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Post by dionysius on Sept 2, 2012 19:26:05 GMT
Will she or won,t she? The border post on the Ukrainian/ Polish border and smiling frontier officer,a blonde, is endlessly examing my passport from cover to cover and back again, scans it through the machine a few times, checks the monitor, puts the passport under a UV lamp and does the same to all of the visas, asks her supervisor, makes a telephone call. A queue builds up back along the fenced in walkway(Ukraine kept its wire fence on its western frontier) but the people behind are good humoured. The problem seems to be that my passport expires in early November. Should I be admitted? That is her descision. Some gentle questioning follows. Where are going to? Lviv Have you friends there? No Why do you gp there Tourist She flicks through the passport mentally noting the many stamps from many countries. She puts down the passport and her hand drifts tothe stamping machine, selects a page, and....Yes, down it goes. I am in. Denis
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Post by mactennis on Sept 2, 2012 20:02:39 GMT
well done hope you get out same wayj
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Post by dionysius on Sept 9, 2012 20:22:02 GMT
Ukraine is a huge land that rolls on and on inticing invading armies, wandering tribes and swallowing them up and the same seemed to be happening to me. For days, it seemed, I spent most daylifgt hours on minibuses, or waiting for them, bumping over potholed roads (try to imagine roads nearly as bad as one one leading to my house from the Six Cross Roads Roundabout extending for miles and miles) never geting to the high mountains. Then, one day I awoke from heat induced slumber and saw that we were in a valley, one with spruce covered steep slopes and youthful rivers shattering their slabby beds. The bus came to a stop at the alpine setting of Vorukta village and finally I was in the high country of Ukraine.
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Post by dionysius on Sept 12, 2012 19:12:14 GMT
The gleaming golden domes of the Ortodox Church and even more facinating wooden church at Vorukta lured me away the minor turnings to the gravel road to the mountains;but find it I did and off I went savouring that wonderful moment at the start of every expedition when I am in a new land walking into new mountains. A young couple, he wearing a red football jersey, she fash :(ionally dressed walking along a track with a cow; the comparative youth of the mountain farming couples in Ukraine was striking. More people, off all ages, were saving the hay, by hand up on a hillside, where beneath them I found the correct turn-off into the mountains on a bull-dozed track. Although evening time men were working in the woods felling trees and having trimmed off the branches by hand were using horses to drag out the logs. Nearing dusk I reached the top of an alpine meadow with table and bench, and an amount of litter, but the grass was clean and level for my tent. Getting water required a considerable drop and this was a feature of my first camps on the Chornohorna ridge.
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