28/07/08
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Wild goose chase in Odessa
Odessa - about 315 miles, and 2172 miles in total. This morning, Anneke and I had set out early for the Chernobyl Museum, only to find it closed for its monthly clean. We got to see the ambulance, fire engine and armourerd personnel carrier, veterans of the cleanup operation, parked outside, the ambulance now being used as a warm sunroom by two cats. Very frustrating - almost tempted to go back to Kiev later in the trip, but it will wait for another day.
Anneke went back to the airport and I inched my way out of Kiev through the static, smelly traffic, and due South on the E95 highway to Odessa. Outside the city, the road was nicely surfaced, the traffic light and the going easy. The scenery consisted of endless fields stretching to the horizon in every direction. Halfway down, I ventured off onto a local lane winding though these fields and some villages, for a change of scene. Most of Ukraine is fabulous agricultural land, seen as a breadbasket by Stalin. He used his policy of agricultural collectivisation (i.e centralizing the production and distribution of food throughout the Soviet Union) as an excuse to starve any national spirit out of the Ukrainians in the early 1930s - the enormous grain collection quotas that Stalin imposed on the region resulted in a famine known as the Holodomor. It's estimated that 7 million Ukrainian peasants died as a result of this - you can read more about it here .
I arrived in Odessa at 6.30pm and soon realised that, yet again, my directions to accommodation were completely useless. After 2 hours of fruitless searching, I asked a taxi driver to drive to the supposed address while I followed him. There followed a hair-raising chase around the rapidly darkening Odessa streets, running 3 red lights and straight in front of a tram. He left me outside a block of flats in middle of rough housing estate with no street lights. Nobody answered my knock on the door of the named apartment, but there was a mobile phone number on piece of paper. I called the number - the hostel owner, an Algerian, turned up in his car about 10 mins later. There followed another, more sedate chase through the pitch-dark Odessa streets to a 2-room apartment buried in the depths of a dank block. There were 12 beds packed into the apartment, and everyone there was drunk. The owner paid someone in the street to watch over my bike. I went to the supermarket on the corner, bought some cheese and beer, and headed back to join in the fray.
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