I walked from the palace all the way down Bulevardul Unirii, which was another of Ceauşescu’s grand projects and is a few metres longer than the Champs-Élysées. Apparently some historic parts of the city were bulldozed to make way for this, but despite this I quite liked it, probably because I was again reminded of Beijing, and of Chang’an Avenue which carves through the city and which also sits on top of a lot of history. Fountains lined the street, making the hot day seem a little bit cooler, and trees kept it shady. I ambled along, enjoying the stern but grand atmosphere of it. All too soon it was time to leave. I should really have sacrificed a lazy day in Braşov for a more active one in the capital, but it was too late to worry about that now. I bought a snack from a shop and then got on the airport bus to Otopeni airport. It took me past lots of things I’d have liked to see properly, and I thought I’d probably like to come back to Bucharest. But all there was left to do now was allow myself to be relieved of a shocking number [...]

I only spent one night in Bucharest. I spent the final morning of my trip walking from my hostel to the Palace of the Parliament, which is claimed to be the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon. I could well believe it – after a hot walk in blazing sun to Bulevardul Unirii I found myself in front of the huge squat white building and could hardly believe the size of it. I wanted to go to a contemporary art gallery in the grounds of the Palace, and this involved walking along two sides of it. This took about half an hour, along punishing shadeless pavements in the morning heat. I was then extremely disappointed to find that the gallery was closed on Tuesdays. I walked back to the front of the Palace, thirsty and lacking in cultural experiences. On all this trip in these far flung parts of Eastern Europe, I kept thinking back to what I remembered of 1989, when Europe changed so quickly and so spectacularly. I was 11 years old at the time and I wish I’d been a bit older, and been able to appreciate the history a bit more. When Romania [...]

It was hot and humid in Bucharest, and I stayed in a hostel above a really sleazy nightclub. I went for a late night walk around the city when I arrived. I’d read about Bucharest’s amazing stray dog problem before I came, and when I’d arrived on the night train from Chişinău I’d seen a few running about on the tracks. Now, in the quiet city at midnight, I was a bit worried about walking down some dark streets. Often there would be a bark from the shadows, and occasionally a dog would run past. There are 300,000 stray dogs in Bucharate, apparently, and they bite about 50 people every day. They are supposedly the result of Ceauşescu-era redevelopments of housing, in which people were moved into higher quality housing but not allowed to take their pets with them. Ceauşescu was very fond of vast building projects which saw historic parts of Bucharest and other cities razed to the ground and replaced with communal housing or government buildings. But I managed to avoid getting bitten by the dogs of Bucharest, and I thought the city looked pretty impressive in places. It slightly reminded me of Beijing in a way, with [...]

Braşov had an addictively laid-back vibe, and I spent another couple of days there doing nothing much at all but enjoying the fresh mountain air and sunshine. Eventually it was time to move on – I wanted to see a bit of Bucharest before flying back home – so I got a train to Sinaia, another mountain town on the line to Bucharest. I wanted to go up its famous cable car, which takes you up to an altitude of some 2200m, high in the Bucegi Mountains, but I’d picked the wrong day – it’s closed on Mondays. I had to content myself with a short walk into the hills and a look at Peleş Castle, which was massively more impressive than Bran Castle. Then I walked back to the station and got the train to Bucharest. The sun was setting and I had a great journey under blazing red skies. I got to Bucharest late in the evening, jumped on the metro and headed for a hostel.

I wanted to cycle to Bran while I was in Braşov. It’s about 20km away and is the site of castle, claimed on scant but tourist-attracting grounds to be Dracula’s castle. But it was the weekend, and all the bike shops in Braşov were closed, so I reluctantly headed out to the autogara and got a bus. I watched sadly as the nice flat tarmac round wound through the mountains to Bran, and then managed to miss Bran completely because it was far smaller than I’d expected. Seeing a sign saying ‘you are now leaving Bran’, I got off the bus and walked back towards the castle. I saw it now, on top of a hill. Its location was pretty impressive, but it hardly looked mediaeval or terrifying, and when I got back into Bran itself I was confronted with a horrendous tourist nightmare of Dracula souvenirs, sold by people wearing fangs and capes, and decided to head back to Braşov as quickly as possible. The only thing I liked about the town was the view of distant snowy mountains behind it. When I got back to Braşov the sun had just set. Earlier, I’d got a bus from the [...]

