Gunnar Rundgren på resa / on tour

An old woman selling pickled cabbage can perhaps be a good symbol for Ukraine? It is a very common thing to eat as well as pickled cucumbers etc .
Below you see two of my Ukrainian favourites: Varenniki and Deruny, the first is a dumpling filled with e.g. cheese, the second are potatoe pancakes, like Swiss Roesti






Sometimes it is a bit hard to find food in the country side, and then you go into a shop. Often they can boil some water for tea and then you buy some other stuff. Like here some bread and a piece of ham. The nice thing with food is that it is one of the least globalised things. Most other things you buy are more or less the same in Sweden and Ukraine. A few brands dominating the world and with local companies basically only doing bad copies. But food is still very much a local/national thing.



It is surprisingly difficult to find the restaurants and bars. Some of them are on the fifth floor (elevators-are you joking?) and it is only rarely there are any opening hours. Many things look like small bars, but then you enter room after room each with its own style.

Most bars and restaurats have very few guests, the staff is regularly many more and normally sit around a table. A bar that is managed by one person in Sweden would normally have four-five staff.


Landscape



This is the mighty Dnister river. I crossed it three times already and been driving on the banks of it and some of its tributaries. It is a beautiful river which has very marked meandering, such as the Klara river at home, unusual for these big rivers. I think it would have enourmous tourism potential for canoeing, partly rafting (and even more some of the tributaries). But there seems to be nothing going on. Didn't see a single boat on it either, so I don't know about fishing. Up here were the river is still at its beginning there is very little industry so I guess it is not so polluted.



Most of the landscape I passed through has not been river valleys. Most of it has been a high plateau, which is cut by the Dnistr and many smaller rivers feeding into Dnister. Up on the plateau there is almost only BIG fields, not forest and no huses. The villages are in the river canyons and valleys. From a biking perspective it means you go for 10 km on a plain like this, then there is a steep slope downhill then there is the villagae and then it is steep uphill again. This is most marked when you travel East West as the Dnistr tributaries flow North South.

The last days fields have just got bigger and bigger. It is like travelling on the ocean almost. I also see fewer and fewer horses now. But still you see the guy with a hay fork making a stack by himself in the middle of  a 500 hectare field.....It is a bit hard to really understand the aricultural conditions here. It is such a mix of enormous scale and subsistence farming, of new technology and hundred year old technology.



This pricture shows the transition of the country here expressed in clothing. You see one of the old woman has the traditional folk dress. The two other older women has small parts of it. The man looks like men look like most. The boy in the background could have been anywhere in Europe and the young woman has modern dress, with a certain Ukrainian style. Unfortunately none of them carried the typical Hugo Boss plastic bag. I think a plastic bag maker has offloaded a large batch of Hugo Boss bags here, because you get them in every gorcery store.


The villages
Almost all villages are stretching along the main road and there his no particular centre. This can go on for kilometers. I wonder what the background is? It is very far from the villages to the fields, sometimes it seems to be like 10 km. This must have been very hard in the past. It is not clear if this pattern is very old or new. I mean also before Communism there were large landholders in most parts of Ukraine where the people were serfs. Question is then: was it to control them more easily that they live in big villages like this? And is it to prevent them to defend themselves that the village is so spread out???



Close to the village you see a lot of cows and fowl, here goose. Pigs are rarely seen. Wonder if they are not kept in this area; kept indoors or if they come from big "factories" somwehere else. I surely have not passed any big pig or chicken operation as you feel the smell for kilometers.




What really surprise me is that this land has so much arable land, I mean these plains are just "endless". Apparently Ukraine has the highest proportion of arable land in Europe. Still people in the village use almost every inch to cultivate as well - just look at this picture below. NO LAWNS and not much of ornamental plants. It is said that these small plots is what has kept people alive. The fact that they have had several famines in Ukraine is really an indicator that most famines are caused by bad policies. I mean it is hard to see a more fertile land, and it is not at all overpopulated and the climate is good, what more can you ask for?




Most house are in quite good shape I must say. See more bad houses in the cities than in the country side. The one above is perhaps quite typical.


This one is from the mountain areas, where they build more in wood.



Houses can really look quite different - this one is all covered in tiles!


Roads

Quality of roads vary a lot. Also the same road, may go from 20 meter wide good road to a 5 m rough gravel and then back again. It is not uncommmon that people actually drive beside the road instead (like in Africa). As a cyclist the biggest problem is that the middle part of the road often is quite OK but edges are really bad.



This is a bridge over Dnister in a "road of regional importance". Looked a bit scary, but in the end it looks worse than it is.

Here it is the opposite. it is hard to take pictures of the roads that give the right feeling of how bad they are....But we are speaking about at least half a meter difference between the highest and the lowest part here.




Most of the country roads have a hedge of trees along them. Probably good for erosion control, and control of dust and snow storms. In many cases these vegetation bands are wider, and the locals seem to use them for firewood (legal or not).