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.

Five days after having arrived in Kiev, we got what we had (mainly) come here for – a three-month visa for Kazakhstan. I am personally really happy and excited about this, since for me Kazakhstan is the place I am looking forward to the most. Of course China and all the rest will be great as well, but there’s something really intriguing about this vast country right in the middle of Asia, about which we hear so little in Europe and which is largely empty.

When we got to the embassy on Tuesday morning, we had our first meeting with real Kazakh people. They have a very characteristic facial type, certainly more Oriental than Russian but also not Chinese. I think what makes this interesting for me is that it is quite new and unknown – Chinese culture and Chinese people are quite visible in Europe, but how many cities have a Kazakhtown?

While waiting for the visas, there been some time to wander round Kiev and visit some churches and museums. The second of these was less successful than I would have liked, for a number of reasons. Firstly, just like the hostels on Sunday, one that was in the guide book did not in reality exist, at least not any more. Several more were closed despite being advertised as being open, while another contained completely different works than claimed. And not one had any text in English for foreign visitors. A shame, because there were some interesting things to be seen if only you could read the story behind them.

That’s not to say that I am disappointed with Kiev, far from it. It’s an interesting city, still feeling quite European but also very different from Cracow; for a start, there are almost no Western tourists here. They will come though, I am sure. You can almost feel the place being tugged between East and West, between the sweet delights of the European Union and the old ties with Russia. It is hard to say who will win the battle.

I paid a visit to the Chernobyl museum, which was quite an odd mix of an educational exhibition about the disaster and a huge art installation combining religious imagery with radiation symbols and other things connected with the incident, which coincidentally occurred twenty-three years ago today. Things like paintings of Jesus as a nuclear scientist, and an ark filled with burned children’s toys, very odd.

Another museum interesting mainly for its bombastic approach was the museum of the “Great Patriotic War” as they call WWII in the former Soviet Union. It consists of a complex on top of a hill covered with tanks, missiles, artillery, and socialist realist sculpture, with patriotic songs blaring constantly from loudspeakers. Topping all this is the enormous statue “Motherland” which towers above Kiev, sword and hammer-and-sickle shield held aloft. Very impressive.

The churches here are very richly decorated inside, as much so as Catholic churches. One unique thing about the Orthodox religion are the icons – squarish paintings of saints and so on which you pray to and also kiss. For hygiene reasons, each is behind glass and has a little cloth to wipe it clean.

The hostel where we have been staying offers a few interesting activities, none of which we have unfortunately got round to trying. Providing that you book at least three days in advance, it is possible to go on a tour of Chernobyl itself. It is only 100km or so from Kiev, which is close enough for me, thanks. Other exciting activities included tank driving, and best of all, AK-47 shooting. Have a go at the world’s most popular automatic weapon!

At the hostel we have also met various fellow-travellers (the literal translation of “Sputnik” incidentally). These have included a Dutch/German girl and a Volga German. I have been very curious about meeting one of these – they are a German-speaking minority from the former Soviet Union about whom I have read but never seen in person. We went to see The Marriage of Figaro with them the other night at the opera house, but like much in Kiev this was not quite as expected. I was looking forward to real live opera, with all that “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!” and such, but this was actually the ballet version. So lots of very impressive jumping around in tights, but alas no singing.

We also spoke to a Dutch couple who were travelling towards Hungary by train, and a young pair from Moscow who were staying in the room next door; in fact, we had to go through their room to get to ours. They were the most fluent English speakers we have met in this country, and before leaving yesterday morning gave us a huge bag of Russian sweets. We should really have brought some Dutch liquorice and Scottish shortbread with us for such occasions. They also shared their vodka with us, and answered our many questions about the history of this country. This is quite a sensitive area, since Russian and Ukrainian perspectives on many things differ. Many Russians still consider Ukraine as part of the “mother country”, but plenty Ukrainians would see things differently. Of course this is a very familiar story.