At Bucureşti Nord station I said goodbye to Cristi, bought a strong coffee for breakfast, and then got on the first train to Braşov. The train was far nicer than the average British medium-distance train. I found a window seat on the top deck and sat back to enjoy the ride. A lot of the Romanians crossed themselves as we pulled out of the station for the three hour journey into the heart of Transylvania. We rolled through Bucharest’s northern suburbs under deep blue skies, and before long hills were rising from the plains. After an hour or so we were in the forested Bucegi mountains, where wild bears still roam. Rocky peaks towered over the train lines and although I was tired from the overnight train journey, I didn’t want to miss the scenery by sleeping. A couple of hours later we arrived in Braşov. I liked the town straight away. The air was cool and fresh, the sun was shining, and the atmosphere was friendly. I spent a day ambling around narrow streets lined with grand old buildings, and took a cable car to the top of Mount Tâmpa. The mountain towers over Braşov, and once you’re up [...]

After a couple of days I’d pretty much covered Chişinău, and so I walked down to Chişinău’s grand main station and bought a ticket for the night train to Bucharest. The train was quiet and I thought I might get a compartment to myself, but a few minutes before the train left someone joined me. When the train left at ten past five, I spent a while looking out of the windows at the beautiful Moldovan countryside rolling by in the evening sun, and then I got talking to my travelling companion. He was called Cristi, and luckily he spoke quite a lot of English. He was Romanian but married to a Moldovan, and he said he thought Moldovans were friendlier and more honest than Romanians. It turned out that he was on the first stage of a journey to Italy, where he was planning to work for at least a year. Romania had been a member of the EU for nine months and he was taking advantage of the free movement of labour that this brought. But I felt sad for him that he was leaving behind his wife, and didn’t know when he would see her again. As [...]

A slight problem in Moldova was that none of the cash machines seemed to accept foreign cards. Luckily I’d taken some cash with me, and I had enough to cover a few days in Moldova. When I tried to change my notes at a bureau de change near where I was staying, I ran into problems caused by not having crisp new banknotes. I’ve always heard that this can sometimes be a problem but had never experienced it until now. Luckily the owner of the bureau was very friendly and spoke excellent English. “I’m really sorry”, he said, “but the central bank charges us 15 per cent of the face value to change damaged notes”. The only note I had that would pass muster was a 50 dollar bill, so I was definitely going to have plenty of lei left by the end of my stay. I chatted to the currency man for a few minutes. He asked me what I was doing in Moldova, and seemed very surprised that I was just on holiday. I asked him if he could recommend any places I should go and he said he really couldn’t think of any. When I pushed him [...]

At the town of Bendery, just before the border with Moldova, two young Pridnestrovians had got on the bus and sat next to me and Carlos. We spoke to them in a strange mixture of English and French, not finding much common language in either but still having a friendly conversation. When we got into Chişinău they showed us to a currency exchange booth so we could get some Moldovan Lei, and called a taxi for us to get to a hostel. A short drive through the dark and potholed streets of the city took us to a place near the centre. That night a huge thunderstorm rocked the city. I lay awake listening to the rain lashing down, and got up late the next day as a result. Having gone for a short walk through the city centre in the dark when I arrived, I set out for a longer explore, through the city centre parks and past the plain-looking cathedral. Carlos had gone to find a different place to stay, not being much impressed with the hostel, but I soon bumped into him in town. We were both taking a photo of the presidential palace on the main [...]

So with our time extremely limited, we hurried off down Lenin Street into town. We passed Kirov Park, and soon reached Ulitsa 25 Oktober, the main street. Tiraspol is no beauty, that’s for sure, but it had quite a likeable atmosphere, and no-one seemed too bothered by the sight of two obvious tourists taking photos of everything they could see. We didn’t really have long enough to do very much at all, but we did manage to buy some postcards, which I hadn’t expected to be able to do. I posted four later from Chişinău; only one ever arrived. We popped into a shop to buy some water and snacks. The ladies behind the counter thought we were very entertaining and made sure we bought locally-produced mineral water and a couple of freshly-baked cheesy doughy snacks. All too soon it was time to go back to the bus station for the bus to Chişinău. We spoke to Yulia again to thank her for her help. She told me her sister was working in London, and gave me her telephone number and a message to pass on. I promised I would and then said goodbye, sad to be leaving so soon [...]

