The Wild East

"Me and Taylor were the only foreigners on board"

We arrived in Vilnius on a cloudy Sunday afternoon. I was a little nervous of what I would find. After all, this was to be my home for the next year. (Vilnius is a really nice city and I have absolutely no regrets about spending a year of my life here- September 2003.)
We still needed to recover and opted for a quiet night. The evening was uneventful apart from a BMW doing a 180° handbrake-turn, ignoring a set of red traffic lights in the process. WE headed back to the Electros Trinklai, our cheap hotel, and watched “Trukin’ Africa” on a British travel channel. Taylor had done a similar expedition the previous year and could really empathise with the charaters. Our favourite was a Mancunian with huge teeth, who had a habit of contradicting himself. “poor little sod...” he remarked when it was decided a goat would be slaughtered, but then he expressed his disatisfaction with the meagre quantity of food available.
Monday was a wash-out. The KGB museum was closed and it rained heavily all afternoon. On the spur of the moment I went to visit my place of work for the next year. Summer 2002 was the hottest summer on record in Lithuania. Typically, me and taylor were there for the rare few bad days of the summer.

The next day we visited the KGB museum,most people are fairly horrified by it. The contents were grim, but perhaps no worst than in any other post-Soviet country. The museum had a very similar message to the KGB museum in Tartu, Estonia.
That night we ate in a Georgian restaurant.

Wednesday
Trakai- a medeval castle 25km west of Vilnius. The day was cool, windy and dull and me and MT, dressed appropriately in sandals, shorts and T-shirts shivered the whole day. I noticed a few smirks in our direction by people comfortably dressed in jumpers and long trousers. All throughout 2002-03 Lithuanians talked about the hot summer. I think we were just unlucky, there were 3 cold days in 3 months, we got 2 of them...
The castle, renovated in 1974, was very impressive actually. Tunnels, galleries, drawbridges, all built surrounded by a lake. There was plenty to keep us entertained for hours, including a shooting gallery. I couldn’t hit a barn door.
I have no recollection what we did when we got back, probably went into the Pub (Prie Universiteto), a British-run establishment which I am very familiar with, though it’s nothing like a British pub. Our time in Vilnius had come to an end and we left for Warsaw on the overnight bus.

Thursday
As usual Mark slept well and I slept badly, I was afraid the whole way. The driving was erratic even by eastern European standards, I kept thinking the bus was about to crash. Arrived in Warsaw at 8am. Me and taylor had been here twice before, got complacent that we knew exactly what we were doing and promptly got lost in a bleak suburb when the tram made an unexpected turn. Two long and tiring hours later we finally made in into the city centre.
We spent the day re-acquainting ourselves with the ‘sights’ of Warsaw (very few), following people dressed-up as mugs of beer, and went to inquire about the Poland-Ukraine border crossing at the Brit embassy. The woman didn’t even seem to know where Ukraine was and was totally useless. There is now a Marks and Spencer store in Warsaw, which wasn’t here in 2000. Warsaw seemed slightly cheaper than in 2000.
At 1700 we made our way back to the bus station and sat in a cafe while we waited for our bus at 18.45. the timing wasn’t ideal, we would arrive in Lviv at 5am and I wondered what we would do until 8 when everything opened. Just then an idea struck me- we would sit and drink coffee in a 24-hour café like the one we were sitting in now. Perfect.
We were both quite excited when the bus set off: Ukraine would be our first REAL Eastern European country (i.e. you need a visa to go there, nobody speaks English, and Poland looks rich in comparison)

Me and Taylor were the only foreigners on board and the bus was quiet. After a few toilet stops (=standing in a dark field, urinating against a tree) we made it to the last town in Poland, Zamosc and to the border around midnight. The border was a nasty one- at least 4 passport checks, and 3 luggage checks. Me and Taylor were marched over to a filthy window with “Immigration” marked in cyrillics where we had to fill in several forms. The guards were friendly, laughing and joking as well as asking where we were hiding our drugs, guns and explosives….
By 3am we crawled our way into Ukraine and the road became rugged, unmarked and unlit. There was a ragged collection of people gathred at the side of the road trying to hail a lift. Sleep was impossible- every 90 seconds the bus would hit a huge pothole. We passed through some pretty evil suburbs before getting to the bus station at 5am. Our 24hour café turned out to be a wooden bench next to an unlit semi-abandoned building (the bus station), 10km from the town centre. There was nothing open, nothing to do except sit with our fellow passengers in the rain, and wait...

Back to Main Page