Earlier in the week we saw something quite horrible. We were at the top of some steps leading down into the metro station, when a man fell from edge of the entrance above the bottom of the stairs, perhaps about seven or eight metres. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked properly he was lying face down on the concrete and not moving at all, with blood dripping out of his ear. I have no idea if he was alive or dead. People just stood and stared without much interest, in fact nobody even seemed to be bothered to call an ambulance. It was quite a surreal situation, as if I was watching a film; all I seemed to be able to notice as he lay there was his belly sticking out from between his trousers and his jumper, squashed outwards by the floor. This seems a very cold and heartless thing to say, but I was really too shocked at the time to respond rationally to what happened. Of course even now I keep thinking about it and getting the shivers.

One thing that goes without saying on such a trip is your wardrobe is quite small. I have enough clothes for a week’s cycling, and exactly one shirt, sweater, and pair of trousers for the other days. I had the idea that it would be nice to find a nice old shirt or something here from the 1980’s, something from the time when Western fashions were not available, and so I was quite delighted to hear of a huge clothing market on the other side of the city. When I got there it was indeed as described, but of course everything was of much more recent origin that I had hoped. Still I got something new to wear for the opera that was not really an opera. Interestingly there were quite a lot of black people at the market, about the first I have seen since leaving Amsterdam. I had no idea there were any here at all.

Yesterday, before leaving Kiev, I sent home a parcel of things which have proved to be unnecessary – one pair of shoes, extra gloves, and so on. As I had been expecting, this was no easy process; I had to fill in the same form four times (saves on photocopies I suppose), the package had to be opened, the contents inspected, and re-sealed, while no less than four staff members at the post office kept themselves occupied with the matter. Luckily there were no other customers at the time. It was for some reason necessary to apply a variety of marks to the parcel with stamps and ink, although these were too smudged to actually read. Strangely the form which I needed to fill in so many times was in Ukrainian and French, neither of which I can read. No-one seemed to care that I filled it in in English, and then only the half of it. I am very curious as to whether the parcel will ever actually arrive at its destination.

Of course I cannot avoid mentioning the food. This has been a bit more varied than earlier, with my favourite being the Ukrainian dumplings with cabbage or sweet cheese, and a sort of sauerkraut-like dish but with carrot and other vegetables. Sweet bread with poppy seeds is also nice. They also sell a huge range of dried fruits and nuts, my favourite being sugared cherries. Delicious.

As nice as it has been to hang around in Kiev and to have a fixed place to sleep for a few days, it’s now time to move on. There is no great rush now, since our Russian visa is not valid until the fifth of May. So as we head towards the border a relaxed week and a half awaits, with luck.

Yesterday’s arrival in Kiev did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. In all our rest-day cities so far, we have followed pretty much the same procedure: upon arrival, find the tourist information office, book as cheap a room as possible, and go there immediately. Clearly the zone in which this is possible is now behind us.

The map of Kiev which we had bought earlier in the week in Rivne didn’t indicate the location of any such office, and the electronic information points dotted around the city didn’t help either (ideal if you want the Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture, no use for hotels). So we went to the main railway station, with the idea that there might be something there. Nothing.

Whilst getting something to eat at a nearby café, I tried asking a security guard with the aid of a Russian dictionary. He phoned a friend (Millionaire style) who could speak English, from whom I learned that no such office existed.

After cycling round and engaging in various attempts at conversation which lead to nothing, we ended up at a hotel which had rooms, but at twice the price we could afford. Clearly Kiev is a little different to the Ukrainian countryside. They did however point out that the café next door had free wireless Internet, which allowed us to find the addresses of a few hostels.

When we arrived at where the first of these was supposed to be, we were most pissed off to find that it did not exist. The same was true for the second, by which point it was dark and I was beginning to feel the victim of a very stupid joke.

Not expecting much, we headed across town towards the third address. Again no bloody hostel, or so it appeared. Running out of options, we headed back to a hotel we had seen on the same street, in the hope that it would be cheaper than the first.

