Marooned in Kiev
Having failed miserably at my covert action into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone I pushed on to Kyiv.
Now the truck has done well and has yet to let me down….
But I have punctured the muffler box with my off road fun and as I crossed the Ukraine border the front brakes started to grind….
Now these were replaced just before I left and brakes should last about 10,000 miles…
Or apparently 6000 miles if you tow a trailer across the fjords of Norway and the wastes of northern Russia……
Damn.
Anyway, Kyiv is pretty….though I’m slightly agoraphobic these days and it’s a bit big and busy for my tastes…and I booked into a £12 per night hostel which is just a non stop cabaret of travellers and nutters also wandering through the Ukraine….so never boring!
So I am left high and dry in Kyiv waiting for DHL to deliver my brake pads from the UK.
All part of the fun I keep telling myself.
On the way to Kyiv the usual Soviet-style memorials…this one in the middle of the road keeping an eternal watch along the direction from which the Germans invaded
and for some unexplained reason on the Russian side of the everything was still snow-covered whereas 25 km within of the border on the Ukraine side it looked like this….
and the roads were suddenly very European…thank you god!
and finally the Dneiper River which cuts Kyiv in half
Though I was quite surprised to still see Lenin dominating the city squares and parks still……I mean its not like there was too much love for the Soviet system in nationalist Ukraine but it seems like old Vladimr Ilyich is still on the approved list.
