Motorhome Trip to Russia

Day 39: Sunday 20th September

A lovely bright morning and our overnight stopping place was peaceful and beautiful – this is what wild camping is all about. We have about 120km to drive to reach the Moldova-Ukraine border. Moldova north of Balti is just lovely, with clean and cared for villages, some beauty spots and a general feeling of rural peace. Many people, the further north you go, get around in horse-drawn carts or on bikes (which we have discovered in 2010 is very Romanian). We come across wells at regular intervals (in some villages each house has its own well) and people can be seen carrying their morning pail of water back home. We fill up one 5-litre bottle with water from a communal well, not without some difficulty – you have to control the reeling of the wire otherwise the bucket gets buckled on its way back up – a steep learning curve.

 

Then on to the border crossing at Mamalyga. Leaving Moldova is quite quick and simple but entering Ukraine is another matter. How many kiosks does it take to get a motorhome into Ukraine? Five, or is it six? It is at the third one that we come unstuck. A very polite, relatively pleasant uniformed man tells us (a) the insurance we bought at Port Kavkaz isn’t valid for Ukraine, only for Russia – which is wrong – there had been no problem at Kerch; and (b) that we should have two Moldova stamps on our passports for entering and leaving Moldova, and, true, they are conspicuous by their absence. In the end, after much altercation, at one point aided by a car driver with some English, he simply gives us one Moldova stamp each and passes us through. The official at the next kiosk smiles at the pragmatic solution. On reflection they must have had to do that often enough before, otherwise why would they have a stamp that doesn’t belong to them?!

 

As we passed through the Moldova/Ukraine border there was a convoy of about ten German motorhomes going through in the opposite direction. Fraternal waves exchanged.

 

The roads in Moldova were not perfect but were generally of a higher standard than Russia. Ukrainian roads in this eastern part of the country are even worse than elsewhere. Shake, rattle and roll are not fun terms to use but very accurate descriptions of the experience.

 

The so-called ‘by-pass’ around Ternopol is a disgrace with speeds down to 5-10 kph and buses, trucks and cars weaving from side to side of the wide road in attempts to avoid the worst of the holes, cracks and huge ridges. A short while later – having picked up speed on a relatively good stretch – we sustain our worst damage of the trip, hitting a double bump at around 20 kph, sending a Nivea sun cream bottle up out of the rack to land top-end first on the laminated counter, the hard plastic lid making a half-inch hole in the laminate as it found a weak spot in the honeycomb beneath.

 

We see a Camping sign 3 km south of Czernovcy, but it is unclear where/what it relates to.

 

We are clearly not going to get close to Lviv today and so, with the sun blindingly low in the sky directly in front of us, we seek out our next stopover spot. This we find by pulling off the road and stopping between a clutch of houses and some kind of factory on an open field about 300 metres across.

 

I feel quite tense and stressed after today’s driving over such bad roads and latterly into the setting sun but we have a pleasant evening and see another beautiful clear night sky – absolutely splendid, the very best of the holiday with the Milky Way clearly visible.