It was more than three times as expensive. As we stood in the street trying to think what could be done (I was ready to find a park and camp), a bloke standing next to the hotel said something along the lines of “you are looking for a place to stay, no?” in English. Ah, yeah.

“You know what a hostel is?” he continued, and as we furiously nodded he turned and said something to a hotel worker standing in the doorway. “Follow him”, the first guy said, and we thanked him very much.

The hotel guy lead us back along the street to where we thought there was no hostel, and down a back alley. It turned out to be there all along; it was just tiredness, the darkness, and pessimism borne of a wasted afternoon which had prevented us from finding it.

Finally we had somewhere to sleep and shower – a tiny room with a ventilator pipe which makes a very loud noise every time someone switches on the light of the bathroom next door, but a million times better than no room at all.

One disappointment remained, however. We have been cycling like mad people so as to reach Kiev and apply for our Kazakh visa today, Monday, in the hope of getting it by the end of the week. Unfortunately today is Orthodox Easter Monday, not next Monday as we had been lead to believe, meaning that the embassy is shut. This will likely mean we cannot leave until next Monday at the earliest, adding extra cost and eating into valuable cycling time – we really should reach the Russian border by 5th May, when our visa becomes valid. But there is nothing to be done about it.

Meanwhile, time to stop writing and see the sights. Also, it has been brought to my attention that the map and photos have been a bit messed up. Hopefully all should be working now.

The first day and a half in Ukraine had not left me very optimistic about the progress that we would be able to make, but after L’viv both the weather and the roads improved enormously. There is clearly a lot of investment being made in improving the main highways, although there is not always much traffic to drive on them. This can make cycling a peaceful but quite eerie experience, as for sometimes up to ten minutes at a time we have had four lanes of road to ourselves. Unfortunately this has become less and less frequent the closer we have got to Kiev. What is also nice is when they have built a whole new road next to an existing one so as to double the number of lanes, but where the new bit has not opened yet. Here we have had a piece of asphalt kilometres long and two lanes wide for us alone.

On the first night after L’viv, we camped as usual as far from sight as possible without straying too far from the road. Unfortunately Astrid was not feeling too well, and we also failed to make a very good start the next morning when our bikes, particularly mine, got completely stuck in the clay-like mud between our camping site and the road. What followed was a comical attempt to clean the mud off the wheels in a large pool of water at a nearby petrol station. This merely resulted in even more mud becoming attached to the wheels, brakes, and myself, while I was trapped balanced on tiptoe trying to avoid getting water in my shoes. The only way out of the situation without us both getting our shoes soaked was for Astrid to wade bare-footed into the muddy water and push me out. The petrol station workers clearly found this very amusing.

Although we had travelled not more than a few hundred metres from where we had camped, the sight of a little shanty town of wooden huts, caravans, and wood stoves nearby was enough to necessitate an early coffee break. There was also some sort of holy well next to all this, from which water streamed at great speed from a huge wooden barrel with a picture of Jesus on it. Luckily the water turned out to be not only holy but also clean, providing us with enough for cooking and drinking for the next few days.

On Tuesday, we had the time to take things easy and so stopped for a few hours in the town of Dubno. While we were there we visited an ancient castle, full of tunnels and underground rooms which of course got me very excited (all boys like tunnels and caves, you see). While there I came across a bunch of blokes welding things in a workshop, and asked them (by pointing and so on) if I could use their bench vice and hammer to fix the little metal thing which sits on top of our petrol stove so as to allow a small coffee pot to be used with it. It was good to be bending and hammering things again – I miss my tools and workshop in Amsterdam.

After this, while we were packing things in, we were approached by a man talking very fast at us and waving his arms around maniacally. This he continued to do despite it being obvious that we could not understand him at all. So we started shouting nonsense in Dutch and English at him, to try and illustrate the pointlessness of the situation. Some security guys from the restaurant next door came and tried to get him to go away, explaining that he was some sort of evangelist. We cycled off with him still talking, but even this did not get rid of him; ten minutes later by the bakers, there he was again. Hopefully we have lost him now.

