Russia so far for me – it is absolutely nothing like the threatening image we have been fed by people at home and on the road. Most people have been extremely friendly and helpful, sometimes excessively so. And today, in a small shop in Tim, they gave us a loaf of bread for nothing, because we had come there all the way from Holland. And very tasty it was too.

As mentioned at the end of my last post, the road from Kiev to the Russian border has been a less hurried one than the way to the capital. This has proven to be not only true with regard to the number of kilometres that we need to cycle each day, but also in the way of travelling and the encounters on the way.

There are two differences from the time before Kiev. Firstly, as explained by the owner of the youth hostel there, Ukraine east of the Dnieper has a different history than the west, being more closely tied to Russia than to Europe. This manifests itself today in a landscape seemingly frozen back in time, where every house has its own fairy-tale well and tractors are almost nowhere to be seen. Secondly, the road to the border is not an important highway as earlier, meaning than the volume of traffic has slowed to a trickle. For long periods there is nothing to be heard aside from our own wheels and the singing of the birds in the trees.

What has also taken us by surprise is how empty of people the landscape is. It became apparent in the west of Ukraine that the little white dots on the map were fairly large villages, with several more to be found in between that were not on the map. Here, the same symbol means a cluster of a few houses, with nothing in between. This caused a problem the other day when we realised we were running out of water and petrol, with no immediate sign of any sort of civilisation. Eventually we obtained some water from the well of an old man, and were surprisingly able to make dinner and drink two pots of coffee the following morning with the tiny amount of petrol left in the bottle. By the way, I can definitely recommend a petrol stove for anyone making such a journey as this – we would have been totally screwed trying to buy bottles of gas.

The people here are also very relaxed. The morning after the petrol-and-water crisis, we stopped at a магазин (that’s a shop, pronounced “magazine”) next to the road and bought ice creams. Such places are always interesting, since each one is quite unique. One strange thing which has occurred quite a few times is that I have pointed at something (usually a cake of some kind) that I would like to buy, at which the person serving me would screw up her nose and shake her head as if to say “you don’t want to eat that”. I guess it’s things that are no longer good to eat but still sitting around to fill up the space – if so, I appreciate the honesty being shown.

On this occasion, we got talking to an old man, in the stop-start way which occurs in the absence of a common language. He was drinking a beer from the tap in the shop, which looked so delicious that I had to order one. This didn’t work so well despite the best efforts of the shop lady, me, and another old man to change the gas, but in the end I had an almost-full glass of beer. None of the other customers seemed to mind the delay caused by all this. Then we all sat outside in the sun on an old picnic bench under a parasol, and the shop lady came outside to eat an ice cream too. It turned out that the old woman further up the road selling potatoes was the mother of the beer-drinking man. He was fifty-three, had been married three times, and had been in Dresden with the Red Army during the Cold War. Or at least I think that this is what he said.

It became apparent that even at 50km per day, we would still reach the border before our visa becomes valid. To take advantage of this situation, we decided to head towards a small lake marked on the map and spend a day there. Previous experience has shown than patches of blue on the map in no way guarantee the actual existence of rivers and lakes, but it seemed worth giving it a go.

To my great delight, the lake really did exist, although still differently than on the map, and looked beautiful in the evening light. We lost no time in finding a small track which would take us to the shore, but were a bit disappointed when a car drove up behind us as we headed along it. We explained what our intentions were, and the men in the car thankfully found it no problem – which was just as well, as shall be explained.

When we got to the end of the track at the shore, we discovered that in fact we were not at all alone – the guys with the car were on the way to meet up with a bunch of mates at a little hut next to the lake.

It was here that we met Grigori, a huge beast of a man in combat boots and camouflage clothing who was the inhabitant of the hut. He was in fact Polish but had lived for a long time in the Ukraine. He was very enthusiastic to meet us and insisted that as soon as we had set the tent up, we would come and drink Russian cognac and beer with them all. This we did.

It was then that things descended into some sort of absurd cliche of eastern Europe. After a few more cognacs, beers, and exchanging of telephone numbers, an AK-47 was suddenly produced. I am quite glad I had had so much alcohol by this point, otherwise I would really have shat myself. It was insisted that both myself and Astrid should pose for photos with the thing (incidentally fully loaded), before the guy with the car excitedly shouted “Работа! Работа!” (“It works! It works!”) and started shooting it off into the air. Everyone thought that this was, like, the best thing ever. We went to bed while the guys stayed up all night finishing off the cognac, with the Kalashnikov being fired off again a few times in the morning for whatever reason. By this point I was fairly relaxed, figuring that if they wanted to murder us they would have done it by now. Grigori asked me about four more times to share another cognac, before suggesting (through various hand signals) that I should return on my way back from Hong Kong to “drink vodka and cognac, go fishing, and shoot things with the Kalash”. I said maybe.

One thing must be made clear – although I am grinning like an idiot in the photo below, I am in no way trying to glamorise firearms. When in Rome, make like a Roman, is the rule. But I would like to make it clear that really am quite a peace-loving anti-war person. In case there was any doubt.

The woods around Grigori’s hut were a scene of great carnage, with bits of various unidentifiable animals lying around for the dogs to eat. While this kind of fitted with the rustic, macho setting, it was not really what we had been looking for and so we decided to pack up and head for a quieter spot on the other side of the lake. Here we spent a very peaceful day, interrupted only by some guys with a little rubber boat coming to do some fishing, and some others who only seemed interested in drinking beer and staring at the lake. Fine by me.

A few days later, we have reached the town of Sumy, the last stop before the Russian border. All of a sudden we are back amongst streets, markets, cafés, ethnic minorities, and all the things which are absent from the Ukrainian countryside. We have heard plenty scary stories about Russia, but then that was also so for Ukraine, and Poland before that. And we’ve survived.