Gunnar Rundgren på resa / on tour

Nova Kachovka 25 November,
Have not had internet for quite some days.
Har inte haft internet pa manga dagar. Har foljer en beskriving av de senaste dagarna pa engelska. Jag skriver sarskilt pa svenska om Gammelsvenskbyn.

Priamo, Priamo
De sista dagarna sa har jag korsat stapp, 400 km, Priamo betyder rakt fram pa ukrainska och det ar standardsvaret nar jag fragar om vagen.

The last days I have had the ultimate steppe experience. Priamo is Ukrainian for straigth ahead, which is the most common answer when I ask for which way to take. From Uman to the old Swedish village there is more than 400 km of steppe. Vast fields interrupted by small river valleys. The main difference in landscape compared to more West in Ukraine is that fields are larger, and distances between villages even bigger. It is of course somewhat monotoneous but it has its own beauty and the colours of the sky and the fields are changing all the time.


 

this is the famous black soil of Ukraine.

Hurry up Gunnar, the sun is setting!!!

Now there are no horses working on the field. But strangely enough even if farming is more large scale it doesn't look as if they earn more money in this part, rather the opposite. I saw many villages where there was no running water in the houses and people collected water from village wells. interestingly I only saw men and boys carrying water.


Another difference is that I see less churches and the ones I see are smaller, and I see more monuments from the Soviet time, not only the monuments form the Great Patriotic War (WW II) - it seems as if each village fought its own key battles with the Nazis - but also other Soviet art work, cultural houses, children play grounds etc.

Play ground for kids in a small village, both a medeval fort and and a sky rocket. Bet it was built in the seventies something. 

Typical piece of soviet art. What is nice is the gender balance in most these soviet things. Even the military monument has a high proportion of females featured.


Climate is slowly getting milder. I saw peaches and walnuts and the lasyt day of my trip vineyards became common. Earlier I have only seen grapes in private gardens.

House styles also change gradually as well as the colours used.


I trid this time to avoid the bigger roads as I don't like the traffic, but in the end that might be a bad strategy. Taking the smaller roads really increases the risk that you get lost: that you can't find food or any place to sleep. Roads that are marked as "roads of regional importance might suddenly be just a mud track......



I have not stayed one night in the tent in Ukraine. There are several reasons but one main reason is that there are fields everywhere and where there are trees there are villages. There are some exceptions, like the 20th I cycled alongside a forest for 5 km, but that was in the morning and since then I didn't see anything I would call a forest (OK as a Swede I might have an exaggerated idea of what makes a forest) for five days.

The center of Ukaraine
I left Uman 20 November. It was very cold and the ice on  water puddles never melted. Briefly there was some powdery snow as well. I had the wind in my back and already at 14.30 I had reached my planned destination Dobroveliskovka, 103 km average speed more than 19km/hour. It was difficult to find a place to stay, the hotel had closed. But finally I asked a policeoffice that knew about a new hotel under construction. He started to call on his phone and finally reached th owner.I was the first guest of the hotel and was very well received. I had to write in the guest book and my photo was taken. Hotel was very nice and owner, Vasilij even nicer. Aparently Dobroveliskovka is the geographic centre of Ukraine.

The following morning it was a lot warmer and it was sun already in the morning, which has been really rare. If I have seen the sun at all it has been for a few hours in the afternoon. When I came to Bratske, I asked for a bar and people pointed to a house without signs or anything. Somebody opened in a night gown, it was arounf 11.30, but apparently it was open. I asked for soup and some bread and tea, which they served. Then they continued to carry in varuious dishes that I never ordered. I had a bit more and didn't bother to protest - it was all very good. In the end when I wanted to pay (now they were three ladies and a girl) they refused my money and said 'present'. One of them called a daughter and she spoke some English. I gave them my business cards which I had to sign 'autograph, autograph'. I bet I was not only the first bicycling foreigner passing their bar but the first foreigner ever since the Germans during the war. Perhaps the thought I was Robert de Niro?