Later the same day we reached Rivne. We had decided to spend a night in a hotel here in place of a proper rest day. We had some difficult actually finding any hotels, until we came across a new and expensive-looking one. With the intention of just asking if they knew any other (cheaper) hotels in town, we walked nervously into the gleaming marble hallway and up to the huge reception desk. Amazingly enough the price of a double room was so cheap that we ended up staying there, certainly the first time in my life that I have been able to book a room in such a place. I realise I keep going on and on about how things are getting cheaper and cheaper as we move east, but I must admit that it does feel nice to feel rich for a little while. It also makes you very aware of how obscenely rich we all are in the west, compared to the greater part of the world.

After having a much-needed shower (it doesn’t stop feeling amazing after so long without), we went for something to eat. The restaurant where we ate had a sort of cheesy 1980’s American theme to it (neon saxophone on wall, etc.), and luckily a menu in English. What was most bizarre about this was a page featuring a very detailed list of the prices that would need to be paid for anything damaged in the restaurant. Their clientele are presumably either very clumsy or else quite wilfully destructive.

When we returned to the hotel several hours later, something quite unexpected happened. We were approached by a man and a woman who had apparently being waiting in the lobby for us for quite some time. They were a reporter and photographer from a local newspaper (and also husband and wife), and had come to ask us about our journey through Ukraine. Of course we were happy to answer their questions, although I later regretted being as open as I had; I don’t really like the idea of too much attention be directed towards us. I am beginning to become aware that we are very visible in a way which was not the case earlier, simply because we are the only cyclists heavily-laden and equipped for such a journey to be seen on the roads of Ukraine. On the road we are constantly greeted by tooting of horns and friendly waves from truck drivers and construction workers, but I am a bit afraid of attention from either criminal types or indeed the authorities.

Despite this I am very happy with our time so far in Ukraine. This is the first place that really feels very far from home – the strange alphabet, horses working the fields, Soviet-era trucks and Ladas, Orthodox shrines next to the road, and of course a new and exciting range of food to eat. The other day I ate a delicious oily doughnut-like thing from a market with grated carrot and cabbage and mashed potato inside, much nicer than in sounds. Ukrainian pancakes with cottage cheese are also delicious, but my favourite thing so far has to be a chocolate bar called “Yo-Ma-Yo” which is quite indescribable, something like nuts, chocolate and nougat but slightly sour and cheesy as well. A further strange but tasty combination is smoked prunes with whipped cream.

There are of course many trivial but startling differences from home. I was in a shop in Rivne which proudly displayed cat food neatly arranged in a glass cabinet for which a key was required, and later saw a tank of water in a supermarket with live fish inside and a small net with which to select an unfortunate specimen to become your dinner. Also, you can buy plastic carrier bags which appear to be from one of many western shops and brands. The idea is presumably that you can make it appear that you have been to Hugo Boss, for example, without the expense of actually going there and buying anything.

Ukraine is not a very wealthy country. Of course we could get a room in a hotel with a shiny marble staircase for less than a youth hostel in Germany, because they people who work there earn a fraction of what they would in the West. It is easy to forget this.

Poverty and scarcity is neither romantic or pretty, but it does deliver some absurd and comical situations. For example, I was astonished the other day to see a group of people trying to shove a cow (well, a larg calf) into the back of a Lada. I didn’t know if I should have more sympathy with the people, or with the terrified beast.

In the West, people have dogs as pets and walk them regularly. Here, they roam hungry in the streets, or else people tie them to a stick with a chain and leave them until they grow insane with boredom and despair, having worn the circle of ground around the stick to dust. I find it hard not to feel depressed at such sights, and to remember that perhaps people have other priorities than the mental health of domesticated animals. But still I can’t accept it.

