January 1, 2014
Last day in Ukraine: What hard times dear Santa has fallen on
When I woke up the house was quiet and I crept past the sleeping Sergi into the kitchen and saw with some relief that my tormentor and everyone else had left. I woke Sergi up as I carried my bags through his room and he got up to see me out. I assume the second bottle of vodka had been finished off and my host had not long been in bed, for a closer personification of death would be hard to imagine. He said goodbye through red eyes and shut the door. I was free!
I was very happy to be out of that house. The streets were empty and the early morning air felt crisp and beautiful and new. It was the beginning of a brand new year and everything felt possible. I didn't really know where I was but that was a small detail. I remembered the way back to the centre of town from where I hoped I could find my bearings. There were very few people around in the centre of town but a group of young guys and girls came up to me and said hello and asked about my trip and wished me a Happy New Year. They had celebrated the New Year on a train from Kiev and were only staying in Chernivtsi for a day before returning. I didn't really understand why. But that didn't matter because they were really friendly and nice and after the previous evening it was a welcome boost to restore my confidence in the Ukranian people. I took their photo and said I would post it to my blog, so here they are:
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I got my bearings and headed out of the city to the east towards Moldova. I was skirting the Romanian border and I considered cutting across a corner of this country to Moldova but that would have meant taking smaller roads and I wasn't sure if the minor border crossings would know what to do with an international passport (apart, perhaps, for asking for a bribe.) So I stuck with the route east avoiding Romania and the road went through a few small towns and at the start of one of these I saw Santa Claus. It was quite a relief to see him alive, although it looked as if he had lost weight, understandable after all that he has been through I suppose. I wanted to thank him for the sock and the pretty girl, particularly the pretty girl. But he was on rollerblades and was being pulled along by a reindeer thinly disguised as a motor scooter so it was difficult to keep up with him. When I did I was flabberghasted to see he had joined a group of five or six more Santa Clauses on roller blades. Which was the real Santa? I couldn't tell, so I stood and watched as a car drove along towards them and two of them held a pole across the road to force the car to stop. I continued to watch, aghast, as the rest of them rolled over to the driver's window and, so it seemed, demanded money to allow the car to pass. What hard times dear Santa has fallen on.
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As I continued along the road there were more and more people dressed in costumes, ranging from insane doctors to insane goblins to insane cuddly white bears. They were all forcing cars to stop and requesting something from them in order to continue. It may have been money, it may have been candy, I can't be sure. What was certain was that this was some rather extraordinary Ukrainian New Years Day custom that may be considered to be something along the lines of Halloween Trick-or-treating for adults, or legalised mugging, or illegal road tax enforcement, depending on your viewpoint. Perhaps understandably not all of the cars seemed to be getting into the spirit of things and I've never seen a group of Santa Clauses scatter so quickly as I did when a coupe accelerated directly towards them at full speed.
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There were other festivities going on too, traditional music and dancing and so on and some parade-type vehicles going along the road, and people outside watching it all. I rather wondered whether they might have mistaken me for part of the parade, they certainly stared at me as if I was. And perhaps the masked bandits did too, for none of them ever forced me to stop, though I would have loved them too if only so I could have found out exactly what the hell was going on.
As the day drew to a close I was approaching the Moldovan border and could even see the lights of the border point ahead of me. I preferred to wait until morning and daylight to cross into a new and unknown country and so I threw up my tent and camped at the apex of three countries; Ukraine, Moldova and Romania.
UKRAINE SUMMARY:
Time: 12 days
Distance: 440 kilometres
Best bits: Christmas in Lviv!!! Seeing Hanna, adopting a dog, meeting lots of great people!
Worst bits: Leaving Hanna, abandoning a dog, meeting one crazy drunk idiot!
Top tip: If you drive a car on New Years Day in Ukraine make sure you have lots of spare change.
1/1/14 - 62km
2/1/14 - 82km (2km in Ukraine)
Today's ride: 64 km (40 miles)
Total: 11,549 km (7,172 miles)
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