It was very hard to leave them because it is really no good idea to have a heavy lunch when you are out biking, you get tired and the legs feel like led. My total distance this day was 114 km and I found a very strange 'hotel' where I could stay for 3 Euro. There was heating and a communal shower and a toilet. In the evening I found a nice bar with Armenian food where I had excellent Schaslisch (don't remember how that is spelled, but I mean those barbecued sticks). So that day was very nice.

Biking by taxi
The weather is changing a lot on the steppe and also the other experiences. The next day was a HARD day. First I was tired from two long days, both above 100 km, and then there was a drizzle and a very strong wind. After 25 km I tried to take a bus and to flag down cars to pick me up. But the bus refused and no cars stopped (there were perhaps five cars passing in one hour.....). I didn't want to get stuck in that raod crossing with five houses so in the end I continued another 35 km to Novi Bug, where I first had lunch as my experience is that it is good to take food where there is food and also that I make better decisions after a meal. Also here the busses refused to take my bicycle. I have some understanding for that as the buses on the country side normally are this kind of 20 seaters, with not enough luggage space to take a bicycle so the only option is to take the bike inside the bus. Finnally I took a taxi to reached my planned destination, Snigorivka, a distance of around 80 km. The taxi charged 0.35 Eurocent per km. 

I thought it was mainly because of language problems that it always is so difficult for me to find hotels and bars, but I realise that there may be other reasons. It took the taxi driver more than half an hour to find the hotel, he asked more than ten people and they all pointed to different corners of the town (and it was no big town). In the end we took one guy with us in the car to show us all the way. That hotel was the worst so far. There was no heating, there was no running water and obviously no hot water. I managed to get an electric fan, but then at seven the electricity also went! Normally in Ukraine there are good blankets or duvets and often extra ones in a closet, but here there was only one thin blanket. Fortunately there were three beds in my room so I took the blankets from the other beds. Cost was 4 euro, so one can't expect much of course. 

Stuck in the mud
The 23 November was nice and sunny, but there was frost in the morning and a hard wind, mainly in my face. I got some crazy directions and ended up trying to pass on a farm road for 7 km. It all looked ok, the raod was smooth. But how I regret that I took that road. It was without competition the worst biking  so far. The dirt from the road got stuck on the tyres and followed round and in the end got stuck between the tyres and the frame, so wheels simply stopped to spin. Which meant I had to take a stick and clean up the mess. Then go again ten meters and repete the whole things. In the end I had to drag, pull, lead the bike on the side of the road in tall grass to avoid all this mud. Here and there I could cycle, but mostly not. So those 7 km took me more or less two hours and I can tell you it felt like a day!!!.

This picture was taken when the problem started, later on I was too tired and depressed to take anymore pictures, but I can assure you it looked a lot worse.

The Old Swedish Village
In the end I reached the old Swedish village at sunset. I stayed there the whole 24th as well. I write a separate posting about the Old Swedish Village in Swedish, but the main story is that 1792  1000 swedish farmers were moved from an island outside current Estonia and were forced to walk 2000 km (more or less the same distance as I now have gone by bike) to settle in this area, on the Dnepr banks,  which Russia recently had conquered from the Turks. They kept their Swedish traditions over the years. But there are not so many of them left. I visited an old peoples house and spoke with one of the old ones. I stayed in a farm family where the wife, Lilja Malmas could speak good Swedish, and we had a lot of exchange about farming conditions in Ukraine and Sweden. I also got to wash my self, my clothes and my bike and have a full day of rest, just strolling in the village, so now I feel quite fine. It does make a lot of difference in undesrstanding if one can stay with a family like that and share a common language. I gave them a leaflet about organic farming from the Ukrainian Federation of Organic Farming. Read more about the village in English on 
http://www.svenskbyborna.com/Historia/Historiska%20dokument/Hedman%20Zmiivka%20history%20eng%20vers.htm
You can also improve your Swedish!

The banks of Dnepr at Zmievka