I have the idea that Ukrainians are quite lazy. I don’t mean in the sense of being bone idle, but more that although they do work and are helpful when needed, they would rather not. In the West, if you work in a shop or café, you are expected to keep yourself busy and be alert even when there are no customers or things to do. People here prefer to sit watching the TV while working, and although they will get up help you, they will sit back down again as quickly as possible afterwards. I am not critical of this, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of a more healthy and relaxed attitude towards work and life in general.

Yesterday we reached Zhytomyr, the last large town before Kiev. Here we took the bikes, which had become totally filthy, to be cleaned at a car wash. It is very nice to see them looking like new again, and should hopefully keep the rust at bay for a while yet.

Not so nice was the flat tyre I got just as we here heading our of the city, the first of the trip but inevitably not the last. Big sharp nasty nail, no idea how but it got stuck right through the inner tube and out the other side. Fixing it was not a problem, except that I immediately had three guys swarming round me being “helpful”. Of course they mainly just got in the way and I was also totally paranoid about what their intentions were, since I could clearly not keep an eye on our bags and fix the damn tyre. In the end it worked out OK and one even gave Astrid a keyring as a souvenir, although he kept saying “Euro, Euro” afterwards. I hadn’t asked for his help and wasn’t going to give him anything, and in any case we don’t have any bloody Euros. I don’t feel bad about being suspicious, I would act exactly the same way back home.

If all goes well and nothing else bursts, we should reach Kiev tomorrow. Here we’ll have to wait for a few days (hopefully not any longer) for our Kazakh visa, meaning a wee break from cycling and a chance to see some sights, laze around a bit, and of course wash some clothes. And ourselves.

Yesterday we reached country number four, Ukraine. This was a bit less straightforward than I would have liked, but all the same fine in the end.

But first something to sum up our ten days in Poland. The morning after writing my last message, we were invited in for tea and cake by the family in whose garden we had camped. This at least takes care of one regret that I had been concerned about, namely not having seen the inside of a house in Poland. Sometimes it can seem that our constant cycling, punctuated only by visits to cafés and supermarkets, gives us a very superficial view of where we are.

The cake and apple pie was home-made and delicious, cooked in a huge wood-fired stove which dominated one side of the kitchen. On the wall hung a picture of the Pope, this time the current German one and not the previous Polish one, whose greatly-enlarged portrait can be seen all over Poland.

Before we left, the husband who could speak German once again warned us about Ukraine, and insisted that we take some of the delicious cake with us. When we opened the packet later we discovered that there were also sandwiches inside, and some apples. This is certainly a very hospitable way of treating a couple of strangers who turn up unannounced wanting to sleep in your garden.

So, what is my opinion on Poland? What I wrote last week was fairly brutal in terms of describing the state of affairs there, but was no more than the truth. On the other hand, I am being quite harsh with Poland because I think it has a lot of potential. The only thing that separates here from where we come from are the rather unfortunate accidents of history that Poland has had to deal with during the last century (invasion, occupation, Soviet domination, etc.). I expect that things will continue to improve very rapidly here.

What I have liked have been the various sweet things I have eaten, Żywiec beer, plenty of empty forests to sleep in, and strangely enough the Polish road signs; they have an endearing, slightly clumsy cartoonish look. Certainly more interesting than the plain old western European ones.

On to Ukraine. This border was always going to be interesting, because it is the first real border of the journey so far, and the edge of the EU. That would mean guards, customs, and passport checks.

We had the very naive idea that we would just be able to cycle past the queues of cars, wave our passports, and sail on through. This was not to be the case.

The basic problem is that it was not allowed to cycle through this checkpoint. Instead, we would have to place our bicycles into some form of vehicle and be driven through. A border guard on the Polish side helpfully arranged for us and our bikes to ride inside the otherwise empty van of a man who was also queueing to cross the border.

