At Sea with Nothing Else to do...

It is in times of intense boredom that humanity has crafted its greatest achievements. This of course also applied to Floris's last drawing up till present: the journey across the Black sea from Poti (Georgia) to Ilychevsk (Ukraine).

P.S. Please note the note.

Ukraine in 5 days

What can you say about Europe's biggest country (well, if you exclude Russia, that is) if you only spend less than a week? Not so horribly much, obviously.

When you arrive at 21:30 in the middle of Ilychevsk seaport, 20 km away from Odesa, when it's dark and cold and the only available onward transportation is one taxi, then you know that you're all exposed to some serious rip-off on the taxi fare. With no negotiation power, we had to settle at the asking price of 130 UAH (about 14EUR), which was however not such a complete rip-off.

Arriving in Odesa, we found a nice hostel with the helf of a Japanese fellow-traveller. The address is Velika Dranautska 10, apt. 3 (door code 358), for anyone happening to be nearby.

Odesa was quite a nice city, with a good deal of churches and boulevards to explore. It seemed to us, however, that it is mainly a summer city, with nearby beaches and bars. Wintertime walking through the streets proved nice enough, though not particularly enchanting.

The famous "Potemkin-steps", as seen in Eisenstein's well-known classic "Battleship Potemkin", were actually a bit of a disappointment to us. It's just a staircase, really. With an optical illusion and all (from above you only see the landings, whereas from below you see only steps), but altogether not that impressive.
From Odesa, a night train took us to Lviv. Not Kiev, as we had first planned, because Kiev is quite out of the way and Lviv had been recommended to us by both travel guides and fellow travellers.

And indeed. Lviv is most definitely going to be one of the new "hot" Eastern European cities. There's a great deal of historic building to discover (a myriad of churches, castles, houses,...), the cobblestone streets guarantee charming walks, there are a few flea markets worth exploring, there is a range of modern boutiques and shopping opportunities and there is a good range of restaurants and cafés.... All being very cheap to Western-European standards (but several times more expensive than e.g. Central Asia).
For serious shoppers, the shopping experience is probably still a good one as there's more than just the big Western chains: there are a lot of Russian boutiques with goods that don't often reach Western Europe (at least as far as we're informed).

So: Lviv is the place to go to! With no visa needed to enter Ukraine, and with Polish cities such as Krakow and Lublin not at all very far away, Lviv for sure is a tourist destination the rise. Go there before the crowds do!

Our two days in Lviv where well-spent and well-enjoyed, but with Pieksämäki still not anywhere in sight, we had to continue. A day's drive in a bus brought us back into the European Union, in Poland, to Warsaw.

Five days in Ukraine gave us just enough time to decide that we like it, and that we can very well imagine going back there one day...

Poti and the Black Sea Experience

After arriving in Poti, the usual endeavour to find a place to sleep started. The guidebook spoke of a very shabby hotel full of Abkhaz refugees and an apartment which we couldn't find: the prospects looked rather dim... Until we were spotted and stopped by a yellow Pepsi van: the men joyfully hijacked us and brought us to a nice small hotel that wasn't in the book ("Gastinitsa, Ulitsa Tsarina Tamara 20", for anyone with a particular interest). They even haggled down the price for us!

Later, they came back to our hotel with some food and some drinks, vodka of course. We learned about the Georgian way of drinking: long, elaborate toasts (in our case mainly to the friendship of the peoples), lots of vodka and a sip of radioactivity-coloured soft drink to wash it all away.
One of our hosts was the former chief of police of the town of Poti, and this encouraged his friend to drink without limit: upon our enquiry whether drunk-driving wouldn't lead to a traffic fine, he laughingly answered "Omari (his friend) chief police, problem no!". Avoid yellow Pepsi vans in Poti...

The ferry from Poti to Ilychevsk was great. After our experiences in Central Asia and the Kaukasus, we anticipated a dilapidated ship ready for the scrapyard, but the MS Greifswald turned out to be a quite modern RoRo-ferry that could easily sail somewhere between EU-countries (even quite up to DNV standard...)
The beds were comfortable, the sea was very calm and the weather was fantastic. We even saw a very clear halo around the moon (e.g. here)! The only real drawback was the late arrival time in Ilychevsk: we passed immigration around 21:30, and arrived late evening in Odesa. Luckily, a nice Japanese fellow traveller knew of a good hostel near Odesa's main station, where we were very welcome even at 23:00...

From here to eternity

Granted: eternity is a bit of a stretch, but from Kutaisi (Western-Georgia), where we are now, to Helsinki is still quite a long way... Next Saturday, if all goes well, we'll be taking a ferry across the Black Sea from Poti to Ilychevsk near Odessa. The weather is great down here (20 degrees, sunshine, cloudless sky), so we hope the ferry keeps its schedule and arrives next Monday in Ukraine - but shipping schedules are there to be adjusted.

We'll spend the last two weeks of our "heroic trip" (sure, whatever) in Eastern Europe, mainly hopping capitals: Kiev, Warsaw (or Minsk, provided getting a transit visa in Kiev goes super-smooth), Vilnius, Riga and Talinn. From there, another ferry will take us to Helsinki.

So it seems that out "overland" aim of crossing the Eurasian continent will be achieved, if "by sea" is also admitted as overland travel (which we of course believe). With borders between Georgia and Russia sealed and the Azeri-Russian border open only to locals, going by sea is anyway the only sensible option: going round through Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania is quite a detour, and flying just isn't cool enough for us!