Thursday, 16 August 2012

 

Start: Odessa 09:00

Arrival: Kiev 16:00

Total: 495 km

 

 

 

 

At night, our love hotel was quiet enough, no annoying music or rhythmic banging from the other rooms, but the persistent surring of some mosquitoes kept waking me up. If only they would peacefully land on my arm or leg, gorge themselves and be done with it. But no, they insisted on advertising themselves, buzzing around my ears with maddening perseverance. It was a long night.

 

Shortly after seven o'clock, we decided that we might as well make an early start and headed down to the breakfast room. Except for a lone coffee machine, the breakfast buffet was empty and none of the tables were set. Were we too early? We helped ourselves to some coffee and set down. The owner's son and another man were talking quietly at a table nearby. We waited patiently for someone to acknowledge us. Noone did. After fifteen minutes or so, I worked up the courage to walk up to them and ask, if there was any possibility to get something to eat. They explained that the breakfast was not ready yet and turned back to their conversation. Okay. We could wait.

 

"How about we pack our stuff into the car and come back later?," Sonia proposed after a while. "That way, we can set off right after we've eaten." Good plan. We took our time and shortly after eight o'clock, we were back at the breakfast room. Still no food to be seen. We sat down again. Again, they ignored us. Around 8:30 I asked the men once more, when we could expect to have breakfast as we wanted to be on the road soon. "After 9 o'clock", was the curt answer. He couldn't be serious! We would be more than happy to make do with some bread and butter. They must have that, seeing as they were also running a restaurant. He just shrugged his shoulders. I retired to our table, feeling quite foolish. After five more minutes, we finally got the hint. They wanted us gone. We got up and left. No love lost at this love hotel.

 

 

 

Soon we had left Odessa behind us, heading North on the E95. With Aleksey Gorshenov's voice drooling out of the loudspeakers, our mood improved with each kilometer. Being on the road reliably does that to me, even on an empty stomach. We spotted a shopping mall and decided to get some fruit, yoghurt and bread. Park car, grab handbag, storm in, grab some food. At the storming-in stage, we were abruptly stopped in our desire to find some nourishment by a security guard barking orders at us. In Ukrainian, or maybe Russian, in any case we didn't understand what he wanted, only that we were refused entry to the store. He pointed at a pile of vouchers on the table next to the entrance. We finally figured out that you have to be a "member" at this very ordinary-looking supermarket in order to be allowed to do your shopping here. Odd. We explained that we were happy to purchase a membership card, if that's what it took. But for that you needed a valid Ukrainian ID. All this sounds really strange, and maybe we got it all wrong, but by now the security guard was quite nice and happy to explain the situation in Russian-English pidgin. When he understood that we were tourists, he made an exception for us: He issued us a temporary card for free and let us in.

 

Back at the car, we happily munched our baguette, apricots, bananas and yoghurt purchased at the membership-only store and, stupidly enough, did not think of taking a picture of the place. All I remember is that this was somewhere not too far from Northern Odessa, on the main highway out of town.

 

The highway to Kiev was in better condition than we had feared. Unfortunately, there were no signs telling you about the speed limit and I was paranoid about giving the Ukrainian police any excuse to stop us. So at first I drove uncharacteristically slowly. But soon I changed strategies: when in doubt, drive like the locals. If we were passed by more than one fast car, we sped up, if the cars slowed down, we slowed down as well. It worked like a charm. There were a couple of traffic controls, but none of them stopped us. After a while, we noticed a pattern: right after a settlement or bus stop, there was a big chance for the police to be stopping the very fast cars, so we slowed down at this point, and nobody bothered us. Which convinced me that the foreign drivers complaining about excessive police controls in Eastern Europe are probably just driving too recklessly. I'm definitely not a timid driver but I never once got stopped and fined in any former Soviet republic.

 

After the town of Uman, the road got a lot worse. The many "Uvaga" signs were well-founded: one needed to drive carefully, what with all those bumps and potholes and crazy tarmac crests. And to top it all off, it started to rain heavily, for the first time on our journey. Luckily, right before we arrived in Kiev, the rain stopped again. We made a last pit stop on a hill outside of Kiev and enjoyed a magical rainbow right above the city. The heavens smiled upon our journey, so Kiev, here we come!

 

The capital of Ukraine has about three million inhabitants, and back in 2012, I was not yet used to driving through megacities. Therefore, I had chosen a small family-run hotel in the southern suburbs as our basecamp for exploration. Sadly, the maps we had printed out were very basic and we got lost several times on the way. After almost an hour of driving around, ending up twice almost in the centre of town anyway, tired and dizzy with disorientation, we finally found the place. It had gotten brilliant reviews on the internet, and they were not exaggerating: the hotel was beautiful, small and quiet, and the younger family members spoke excellent English and were super friendly. What a difference to the night before! We were looking forward to spending two nights at this place and especially I was looking forward to a relaxed day without driving, just walking about town.

 

As it was not too late in the afternoon, we decided to do a bit of local sightseeing straight away. There is a park in the Southeastern part of Kiev not far from the famous Cave Monastery. On a hill overlooking the Dnepr stands the magnificent statue of Родина-мать, Mother Homeland, holding high a sword and shield in defense of her city. There were several such statues erected in the Soviet Union in commemoration of the fight against the invading German forces during World War II. I love the grandeur and spirit of Soviet architecture, so I really wanted to see this.

 

The girl at our hotel called us a taxi which brought us to the edge of the park. We walked up the stone stairway to the base of the statue. The base alone is much taller than a person and on it rests an even taller conic pedestal upon which stands the huge female form, proud and straight in long, flowing robes. It is a glorious sight to behold and, in my opinion, much more inspiring than the Gëlle Fra, the Golden Lady in the city of Luxembourg, but then my dear hometown is also much smaller than the ancient capital of the Kievan Rus.

 

There were many other statues and tanks displayed in the park and families walked around, enjoying the evening sun. It was wonderful to be out and about after a long day of driving and we marveled at the splendid view of the sun slowly setting over the golden cupolas of the Orthodox monastery to the Northwest and the large, lazy river to the East. Before it was getting too dark, we clambered down to the banks of the Dnepr to a large monument of the mythical founders of the city, the brothers Kiy, Shshek, Khoriv and their sister Lybed, who are said to have lived sometime in Late Antiquity, long before prince Oleg of Novgorod incorporated the town into the lands of the Rus in the late 9th century. The sculpture, a nine-meter-long boat holding the four siblings, was erected in 1982, in commemoration of the 1500th anniversary of the town.

 

It was getting late, and we were getting hungry. At the southern end of the park, we found, quite unexpectedly, a beautiful Indian restaurant. We were the only patrons, but the place smelled deliciously of naan bread and spices. We ordered a dish of lentils for me and a chicken curry for Sonia. The prices were a bit steep, but then this was a capital city after all. When the food arrived, we realised that not only were the portions really small, but there was no rice included. Strange, but quickly remedied. We ordered two portions of rice. They brought us two tiny bowls, six euros each. I ate every single grain of rice and lentil on the plate and felt even hungrier than before. Considering the small ration, this was by far the most expensive Indian meal we'd ever had!

 

But no matter, we were in Kiev, we were on holiday, we didn't want to think about money. What did it matter that the taxi back to the hotel asked us more than twice as much as the guy that had brought us to the statue, why would we begrudge the driver his seven euros. Back at our cosy hotel, I quickly fell asleep and, if I had any dreams that night, it probably was of Lybed, serving her brothers a yummy dish of piping hot lentils.