The Polish guard was however not at all convinced that the person in the photo in my passport was really me, leading to more delays, and Astrid had the same problem on the Ukrainian side. Here there was also quite a lot of confusion and queueing, including when we needed to fill out immigration cards. They needed the address of the hotel where we would be staying, when of course we will not be staying in one. The man with the van gave us the name of a (possibly non-existent) hotel in Kiev to fill in just to get the thing finished, and at one point his small son even filled in part of my form to save time. This all worked out OK in the end, although to a Westerner used to open borders it did seem like a huge hassle for nothing. Plus it felt like cheating a bit, since we ideally want to cycle the whole way. 500 metres in a van won’t hurt I guess.

As we were finally leaving the border point, our driver, who of course could not speak English, thrust his mobile phone into my hand. To my surprise there was a voice on the other end speaking Dutch – a friend of the van driver. He asked me some questions about where we were going and whether his friend could give us lift to L’viv, which I politely declined, and expressed amazement when I explained that we would be cycling across the whole country. Before handing back the phone I asked him to give our thanks to our man with the van. A very indirect but still effective method of communication.

And then we were there. The former USSR. What immediately struck me as strange was the four-lane road in front of us with absolutely no traffic on it, save a Polish truck every few minutes. Also, there we suddenly no more tractors being used to work the fields, only horses. These two things together combined to make the whole place strangely quiet. Where the road is asphalt it is even worse than in Poland, whereas in other places it is made from huge slabs of concrete which I found quite okay to cycle over. There was very little traffic aside from a few very old and dented Ladas.

In Javoriv, the first town we reached, there was some more confusion whilst trying to get some money at the cash machine. The problem was that we had no idea how many of whatever the currency here is called is in one Euro. It turned out that it’s about ten, meaning that a pint of beer in the café where we ate later cost about 30 Eurocents. Today I had some and it’s delicious.

On the road near to where we camped last night there was a hotel on a small lake. I had the notion this morning to go swimming in it, but before doing so went into the hotel bar to ask if this was OK, with the aid of some pointing and hand gestures. “Yeah, sure”, was the answer I think, “as long as you have some swimming clothes on”. So I did. I am sure they thought I was nuts.

Soon after, we found ourselves cycling through a thunderstorm. This made the journey to L’viv, the first big city in the Ukraine, pretty horrible. The rain filled up all the holes in the road, meaning you were never sure if the pool of water you were about to cycle through was actually a hole 10cm deep. Not good for the bike and no fun at all.

On the way, we passed a very strange sight: old women mending the road with shovels and hot asphalt. Equality is one thing, but I wouldn’t really want my granny out in the cold and rain doing thins kind of work. I have no idea if this is a leftover relic of Soviet-era collective sharing of public works, or pure necessity because there is no-one else to do it.

As for L’viv itself, we didn’t stay long enough to see much of what looks like a pretty grey and uninteresting place. One other strange experience though was a visit to the supermarket: for some reason they choose to fill the shelves with loads of the same thing. I mean as in six shelves high and three metres long with one type of mayonnaise. And not only in one place; we were looking for Snickers and found huge amounts of them in three different parts of the store. I guess it’s better than the empty shelves of the old days – in fact maybe that’s why they do it.

One thing which has surprised me is how straightforward the Cyrillic alphabet is to learn. I had expected it to be as impossible as Arabic, but in fact it doesn’t take too long to remember that a “C” is actually an “S” and a “P” is an R” and so on. Of course there are lots of weird symbols which don’t look like anything at all in the Latin alphabet, but mostly they relate to a sound which is familiar.

The crappy weather and yesterday’s hanging around at the border mean that we are a bit behind schedule, so it’s time to get to sleep so as to be able to put in a good day tomorrow. This may be difficult since we are camped right next to some sort of railway yard where they are still moving trucks and engines about even at 11pm.

Oh, and that’s another thing. I didn’t realise until we had already been in the country for a few hours, but we are now in a different time zone: 2 hours ahead of GMT. Now it really feels like we are moving.

Monday was supposed to be my one relaxed non-cycling day of the week, but not for the first time things worked out less than ideally.

