Promenade-2007: Kiev—Odessa—Nikolaev—Tsiurupynsk—Mariupol

July 25–30, 2007

A fairly cruddy road runs from Moscow to the border — the Kiev trunk road. I arrived at the checkpoint at about five in the morning and was fifth in line.

Their HR policy is striking: the best and the most polite are sent to work at the airport, the middling ones at railway stations, and the rest at road border crossings.

About forty kilometres past the border on the Ukrainian side there are roadworks stretching for roughly one hundred kilometres. It’s suggested we circumvent them by taking a two hundred kilometre detour. No need for any such nonsense, you can buy an entrance pass from the local cops for about two hundred Russian roubles — that way you can power through all of the construction equipment, dump trucks, and asphalt piles, Kiev-bound.

You might have to renew your pass in the Chernigov region — Sumy indulgences are not valid here. From time to time you see cops lying in wait for locals, for whom the detour is terribly inconvenient. Y ou need to tell these cops that you’ve already bought your travel pass — they’ll wave you through without charging extra.

The last of the romantic hopes about the gains of the orange revolution have been dashed once and for all — the cops start talking money even when all you asked them for was directions.

Ukrainian traffic cops address you using your patronymic instead of your first name. Having studied your driver’s licence, they all say: “Well, Andreevich, the road is closed here”. Either they’re consummate first name-swallowers, or this is some sort of mystifying tradition.

Country roads are lovely because of the timeless landscapes.

They’ve put in crosses at the entrances to towns and villages in a bout of Orthodox ardour. The particularly pious ones have crucifixions by the entrance.

A surprising feature in the South: they don’t just hang up a wreath on the roadside spot or next to the pole where a driver died, no, they erect a proper, albeit small, memorial. It looks a great deal like a grave, although surely the body isn’t actually buried here.

Kiev

It’s the first time I’ve come right up to the Motherland monument complex on the hill.

Déjà vu:

It turns out that the Mother’s shield bears the USSR’s coat of arms. Meanwhile, there’s a cast-iron sculptural narrative, a true masterpiece, by her left hand. Usually all of these victory monuments provoke despair and disappointment — on the one hand, what they’ve built is a piece of shit, on the other hand, you can’t just blow it all up, because it was deemed sacred from the get-go.

The cast-iron part is made up of two parts — the bad and the good. The bad bit has the soldier who’s further away turning his back and shooting at the soldier in the foreground.

This brings us to the most interesting bit. There are absolutely marvellous, very convincing groups of sculptures on both sides of the concrete grotto’s walls. These seemingly depict the feats and suffering of the people on the home font. Of course, it’s better to see it with your own eyes. Also, they’ve got loudspeakers playing “Arise, vast country”, a Soviet war song, on loop.

There are reversible middle lanes in some streets — first one lot of cars goes, then the other.

It’s a shame that Ukrainians are considered greedy — they’ve spared no expense for drivers here.

And they’re big-hearted in their treatment of pedestrians too.

They’ve even got an entire depot filled with barrels of kvas.

They ask for so little in return...

Love the Ukraine!

Chernobyl, Pripyat

There’s a separate story about these — after you.

The road from Kiev to Odessa is generally bearable. It’s here that I learnt where to pour in the engine oil and got to grips with the basic principles of how to top it up. It turns out that you shouldn’t pour in engine oil like you do windshield washer fluid — right up to the top. There’s always something new to learn, although I don’t plan to do any advance swotting up on cars. The last 50 kilometres to the city — bumper to bumper traffic, plus roadworks.

Odessa

They’ve stuck in a cross just before Odessa as well. It was an addition to the existing star and anchor. Now everybody’s happy.

The city is still just as splendid.

Just as unpredictable.

Just as surprising.

Nikolaev

Aliens are doing the roadworks.

Tsiurupynsk

In this fine Southern town you see signs rarely found outside their natural habitat, which is Scandinavia (including Greenland). In those parts it signifies a museum or any other cultural site. What it means here, in the Ukrainian steppe, is anybody’s guess.

Mariupol

There are excellent wide-branching traffic lights in Mariupol.

The border near Novoazovsk turned out to be impassable — there were about two days worth of cars standing in line. Moreover, it was actually the Russian side causing the hold-up and preventing the Ukrainians from making some extra money selling express passes. It turns out that about 90 kilometres away there’s another road to Russia, which no one uses.