söndag 1 november 2015

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...  :)



Inga kommentarer:

Skicka en kommentar