It all started out well, since we arrived in Cracow quite early on Sunday. This meant that some of the things we had to do could be done then. For example, I really needed to find a sports or outdoor store and buy some new shoes. The discovery a few weeks ago that only my newest and most expensive pair of trainers prevent pain in my knees meant that I had only one pair suitable for cycling, which is not really enough for ten months.

By mid-morning Monday I had found some decent shoes at a good price, and we had wandered round Cracow a bit and had breakfast. One thing that needed to be sorted was that the middle finger on my left hand had become swollen round the nail, and had got worse in the past few days. Better to get it seen to now, rather than later.

I asked at the hotel (actually a student halls with private rooms) where I could find a doctor,and they gave me the address of a medical centre.

When I got there I was told to come back in half an hour and “maybe the doctor will see you”. After half an hour there was no doctor, and I was told to go to a hospital on the other side of town. When I got there it took ages to find the emergency department, owing mainly to my inability to understand Polish. When I had stood in the queue for a while I was told that they could not help me, and that I would have to go to another medical centre much like the first one.

Of course I was already getting quite pissed off by this point, but since there was not really an alternative short of ignoring the finger, I went anyway.

At location number three things got even more complicated because no-one whatsoever could speak any English. What I managed to understand from the receptionist is that I needed to return at 6pm. This I did, at which point a doctor was present, who could also speak no English. German didn’t work either. She just sort of stared at me like I was an idiot, until a colleague who could speak a little English told me to come back the following morning at 8am and see the surgeon.

As frustrating as this was, at least it meant I could stop thinking about it for the rest of the evening. As can be imagined I was very sceptical if anybody was ever going to help me, or whether I would have to hack the damned thing off myself.

The next morning came, and sure enough I was told that they could not do anything about it there, but that the hospital across the street could maybe help. Here, after waiting around once again, hallelujah, I was seen by a doctor.

He knew immediately what it was (I forgot the medical term as soon as I heard it) and prescribed me antibiotics. He said that the thing would swell up quite large after a few days, which was naturally not really what I wanted to hear. When this happened I would need to visit a hospital again and get it cut open. “It is not ready”, he explained. Yippee, can’t wait.

I am reluctant to complain in this sort of situation, because it is after all my problem that I am in a country where I cannot speak the language. What is really annoying though is being passed around and told bullshit because no-one has the time or can be bothered to help you.

This is kind of the nightmare I had of what would happen if one of us got sick on this trip. In this case it was a pretty minor thing, but I would rather not think of what would happen if either of us were to get really ill or injured. Fingers crossed we don’t have to find out.

Meanwhile we have been back on the road for a few days and are spending our last night in Poland. I am currently sitting listening to the rain fall outside our tent, always a lovely sound when you are wrapped up warm inside it. It is pitched in the garden of a farmhouse which we came across while carrying out our usual evening strategy of looking for some secluded piece of forest in which to camp. As soon as we had got the tent pitched, the family who live here produced a set of chairs and a table and tea with sandwiches for us, and there followed as best a conversation as could be managed between us. The youngest daughter if the family was learning English at school and was able to talk a little, although the phrase book she had did not help very much; it was full of such sentences as “I’ll have a Scotch on the rocks, please”, “take these suitcases to my room”, and such like, which were not so useful at the time.

Later the husband of the oldest daughter, who could luckily speak German, arrived. He asked if we were worried about our safety further east, which freaked me out a little bit. Should we be? On the other hand he did say that the Germans consider the Poles as lying thieving no-goods, which they certainly do not appear to be to me, so perhaps they themselves just have some negative ideas about their neighbours to the east.

So, tomorrow afternoon then should see us cross the Ukrainian border, leaving the European Union behind and entering what was once the Soviet Union. Needless to say I am as curious as always as to what will be different there.

And here is a picture of a nun who was behind me in the queue at the first clinic in Cracow. The city is indeed full of nuns. I guess even they get sick from time to time, sore knees from praying or whatever.