One of my main aims on this trip was to visit the breakaway Republic of Pridnestrovie. I can’t even remember how I first heard of this place but I think I chanced across it on the web pages of Tan Wee Cheng. It’s a place which I think most Europeans would be surprised to realised they share a continent with, and I was sure that going there would be interesting. In 1990, revolutions had swept Eastern Europe, and the breakup of the Soviet Union was inevitable. The part of the Moldovan SSR east of the Dniestr river (known in Russian as Pridnestrovie and in Moldovan as Transnistria) had always been predominantly populated by Russians, and they did not wish to become part of post-Soviet Moldova, so in September 1990, they declared independence from the USSR. A few months later in August 1991, Moldova also declared independence. Internationally, only Moldova’s independence was recognised. A brief war in 1992 left the situation unresolved but Pridnestrovie was de facto independent, and has remained so ever since. Information for travellers to the region is scarce but rumour had it that the state was a Stalinist nightmare, with officials watching the every move of outsiders, [...]

The next day there was a colossal cruise ship docked at the ferry port, and the city was suddenly full of elderly tourists puffing up the steps, and Filipino-looking crew members enjoying a few hours off their ship. I decided to go to the beach for the day. I headed out to Lanzheron Beach, which looked like a straightforward walk on the map but ended up being more adventurous than I’d expected. The map led me to what appeared to be some kind of old people’s home or health spa, and once I’d walked through the grounds of this I reached a high fence. There seemed to be no gate, and I didn’t feel like backtracking all the way to the main road, so I scaled it and jumped over. Then I just had a ten minute walk through some quite thick woods until I found the beach. Lanzheron Beach looked like it had seen better days, and this year’s season was clearly over. Most of the bars and restaurants lining the promenade were closed, and only a few people were around. I paddled in the Black Sea briefly but thought that given the proximity of the port and the [...]

I felt like I was missing a lot of Ukraine by getting night trains, but then if Ukraine is known for anything it’s for being flat. I woke up to find the sky blue and the Sun blazing over green plains. Soon the suburbs of Odesa were appearing, and we arrived on time at 8.48am. I bought a coffee at the station and then walked into town. Odesa seemed very laid back after Kiev. The pace of life seemed relaxed and slow, and I wandered fairly aimlessly. I soon reached the famous steps, which were not nearly as dramatic as I expected. I thought I probably needed to have watched Battleship Potemkin to fully appreciate them, and wrote a note to myself in my journal that I should buy it when I got back. At the bottom of the steps was Odesa’s ferry port, jutting out into the vast Black Sea. I was vaguely thinking of getting a ferry to the Crimea, because everyone who’d been there said it was awesome, but my plan was quickly scuppered when I found that the ferries had stopped running at the end of August. It meant I had a good reason to come [...]

On my final day in Kiev the temperature had dropped more than 20°C. It was cool and a persistent rain was falling. I walked down to Kreshchatyk again, which was pedestrianised because it was the weekend. I don’t know if it was a special event or if it happens every weekend, but the whole street was filled with people playing sports of various kinds. There was five-a-side football, badminton, volleyball, and pole-vaulting. It was a shame it was rainy but I really enjoyed seeing all this going on. The atmosphere was friendly and communal and I decided that Kiev was a city that I liked a lot. After Kreshchatyk I walked up to Ploshcha Sofiyivska, where St. Sofia’s Cathedral stands amid heavy traffic. The cathedral was built in the 11th century, and is one of Ukraine’s outstanding monuments. It cost a couple of hryvnia to go up the bell tower, and I headed up to the heights for a great view over the bright golden domes to the grey rainy city beyond. I’d have liked to stay in Kiev for longer, but my train ticket was booked, and so later that evening I walked to the train station with April. [...]

The next day I visited this part of the city again, but the sunshine had gone and the city was swathed in mist. I got the metro to Arsenalna and walked through the park to Rodina Mat. It was a Saturday, and there were large numbers of newlywed couples near all the statues and war memorials, having their photos taken. I spent a long while looking around the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. All the text was in Ukrainian but by the end I was glad of this, having been spared a full understanding of the horrors of what happened in the USSR during the war. Back outside, the mist had cleared and it was another fearsomely hot day. I set off towards Druzhby Narodiv metro station but I took a wrong turn somewhere. Instead I ended up walking a very long way up and down hills and through random suburbs of Kiev, until I chanced upon Pecherska station instead. On the way, a couple of people had stopped me to ask something, and both had seemed very surprised that I wasn’t Ukrainian. I felt that probably in a few years time, Kiev would be well on the way [...]

