Ukraine. Stretch no.8. cont'd.

Saturday 19 September 2015. Day 1.

Passes in the Carpathian Mountains often hit 900 m.a.s.l., as here, a couple of hours south of my starting point Uzhok. Looking almost straight to the south, no traffic but millions of sharp stones nearly penetrating my soft shoes.

Sanity is usually quite satisfactory in the town and village as well as along the roads. PET bottles are collected in recycling centers, which in a village can be like this plain construction. 

In Poland - the main roads being in perfect conditions - glass and plastic bottles and containers were abundant along the B-road tossed out of the car windows. 

In Ukraine the road sides are normally in good condition: no garbage, but the roads are in a terrible state. The traffic is zigzagging to avoid all the pot holes. 

Many families had gathered for the weekend working the land or repairing their houses. At 3 p.m. temperature was down from +30°C to around a more pleasant +20°C and I began to fancy the overnight place in Zhdenijevo. In Roztoka I spotted these bee hives. 

                                     

In the most remote and modest village you will find spectacular new orthodox churches in white and blue colours with golden cupoles and decorations like here in Roztoka.

Today's surprise. - Where am I to stay overnight? I showed my www.booking.com print with the address Selo Pashkovtsy 19,Zhdenevo. to a man in the street, where this church of wood and tinplate roof stood, in the village of Pashkovtsy, whereas the center of Zhdenevo, the second part of the address, was a further five kms down the road. - You just passed it, the man said in Ukrainian.

I turned back 50-100 meters and entered this building which looked like a simple but solid place to stay overnight. Some sort of a combined youth hostel and info centre for the adjacent nature reserve, I believed. But it turned out to be only a centre for the Forest Agency. 

My encounter with a Saturday afternoon drunk unhappy family man did not change that fact. Sorry, he failed to show me the right house another 100 meters up the road. I got annoyd and walked on until I got a lift in a car to Zhdenevo. It turned out to be a rewarding mistake. Instead of a private house, here I could stay more comfortably in a hotel with restaurant. The night brought a storm with millions of lightenings and thunder.

to be cont'd

Thursday 17 September 2015. Stretch no. 8.

Getting to the starting point on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border took me two days of travelling.
 
After a mere 1,5 hour flight to Warszawa Chopinska Airport, I strolled for the rest of the day the streets of downtown Warsaw taking an espresso double at Intercontinental Hotel, eating a generously stuffed pizza

on re-opened Swietokrzyska street and...

having a late coupe of thé and a muffin at the Green Caffe Nero...

 on Aleja Jana Pawla II, where I was mazed by this giant wall art

and near the train station these to giant buildings, one a quite new geometric construction and...

...the other, Palace of Culture, a donation by a neighbouring country after WWII.

before I finally could border the night train for Przemysl departing at midnight. 

Friday 18 September 2015. 

Ukraine is a big country of large distances especially between east and west as this map clearly shows. Most areas are lowland east and west of the important river of Dnepr. Only in the very far west, the Carpathian mountains you will find altitude above +1000 meters. 

To find MY ROUTE of walking through Ukraine look for the shortcut between the south-east corner of Poland and the north-west corner of Romania. 127 kms. Less some kms by bus and hitchhiking I walked probably less than 100 kms, When temperature was not above +30°C it was raining.

The sharp part of the Ukrainian -Polish border stems from a end of WWI dividing line proposal called Curzon after the then (1919) British Foreign secretary Georges Curzon. As can be seen from the map below After WWII the Soviet Union claimed a further piece of land that had belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for centuries  -  and to the Czechoslovakian Republic between the two WW  -  but which was extremely strategic for SU's access to its new buffer states. 

Border crossings between Poland and Ukraine are not many and there is none in the very corner where I ended my walking in May. Thus, I needed first to head east by bus and then catch the night train from Lviv to Solotvino (= the end station that happended to be my prime goal for this stretch on the Romanian border). There was some confusing moment at the Przemysl PKP bus station as to which bus I should get on to. No one really spoke any other language than Polish or Russian or Ukrainian. But in one of the buses I tried a man promised to bring me across the border and to the train station at Sambir. At Medica border crossing we left the bus and simply walked across passing controls in five leaving Poland and five minutes entering Ukraine. The car, truck and bus lanes were endless and it would probably have taken many hours to get through sitting in a vehicle. At Sambir I had to wait another seven hours for the night train that ultimately brought me to Volosyanka. Met by the Recreation Complex Uzhanski Kupeli we had to get cleared through this off border control post.

Saturday 19 September 2015. Day 1.

A bright morning. A road in the mountainous landscape of much beauty and no traffic. I am free. Again.

to be continued...  :)