A monkey on my back

Absolutely shattered after getting off a direct 25 hour night train to Lvov. Honestly it was one of the worst things i have done not only because in third class you are in close confines in a hot carriage with 49 other people but unlike hopefully the trans siberian there is nothing to do apart from listen to my ipod and no one to talk to. Hey ho thats what you get for coming to places like this.

After chisinau i had taken the 4 hour bus to Odessa the party capital of Ukraine on the black sea. I arrived at the time i hate most 2.30 in the morning. Its too early too stay up and not pay for a night in a hostel but too late to make good use of a bed. Anyway i found the hostel after collecting about 20 helpers on the way from the station and after waking Luba the manager up crashed until midday. The last couple of weeks haven't been that great weather wise but when i woke up it was already 33 degrees. A stroll around was all i could muster after an attempt to send some post home. Take 1 ended with me trying out the classic english tactic of speaking english louder, take 2 i tried in my incredibly limited russian no good. Take 3 i walked back to the hostel and got Luba to write it down in Ukranian. Literally nobody speaks even a word of english here its a nightmare and to make it worse everything is written in cyrillic but all the maps are in english, impossible to compare.

By the time i had got back to the hostel some Kazakhs had arrived and were already into there second bottle of vodka. After much persuading lol they agreed to go out after the Klitschko fight at midnight. After a couple of bars we all headed out to Arcadia beach where there are lots of clubs on the sea front. We were there till about 5am before going back to the hostel to continue the party. Im not entirely sure but i think i went to bed at around 8am as the sun was already quite warm.

Not surprisingly the rest of the day for me was a complete write off although despite having drunk maybe half of what the others had i was by far the worst. By around 4pm i managed a walk to the beach before the second night out began. The kazakhs sergei, sergei, oleg and andrei were already at the vodka and had cooked pimini for everyone which was amazing. Another english guy josh also arrived and we went out for a second time this time just around the local Odessa bars. It was another late one, the thing about drinking till the next day you wake up more drunk than when you went to bed, its a bit of a shock to the system.

The beach was again the best option and despite the port nearby i took a swim in the clean but absolutely freezing black sea. That night i took the 12 hour night train to Sevastopol in the Crimea. Ukraine really isn't the best place for rushing around or trying to squeeze in an extra place or two as everything is a night train or a full day from everywhere else. Sevastopol is the home of the Russian fleet and is covered in ornamental parks and statues. Again everything was in Cyrillic but by now i have managed to work out not how to speak it but at least to read it. I was at the hostel with Chris (ozzie) and Adam (kiwi) who were a good laugh with the national rivalry banter. We headed out on a day trip to Object 221 which took 15 years to build and was due to be the command center for the black sea fleet. Unfortunately the USSR collapsed a year after it was finished and it was never used. The place is well off the beaten track and consists of four story building inside a mountain with ramps you could drive a truck up. It was pitch black inside so we had to use head torches to explore. This was followed by the submarine base in balaklava. Until 1996 Sevastopol was a closed city and balaklava was completely off limits. All this ex soviet stuff once the most secret places on earth you can now just wander round.

The Crimea is at the cross roads of many civilizations so we visited Bakchasaray which used to be the old Tatar capital when they ruled the area. The city has a completely intact Tatar palace which was well worth a vist as well as a cave monastery in an nearby cliff and a cave city right on the summit of an escarpment that we had to hike up to. Despite being well out of the way the crimea was well worth a trip although for the entire 25 hour train journey to lvov i was cussing the unplanned detour.