The next day was hot again. My first target was to buy a train ticket to Odesa, a task made much easier through being accompanied by April, a traveller from Australia who I’d met in the hostel. At the train ticket office, we wrote out our ticket requirements in Cyrillic and joined a queue. As we chatted, a lady in front of us asked us if we would like her to help us buy our tickets, and she turned out to be a lifesaver. Both the trains we wanted (mine to Odesa and April’s to Lviv) were full and we’d have struggled without a Ukrainian-speaker to help us book alternative trains. Our trains sorted, we headed out to see more sights, and we took the metro to Dnipro station. The metro cost only 50 kopeks, or about five pence, for a ride, and it was almost as grand and impressive as Moscow’s. Dnipro station was near to the Pecherska Lavra, a monastery founded around some caves in 1051 and regarded as Ukraine’s most important sight. We bought candles and wandered through the caves, passing coffins containing the mummified remains of long-dead monks. Then we walked along to a more modern [...]

It was hot and sunny when we rolled into Kiev the next morning. As soon as I walked out of the station I liked the city. It was instantly reminiscent of Moscow but at the same time obviously less huge and intimidating. I walked out of the station on Komintern Street, found a hostel and then set out to explore. In Lviv, there had been no supermarkets – at least, none that I’d managed to find. There were only small grocery stores where it was quite difficult to buy things because most of the produce was kept behind the counter, and I didn’t know many Ukrainian words for food beyond kleb for bread. But outside my hostel here was a huge and well-stocked supermarket, and that made me like Kiev even more. I bought an ice cold drink and walked up Shevchenka, a sloping boulevard lined with grand buildings. This led me to Kreshchatyk, the main street, and on to Maydan Nezalezhnosti. This square, the heart of Kiev, had been the focus less than two years previously of the Orange Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people protested rigged election results, sweeping Viktor Yushchenko to power in place of the pro-Russian [...]

The next day it was raining heavily. Only a couple of weeks earlier, Ukraine had been in the grip of a fearsome heatwave with temperatures well over 40°C, but it had clearly broken now. Lviv in the rain was not quite as enchanting as Lviv in the sunshine, and I decided to book a train to Kiev for that evening. To do this, I went to the ticket booking office in town, and reused a method which had worked a treat when I was in Moscow – I wrote down my destination in Cyrillic, the time of train I wanted, and the word for ‘sleeper’, and handed it over. The woman behind the counter passed back a demand for a modest number of hryvnia, I handed it over, and I got a ticket for the night train to Kiev in return. The train was at 10pm so I had all day to kill. I met Johan and Brianna for lunch, which we had at a curious place that Johan had wanted to try out. It was called Kupol and the decor was pure 1930s. It was like having tea round a very old person’s house. But the food was cheap [...]

We arrived in Lviv in pitch darkness at 4.45am. I hardly remember arriving as I was tired beyond belief, but I know I found my way to a warm waiting room with my two travelling companions, Johan from Sweden and Brianna from the US. We slept in the waiting room for a couple of hours, before heading into the city at about 6.30am. As we walked out of the station the sky was just starting to get light. We didn’t really know which way town was, but we guessed that it would be in the direction of the impressive church spires we could see down the road, and we headed off. Our instincts were right, and after about twenty minutes we found ourselves in the centre of town. I found a hostel and straight away went to bed. I woke up much refreshed at 2pm, anxious to get out and see the sights. It was a warm afternoon and I headed out to Svoboda, the main street, to check out the atmosphere. Then I walked up to the historic centre, Ploshcha Rynok, and looked around there. In the evening I met up with Johan and Brianna for a meal. The [...]

On my way back from China in 2002 I’d stopped for a couple of days in Warsaw. This time, I started here because flights were much cheaper than flights to Kiev, and I thought it would be nice to start somewhere familiar. After a brutally early start to my day at Heathrow, I arrived at Frédéric Chopin International Airport in the early afternoon, found my way into town and got off the bus at Warszawa Centralna to find the Palace of Culture and Science towering above me. It was good to be back in Eastern Europe. I only spent a short time in Warsaw. I bought a ticket to Lviv, departing that evening, so I just went for a tired walk up to the old town. I walked via the Saski Gardens and Castle Square under grey skies, and found the experience a bit like intense déjà vu. Warsaw makes me feel slightly melancholy. It lacks soul, and the reason it lacks soul is that it was utterly destroyed in the Second World War, after its inhabitants were let down in their uprising by the Red Army, which stopped its advance a few miles short of the city as the [...]